• Hanover
    12.9k
    Can the white community pass a convention normalizing the use of the N word and condemning of the Black community's use of the term?
  • Baden
    16.3k


    No, because you can't invent social reality. It invents you.
  • thedeadidea
    98
    But I want to be the pig....

    0-gbfaTwFOvWhHYtF6B4Qxasw5OsON-_lC597_vSzxg.jpg?auto=webp&s=0b34c4f97da9ba9c1287de72af3367cb779d3324
  • Hanover
    12.9k
    Give your mum my apologies.Baden

    Nice. You just called my departed mother a retard. If I weren't so
  • Hanover
    12.9k
    It sent in mid sentence. I think I leave it that way. Use your imagination.
  • Baden
    16.3k


    Actually, I called you a retard. And if you weren't so retarded, you would have got the joke.

    I'm disappointed. >> :sad:
  • Hanover
    12.9k
    No, because you can't invent social reality. It invents you.Baden
    No, it invents you. I'm a grown ass man and I do what I do when I wanna do it.
  • Shawn
    13.2k
    But I want to be the pig....thedeadidea

    Okay...

    Proceeds to be a wallowing chimp.
  • S
    11.7k
    No, because you can't invent social reality. It invents you.Baden

    I invented a new fragrance which smells just divine. I bottle it and sell it as perfume.

    I made it from the semen of a pig-chimp.
  • thedeadidea
    98
    Okay...

    Proceeds to be a wallowing chimp
    Wallows

    Actually... I changed my mind I'll be the chimp and you be the pig now pick a topic so I can tell you it is a pearl and you are unfit and unworthy of it...
  • Merkwurdichliebe
    2.6k
    Hey you guys!

    Goobacks are being oppressed in the future. If we don't get some solidarity soon, they'll take our jobs.
  • Shawn
    13.2k
    I made it from the seaman of a pig-chimp.S

    Oh dear. What's going on in your world?
  • S
    11.7k
    Oh dear. What's going on in your world?Wallows

    Traded in my cat for a pig-chimp. Now I'm raking it in. I spend all of my profits on drugs.
  • thedeadidea
    98
    What was this thread about again ?
  • Shawn
    13.2k
    Actually... I changed my mind I'll be the chimp and you be the pig now pick a topic so I can tell you it is a pearl and unfit and unworthy of it...thedeadidea

    Start a topic on pig-chimp content on the internet and stuff like that.
  • Shawn
    13.2k
    Traded in my cat for a pig-chimp. Now I'm raking it in.S

    Oksa was a good cat.

    What was this thread about again ?thedeadidea

    It's actually about pig-chimp content.
  • thedeadidea
    98
    It's actually about pig-chimp content.Wallows

    This would not be 1/5 as amusing to me if your name wasn't Wallows... this is why I am a philistine because shit like this just cracks me up to much to take stuff seriously.
  • VagabondSpectre
    1.9k
    Where's Vagabond Spectre? He would know what I'm sayingfrank

    Would that our arbitrary visual differences could be marginalized so easily... (Would indeed be grand).

    I'll hazard the field and say that on the one hand, we should not train ourselves to feel emotional pain when he hear a particular sound (intent should matter and all that, but beyond that we should do our best to respond to genuine hatred with genuine love). On the other hand, because of the obvious effect it has, it's not a word that should ever be uttered in certain public contexts (a politician merely uttering the word, in whatever context, is bound to stir a negative emotional reaction). I wish that we were less sensitive about the mere utterance of a word, but it is what it is.

    I actually grew up in a black community listening to hip-hop, so it's not a word I could ever escape. Once I was told what it was (I didn't even realize it had racist origins at first) as the result of using it against my best friend (who happened to be black) I went for a very long time without ever uttering it (when I wanted to reference it in discussion, I said "the n-word", but even then I was unsure if that was appropriate).

    As me and my friends grew older, the word became more ubiquitous, and I couldn't help but to use it among my close circle of friends (in all manner of expressive ways except the hate filled hard-"e.r.", which is what we would call a fighting word regardless of who uses it). At the same time, when I heard it come out of the mouths of the upper-middle class white kids who didn't know any better, I resented them and hated them for it.

    As an adult, I continue to use the word only in private with my friends who will not misinterpret my meaning, or I'll put it in quotations if I'm forced to reference the word itself (I feel too silly saying "the n word".

    I've managed to write this entire post without actually using the titular word, and now allow me to cock that all up by attempting to demonstrate why me and my black friends could not help but use it. It's too expressive:



    And here's the "clean" version.

    "Touch them other hitters cause I'm down for my hitters" just isn't the same...
  • thedeadidea
    98
    what about instead of 'hitters' you get a different word like homies, G, superflybros or chimp-pig ?

    Is the issue that it isn't the same that there is no synonym for that word..... Is it unique in a good way or a bad way ?
  • Relativist
    2.6k
    That's consistent with my observation that its use revealed one's class. I think the same holds true in the African American community.Hanover
    I wouldn't relate it to "class" (whatever that even means). It just seems to be the received world-view of a lot of people. When I was young, I remember using the word when talking to my father about a black guy that worked for him. Had the civil rights movement not become so public (on the news, discussed in schools, etc), I may have never realized there was anything much wrong with it. So in my case, I was living in a time and place where the treatment of blacks (not just use of "n-") came to my attention.

    Regarding use of the word by Blacks: I truly believe they should stop it, because it sounds like a hypocritical double standard to accept it from Blacks but not Whites. That said, it makes perfect sense that it will be perceived differently depending on the source. A black person is not connoting superiority when he says it, but he might perceive that when uttered by a white person (irrespective of what was in the white guy's heart when saying it).
  • frank
    15.8k
    I'll hazard the field and say that on the one hand, we should not train ourselves to feel emotional pain when he hear a particular sound (intent should matter and all that, but beyond that we should do our best to respond to genuine hatred with genuine love). On the other hand, because of the obvious effect it has, it's not a word that should ever be uttered in certain public contexts (a politician merely uttering the word, in whatever context, is bound to stir a negative emotional reaction). I wish that we were less sensitive about the mere utterance of a word, but it is what it is.VagabondSpectre

    You're not supposed to love the Devil, though. The Devil works best in fiction. We see the evil slave owner or klansman uttering the word, and it acts as a lightning rod for all our frustration and anger which is otherwise just particles everwhere: getting stuck in traffic, having to get a tooth fixed, etc.

    Pain is there. We need a way to process it. Screaming at a random white guy who said the wrong word is one way to process it. Block that path and we'll find another. We're going to scream at somebody. We have to. In an ideal world, our processing of pain would be victimless. Is your point that we should try harder to make it so?

    Another oldy:

    The original doesn't say "Don't this shit make my people wanna."
  • VagabondSpectre
    1.9k
    It's just unique. I can't really explain it. The trouble with it is its historical meaning, and the hate that its use can stand for, but it has come to have great utility in the seemingly ambiguous ways it can be used (for example, as with the hitter translation, it can in fact be a term of respect or an acknowledgment of power).

    Its usage in the black community is controversial on the whole. Black people who aren't interested in hip-hop, and generally elderly blacks (the ones I have known), really don't like hearing the word being used by anyone, but then there are some families that use it profusely.

    What are we to do? It's the mess of emergent language, and it's going to take time and changing perceptions to decide how it should or shouldn't be used.

    Come to think of it, most of the slurs that I am aware of are actually somewhat recent language acquisitions (perhaps because the pain associated with them must be in memory?). Would it be politically or culturally insensitive to call someone a Damn Philistine!? The modern meaning actually means "a person who is hostile or indifferent to culture and the arts, or who has no understanding of them", but etymologically (or Biblically) it refers to a region in the Middle East or its people, which is a less than complimentary comparison...
  • thedeadidea
    98
    laissez faire a concept truly ruined by economic theorists but here might be the beginning, middle and end to an appropriate response.
  • VagabondSpectre
    1.9k
    Pain is there. We need a way to process it. Screaming at a random white guy who said the wrong word is one way to process it. Block that path and we'll find another. We're going to scream at somebody. We have to. In an ideal world, our processing of pain would be victimless. Is your point that we should try harder to make it so?frank

    Aside from getting people to stop using the word in a hate filled sense (applies to everyone), I want people to scream less at each-other in general (even when they're clearly justified to do so). We scream if we must, but we mustn't let it poison our personalities and cause us to respond to hate with only hate.

    In part, sensitivity to the word gives it its negative power, and while I am sympathetically forced to rebuke people who use it in a hateful sense, I want to do so in the most dignified way possible. I'm not black so it's not as if I can ambassador myself to racists on behalf of black communities, but I can still try to set an example. I really don't have the answers here, I'm just trying to get by by expressing myself.

    laissez faire a concept truly ruined by economic theorists but here might be the beginning, middle and end to an appropriate response.thedeadidea

    Even if we wanted to interfere, what knobs could we fiddle?
  • Valentinus
    1.6k
    My question is whether this social convention of never uttering the N-word is a reasonable act of respect or whether it's simply a politically imposed rule that can be used to divide and destroy?Hanover

    I grew up when and where never uttering the word was a part of my parents' resistance against those in their generation who did. The Civil Rights Movement divided every group, including my white family.

    So, growing up that way and seeing for myself how people tried very hard to stop calling people that name makes having some black people use it as a special word that belongs only to them quite painful.

    I don't have an opinion about whether the use of that language is good or bad against the background of some eventual historical end. But I have witnessed the degradation that is fused with the word and that is what it will always be for me.
  • thedeadidea
    98
    With the nipples of chimppigs... they are especially sensitive, but none more sensitive than Wallow's...

    edited 10.05.2019 changing "apepigs" to "chimppigs"

    This edit was made possible thanks to Wallows and his nipples that continue to support us and our important work.
  • Maw
    2.7k
    AS A WHITE MAN I AM OPPRESSED BECAUSE I CANNOT FREELY SAY THE N-WORD, THIS IS WHAT ORWELL DESCRIBED IN THE ONLY BOOK I HAVE READ (ONE NINE EIGHT FOUR)
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