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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   31568 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 22, 2023

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I don't understand. Isn't a racial slur saying something negative about people? That is certainly my understanding.

A racial slur is negative in the same way that mocking is saying something negative. I don't know a coherent standard for "saying something negative" that would let you count one and not the other.

You are forgetting the issue of saying something negative about an idea versus saying something negative about people.

I'm going down the list of slurs in my head, and can't think of a single one that says a specific negative thing about anybody. They're just another way if saying someone is black/Jewish/gay/etc.

Clearly. But he's the one making the argumetnt that you have to say something explicitly negative about a group for it to be considered offensive, so by his logic it should not be offensive.

? If they aren't negative, then what makes them slurs?

Since you demand that others point to a specific negative thing the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence are saying about Catholics/Catholicism, the burden should be on you to point how these slurs say anything negative about each group.

The only thing that seems to make something a slur, is whether or not a particular group chooses to take offense. Black people constantly refer to each other with the word that is supposedly a slur, so it's clearly nothing inherent to the word itself.

No, "nigger" and "nigga" are not the same words. And if you think that terms like nigger, or kike, or mick, or wop, were not intended as slurs, we apparently live in different universes.

Please tell me, specifically, what negative thing each of these words are saying.

If "nigga" is a different word, that means no one will be offended when a white person uses it, right?

They're exactly the same word in rhotic or non-rhotic dialects. Most AAVE is non-rhotic so the version black people use is usually pronounced "nigga", but so did a lot of ordinary white racists using it with malice. Wikipedia thinks it was not originally a slur.

Kike (origin unknown), Mick (from the Irish name, though whether "Mc" or the first name is unknown) and wop (from "guappo", meaning "thug" in Neapolitan) were always slurs.

No, "nigger" and "nigga" are not the same words.

In what way are they not the same? If a white person publicly says the latter, in what way would the results be appreciably different than saying the former? Will people even recognize that they didn't say the former?

In what way are they not the same?

See discussion here

The theoretical model is not difficult to derive, but does not answer the question. I'm asking for your evidence that such a model possesses any connection to the social realities our society actually operates under, that the "a"-ending-word does not possess the same Deplorable Word effect as its hard-r progenitor.

  1. I have personally witnessed non-black people using the a-variant in front of black people, who did not blink an eye.

  2. https://level.medium.com/in-the-land-of-white-boys-who-use-the-n-word-70e34923c705

  3. https://www.complex.com/style/when-white-people-say-nigga

  4. https://www.learningforjustice.org/magazine/fall-2011/straight-talk-about-the-nword

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