• thesporkeffect@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    As always - if you’re saying a word is comparable to the n-word, and you are able to use your word in public as a non-black person, it’s not like the n-word

    • TheEntity@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      Frankly that’s something I do not understand. Why this single specific word? We have dozens of terrible offensive words. Why this specific one is considered so bad we cannot even talk about it directly, even when merely discussing it? I would think discussing it and not directing it at someone would be pretty reasonable. As with every single other word.

        • TheEntity@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          Probably no, not in this specific form, that being said I don’t want to compare one tragedy to another. There are lots of disgusting parts of the human history, and that’s certainly one of them.

          • JoeBigelow@lemmy.ca
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            5 months ago

            The only equivalent I can think of starts with k and is a slur for Jewish people, and it’s much less commonly heard.

            • ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world
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              5 months ago

              Ironically enough, that word was coined by Jewish people who had been in the US for generations to describe newly-arrived Jews from Eastern Europe. Still offensive but somewhat different from the n-word.

              • Nutteman@lemmy.world
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                5 months ago

                We killed them and displaced the rest so damn fast that we forgot all the major slurs for them

              • Juniper (she/her) 🫐@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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                5 months ago

                “Savages”, "Redskins”, “Squaw”, and so on.

                Some news headlines even refer to the second one as “the R-word”:

                CNN: The terrible R-word that football needed to lose

                Politico: The R-Word Is Even Worse Than You Think

                These are extremely harmful words with hundreds of years of genocide behind them. I imagine the only reason they aren’t censored like the N-word is is because Native Americans make up a proportionally smaller population due to the effectiveness of the genocide, and because the reservation system is in contrast to racial integration as with American black people in so much as it limits interactions between them and racist whites who would overuse a dehumanizing phrase to the same extent.

        • orphiebaby@lemm.ee
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          4 months ago

          And things even worse than slavery towards them. And that a lot of racists who would likely shoot black people still use that word on purpose. And that there’s still a lot of those people.

          • Lemminary@lemmy.world
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            5 months ago

            It’s weird being told that a regular color in your native language could get you beat up to a pulp in another country.

          • TheEntity@lemmy.world
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            5 months ago

            To my non-American ears “negro” sounds far worse actually. Probably because of how rare it is in comparison.

            • I'm back on my BS 🤪@lemmy.autism.place
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              5 months ago

              To my Hispanic ears, “n—o” sounds like an Anglophone saying “black”. Even when used derogatorily, my immediate first thought is that they pronounced it incorrectly, then the rest of the associated matters kick in and I realize what they are really saying.

              Imagine if in the Hispanosphere , the word “black” was almost synonymous with the n-word.

              But yeah, don’t use n—o in English to refer to or describe anyone.

              • lemonmelon@lemmy.world
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                5 months ago

                Call up the UNCF and let them know immediately!

                (Yes, I know they mostly brand themselves as the United Fund now.)

            • bdonvr@thelemmy.club
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              5 months ago

              It was used in place of black for a longer period, and wasn’t necessarily considered a slur in and of itself. But of course if you say it with a sneer, even “black” can be used as an insult.

              For example a lot of books (even written by people of color) used “negro” and “coloured” etc. interchangeably up to the mid-late 20th century. But in modern context very few people use it in a manner that isn’t derogatory.

              • milicent_bystandr@lemm.ee
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                5 months ago

                I still have trouble referring to a person as ‘black’. It feels like a slur, or at least an inappropriate racial caricature (they’re not really black!) and it still surprises me that it’s become the acceptable and inoffensive term.

                The n word almost seemed more mild, being about the same thing (an inappropriate way to describe race from skin colour), but linguistically removed (I’m not a native Latin speaker*) so I can feel it’s just a word, no need to be intrinsically good or bad.

                • Or Spanish, whatever
                • orphiebaby@lemm.ee
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                  4 months ago

                  From my experience, black people want to be called black. I’m a white kid, but was raised in a foster family with three black siblings and other black family, including some that lived in a ghetto in another city. It was the 90s and early 2000s, so we watched some BET, we watched the Boondocks, we listened to thug rap, we watched shows with black characters such as All That and Cousin Skeeter. Because it was all a part of my brothers’ culture, and they felt attached to it, and “black culture” was cool to all of us. And in anything we participated in I’ve never heard a single African-American who didn’t call themselves “black” and be fine being called that. Maybe there are some rich people like Obama or Tom of The Boondocks who wouldn’t call themselves “black”, but they seem to be of a different lifestyle and culture than that.

                  I’ve also sometimes made the argument in defense of “black”, that “African-American” is mildly politically-incorrect itself— not that I have a problem with the term, just the hyper-vigilant enforcing of it. Because it’s not synonymous with skin color itself, it’s a statement about where they came from. We don’t call white people “European-Americans”; and what do we call non-black African-Americans from, say, Egypt or South America? So… yeah.

                  • milicent_bystandr@lemm.ee
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                    4 months ago

                    That makes sense.

                    I’m not American; never been to America. So I grew up with different culture. The dark skinned ethnicities near me were mainly Pakistani, and I don’t remember if they were happy to be called black or not. I think we basically grew up feeling like you have to ignore skin colour, the same way you ignore the size of someone’s nose. We weren’t supposed to see it as any more different than someone else is from Wales, and someone else is very tall, and someone else lives in this or that neighborhood - but to comment on ‘black’ skin or big nose might give offence.

                    I agree ‘African-American’ is an awkward term also, as you say.

                    I suppose part of the difference is the black community in America, as I understand it, has a very strong cultural identity, whereas when I grew up the idea was basically that your ethnicity was another part of your background, but not your community identity. A British Indian is a Brit who happens to have Indian heritage, that they may like to hold close or may like to distance from: but we’re all British. And someone from South Kensington might talk all posh an’ all; and a Scouser’s gonna Scouse: but we’re all British. That sort of thing. (And if you’re not British we still welcome you just as fondly; and to do otherwise would also be racist.)

            • PlantDadManGuy@lemmy.world
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              5 months ago

              I agree with you. But after studying Spanish I understand the origin of the word, so I’m somewhere in the middle on it.

      • Klear@sh.itjust.works
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        5 months ago

        Non-American here. I also didn’t get this, thinking it’s just puritanical bullshit. Some Americans seem obsessed with auto-censorship.

        Anyway, I finally understood while watching Django Unchained. It’s an extremely dehumanising word, meant to separate people (who have rights) from things which do not. It’s a tool to be able to do this distinction and then do unspeakable evil to specific people because they don’t count as people and so it’s alright.

        Now remember that slavery was ended* only relatively recently, segregation was a thing during the lifetimes of many people and this mindset of black people not being even human is still prevalent…

        The word is meant to be always used in hostility and it’s still being used like that today. That’s why you want to steer clear of it.

        • loudwhisper@infosec.pub
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          4 months ago

          Django Unchained

          Isn’t it ironic that a movie with so many uses of that word helped you understand that word better?

          To me it seems a very good reason to believe that people shouldn’t be afraid of the syntax of the word, but definitely oppose the use when the semantic is the despicable one.

        • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldM
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          5 months ago

          In my opinion, the intellectually disabled too. Unfortunately, many people make all kinds of excuses why that word, which has been used to bully the disabled for decades, is an acceptable one.

    • Otkaz@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      Wasn’t really all that long ago when non-black people very commonly used that word in public and probably still so in certain communities. Having said that, obese is a medical term and I don’t think it compares in anyway to the n-word.

      • GiantChickDicks@lemmy.ml
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        5 months ago

        Absolutely. I moved from urban Southeastern Wisconsin to the upper peninsula of Michigan in a rural area. I love visiting that spot, and I got a job offer five years ago while on vacation. I snatched the opportunity to move to my favorite place and uprooted my life in under two months. I didn’t last two years before coming back.

        The amount of times I got into verbal altercations with strangers and acquaintances over their use of racial slurs, most often the N-word, made me become a homebody. I was a bartender, though, so you can’t exactly hide.

        That’s not to say I haven’t heard it in public all throughout Wisconsin. The difference was how comfortable people felt using these words and sharing openly racist views and stories like they were bragging about it. It felt like an area where people breathed a sigh of relief and took their hoods off. I couldn’t stomach staying in a place where certain friends of mine couldn’t comfortably visit.

        Still, all that is nothing compared to what I saw and heard living in Tennessee. It’s sad and frightening how many communities are like this.

        • MutilationWave@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          Definitely did not. I grew up in West Virginia and idiot rednecks used it before and after the OJ trial. Decent people did not before or after.

          I mean like way before they did, but they weren’t decent then.

    • TheV2@programming.dev
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      5 months ago

      She, as an obese person herself, proposed that “obese” is equivalent to the n-word. She didn’t censor her word the same way a black person doesn’t have to censor the n-word. That’s not a contradiction. It would be, if she wasn’t obese.

      Not that I care about the actual point, just wanted to talk about the logic. My bad, if my assumption that she is obese, is wrong.