I dunno, we can just sort of, never escape the long arm of history, I guess. I suppose that’s maybe a good thing, lest history just repeat itself, but, you know, barring like, more strict material, economic, or discriminatory concerns about racism, it can certainly kind of give a more major weight to what otherwise might be seen as innocent things or just kind of, historical oddities, or holdovers. I think probably, though, for every “gypped”, which is maybe a term that has lost racial connotation over time, there’s like, 30 or 40 n-words and racial tropes that are much more overtly offensive, and I think it’s probably more important that those are called out as racist than that we sort of, become too overzealous and lament the death of innocence that comes with knowing “gypped” originates from a racial slur.
I also don’t think that more information is really a bad thing, in any case. I don’t think that an 80 year old woman who has maybe been hearing the term her whole life and has never heard the racial connotation, is going to meaningfully be depressed by like, hearing the frequency of that word, or something. That might be the case, but I mean, if she went 80 years without really making the correlation, it’s probably not the case that most people were using it against her in a negative way, and if even she only knew the history recently, it’s pretty easy for her to just go “oh, well, they don’t know the history of the term, really they mean cheap, they don’t mean anything by it”. I mean, ideally, right. People are more complicated than that, obviously, but I still don’t think the information itself is a bad thing.
I dunno, we can just sort of, never escape the long arm of history, I guess. I suppose that’s maybe a good thing, lest history just repeat itself, but, you know, barring like, more strict material, economic, or discriminatory concerns about racism, it can certainly kind of give a more major weight to what otherwise might be seen as innocent things or just kind of, historical oddities, or holdovers. I think probably, though, for every “gypped”, which is maybe a term that has lost racial connotation over time, there’s like, 30 or 40 n-words and racial tropes that are much more overtly offensive, and I think it’s probably more important that those are called out as racist than that we sort of, become too overzealous and lament the death of innocence that comes with knowing “gypped” originates from a racial slur.
I also don’t think that more information is really a bad thing, in any case. I don’t think that an 80 year old woman who has maybe been hearing the term her whole life and has never heard the racial connotation, is going to meaningfully be depressed by like, hearing the frequency of that word, or something. That might be the case, but I mean, if she went 80 years without really making the correlation, it’s probably not the case that most people were using it against her in a negative way, and if even she only knew the history recently, it’s pretty easy for her to just go “oh, well, they don’t know the history of the term, really they mean cheap, they don’t mean anything by it”. I mean, ideally, right. People are more complicated than that, obviously, but I still don’t think the information itself is a bad thing.