Congratulations, you're the first person in three years that I've deemed to be so devoid of content that I'm going to figure out what an ignore list is and how to use it.
It's obviously demeaning. And it's completely unnecessary. That's an inexcusable combination. I've made the point that it isn't even effective irony. I am a die-hard Obama supporter and I'm perfectly capable of making racially offensive remarks under special circumstances. Not to mention that I think black and white and all men are literally apes. Who uses the word n-i-g-g-a-r-d-l-y when you can say miserly, stingy, cheap, or "Scrooge"? Only someone pedantic who wishes to provoke. People have pointed out that I quoted the thread title. I hope they can see the difference between drawing attention to demeaning language in the service of getting rid of it, and what PhillyQuakesFan did. In any case, they have a point. DK, please do me a favor and change the title of this thread to Demeaning Thread Title in Politics and Current Events. And please see what you can do to change the other thread title. PhillyQuakesFan doesn't reply to the request you suggested.
Without commenting on the general content of this thread, since all the points have been laid out and I would add nothing to the debate, I do want to speak to this tangential and apparently trivial point. N-i-g-g-a-r-d-l-y is a perfectly legitimate word and one that has value precisely because it is literary. It is absolutely possible to use it without the slightest intent to evoke race or to provoke a response. The fact that an otherwise blameless Washington official was forced to resign due to the reaction to his public use of the word enabled ignorance and, to this day, undercuts far more legitimate attempts to address the problematic depictions of race/ethnicity that continue to do actual harm in this society.
Any linguist will tell you that language change is driven by a lot more factors than just literal definitions and derivations. There's no end to the number of perfectly good words that disappear for whatever reason. If that wasn't the case we wouldn't be speaking English. Thee and Thou? "Whom" is perfectly good, but it won't be around much longer. P-ssy is a perfectly good word for cat. Who uses that without understanding the implications?
Will it make it until Saturday? I had intended using it then, but I'd be very embarrassed to be completely misunderstood, using archaic terminology. Ridiculous.
I know, it's going to put the correctors out of business. But language waits for no pedant. Have you tried reading Chaucer untranslated? Why do we have to translate English into English? So many perfectly good words, RIP.
Getting really offtopic from calling a cat a p-ssy, but thee and thou were considered grammatically different also. You and you works now. Damn philistines! I don't know if this is true, but from wikipedia: According to the OED (2nd edition, 1989), whom is "no longer current in natural colloquial speech". Back on topic, this guy addresses "n---rdly," and he brings up a similar word. If someone is in a good mood, do you tell him he looks gay? If you're feeling kind of sick, do you say, "I feel queer"? Could we use the UK word for cigarette in a commercial over here?
That would be now. Timely. Apparently he uses the word n----rdly, btw. Different times. If a poet used it now they'd be the last to ignore the nasty echo.
The discussion of language change is beside the point. You made a sweeping statement about the motivation for the use of the word "ni--ardly", suggesting that anyone employing it must be doing so to provoke. I don't think that is supported by the facts. Rather I argue that the standard meaning of the word is still sufficiently established that it can be used without racial subtext. Furthermore, attempting to claim that the word is now so tainted that anyone invoking it is somehow blameworthy is a self-consciously political act. While you are correct that such political acts have always played a role in how languages change, it does not (as you seem to be suggesting) then automatically follow that said political act is an accurate representation of the facts of any given case or, for that matter, fair. The David Howard incident I mentioned befor is a case in point.
It sure sounds like he was unfairly railroaded in this case. Sounds like it spread too fast to do any education or damage control. So this guy was a victim. What the case proves is the unfortunate charge of the word, like it or not. I'm not blaming him, but the fact is that he was naive. We can't claim to be. By contrast, the thread title isn't naive at all, as I've been saying. It's very aware, instead of kids and monkeys he composed, sarcastically, an all-out, fully charged historically racist phrase. Imagine the sarcastic thread title PhillyQuakesFan would have come up with to defend David Howard on n---rdly! "I want a black man to be mayor, even though I think they're..." David Howard would still be innocent, but could you say the same about the thread title defending him? I'm not calling PhillyQuakesFan a racist, but I don't think anybody would have blamed the DC government if they took down a thread title like this.
Like you, I'm one of those who think that stereotypes are capable of doing real damage. History is filled with examples where the image of Africans as less than human made it easier for groups in power to understand their own acts of political repression, theft, and murder on a global scale in terms of "manifest destiny", "God's will"...you name it. Furthermore, the diminishment of such stereotypes has not come naturally. Instead, change has come as power has shifted, but it's also come as actual individuals have attacked, as such, the stereotypes that have allowed so many otherwise good people to think past, around, or through injustices they perpetrated or with which they were complicit. This work needs to continue, and it needs to continue in the form of engagement at the level of the ideas themselves. Therefore, I think we're better off when we have explicit conversations about the nature of stereotypes, and I think that's what is going on in the thread you're objecting to. If PhillyQuakesFan is the poster I'm thinking he is, then he and I disagree on where harmful stereotyping ends and "political correctness" begins. Despite that, I don't have any problem with the thread title because although it's confrontational it is clearly talking about the stereotype as a stereotype, and not simply invoking it. I think that's at least potentially a helpful thing. And I think the conversation in the thread realizes some of that potential. Not incidentally, I feel the same way about this thread.
Well said. Where you and I disagree, though, is that we're not talking about a stereotype. The thread title isn't "Black people can't swim," which is one discussion we've had. We're talking about using a racial slur to say that one was never made, which crosses the line.
Sorry for the delay in responding. I'm not so sure that I'd agree that he introduced the slur. I think it's more a matter of someone sarcastically exaggerating the racist attitude that was imputed to the accused woman to make his point. As rhetorical strategies go, I'd guess it's one that 's more likely to backfire than not (somebody's always got a tape recorder in their pocket in the movies, right?). I don't mean to imply that I think your concern is totally without merit: in another time and place I might have reacted just as you've done. And, even now, I may be guilty of letting the ends (a pretty good discussion about racism) justify the means (a too casual invocation of a very ugly idea). But rather than somebody being damaged by the (re)introduction of the racist motif that non-whites are subhuman, I think the real risk here is that the accusation of racism itself gets trivialized.
IMO you're definitely guilty, like most people here, of being emotionally numb to the thread title. The next step in overcoming racism in this country is moving beyond overt racism to address implicit race bias. "Racist" has become the new "n----r." You can't say it because of political correctness. The problem is, white people don't realize their implicit race biases, and so can't judge or correct their own behavior. What health care giver would say they were racist? And yet the difference in treatment given to white and black people within the same hospitals by the same doctors is well-documented. Intentional Racism? No. And yet the consequences are poor health and death for black people. The "real risk" now is white cluelessness, or in more academic terms, implicit race bias. One project trying to study this is Harvard's Project Implicit . Findings observed in seven years of operation of the Project Implicit web site * Implicit biases are pervasive. They appear as statistically "large" effects that are often shown by majorities of samples of Americans. Over 80% of web respondents show implicit negativity toward the elderly compared to the young; 75-80% of self-identified Whites and Asians show an implicit preference for racial White relative to Black. * People are often unaware of their implicit biases. Ordinary people, including the researchers who direct this project, are found to harbor negative associations in relation to various social groups (i.e., implicit biases) even while honestly (the researchers believe) reporting that they regard themselves as lacking these biases. * Implicit biases predict behavior. From simple acts of friendliness and inclusion to more consequential acts such as the evaluation of work quality, those who are higher in implicit bias have been shown to display greater discrimination. The published scientific evidence is rapidly accumulating. Over 200 published scientific investigations have made use of one or another version of the IAT. * People differ in levels of implicit bias. Implicit biases vary from person to person - for example as a function of the person’s group memberships, the dominance of a person’s membership group in society, consciously held attitudes, and the level of bias existing in the immediate environment. This last observation makes clear that implicit attitudes are modified by experience. I'd encourage people to do some googling on "racial bias in health care" and check out Project Implicit. Blacks in this country tend to be all too aware of casual race bias, and whites all too unaware. What could be more of a "real risk" than people's health? Thread titles like these perpetuate implicit bias, as we don't see them about white people. The takeaway message is that we need to be aware of and take responsibility for subliminal racial bias in ourselves, and work against it, or we truly are still part of the problem.
I realize that I'm reneging on my offer of the last word, but this is a bit much to let sit. For one thing, until I changed my job a couple of years ago I was working as a medical anthropologist and this kind of stuff was my my bread and butter. I worked extensively with the issue of race/ethnicity in medicine; worked extensively with issues such as the Tuskegee effect; and worked directly with minority populations: querying them about their experiences with, concerns about, and understandings of standardized medicine. I also worked directly with physicians and other clinicians, querying their understandings of the populations they work with and the role this might play in treatment. I'm not remotely numb to the issue. I simply disagree that that in this case the invocation of the racist image is as potentially damaging and without merit as you do. While I have grave concerns with the way that charges of racism all too frequently receive a knee-jerk dismissal as PC, I don't think that questioning when the race card is played is inherently problematic.
I didn't say you were numb to the health care issue. I said you were numb to using "I think (black men) are apes" to satirize political correctness. Nobody said questioning the race card is problematic. But questioning the race card with satirical racial slurs adds to the implicit race bias in society (white men are sub-human quoted memes don't get equal time), which seeps into health care and all areas of life. While you are more aware of one issue than others here, you don't seem to make the connection. I really recommend everybody check out Harvard's Project Implicit, and then wonder about where those large results come from and what their effects in society might be.
When you overlook a careful and reasonably particular account of how I've assessed the use of race imagery in that thread in order to apply the term "numb", I have to question the value of "numbness" as an analytical concept. It seems more like a rhetorical device. Frankly, I still have more problems with, for example, the persistent unconscious use of value-laden gender imagery in that thread than the self-conscious, explicit discussion of how race, as a concept, is being deployed. The former is far more likely to cause the problems you're concerned about that the latter.
I use the word numb because you use words like "concept" and "stereotype" to describe a racial slur (yes, used sarcastically). It's a very cold and uninvolved way of looking at words that would be highly inflammatory to many others obviously not present in this thread. Probably even bringing it to the attention of BS advertisers would get a response. BTW, even the transition in that title from referencing Obama specifically to using the word "they" shows an ignorant attitude, before the slur screams it. If you want to consider PQF a sophisticated lampoonist of racists who simultaneously skewers PC excesses, then I can only smile.
Why is Niggardly censored by this site? The word has no racial meaning. It's origin is from the Scandanivian "Nyggard". It's not a world which had taken a different meaning over time. It's not even spelled the same. It just sounds similar to an offensive word. To be offended by it, or think it offensive, is pure ignorance. Since when did ignorance become an equal and valid viewpoint?
It's equally ignorant to think we can go around saying an innocent word that sounds like an extremely offensive word. Go into a black neighborhood and use it liberally. When people react, I wouldn't consider them ignorant, I'd consider you provocative and foolish. Be sure to take your etymology sources with you. You know, if we lived in an ivory tower, we'd all be speaking Latin.