Appropriateness of posts
Nick Sabalausky
SeeWebsiteToContactMe at semitwist.com
Wed Mar 19 06:07:54 PDT 2014
On 3/19/2014 6:08 AM, Chris wrote:
> On Wednesday, 19 March 2014 at 07:51:06 UTC, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> [...]
>> even though "white" is still used all the time anyway and I've never
>> seen anyone get offended.
>
> QED. "white" has no negative connotations simply because the majority of
> people are white.
The majority of people are Asian. The majority of Americans are white.
But I'm being pedantic. :)
Of course, if I want get *really* pedantic, I'm not certain if those are
actual "majorities" (ie >50%) or simply just the largest (erm, I mean
most numerous) ethnic groups. But I don't want to get that pedantic ;)
But you make a good point. If one group has historically been treated
badly, then any reference to them has a certain chance of being
interpreted as derogatory. I've noticed that the more fresh the memory
of ill-treatment, or the more such memory is maintained and cultivated,
the more likely things will be interpreted, or misinterpreted, as offensive.
Interestingly enough, it makes no difference whether the discrimination
is still happening or not: As long as people remember that is *has*
happened, there will *always* be a higher chance of someone interpreting
a statement as derogatory, even if it wasn't intended to be. Choose to
believe discrimination exists and it will *always* be found *somewhere*,
even if it has to be subconsciously fabricated in order to fulfill the
preconceived belief that it still exists.
Great example of this phenomenon is Resident Evil:
Several games, one after another, involving battle for survival against
hordes of people-turned-bloodthirty-zombies (infected by an evil
entity). First game set in an American mansion, battling white American
zombies, everything's ok. Next game set in an American town, battling
more white American zombies, everything's ok. Three more games, all
fine. Then one set in Spain with (obviously) Spanish zombies.
Everything's *still* good.
Then, the same *non-American* developer, Capcom, makes the unfortunate
mistake of doing a North American release of a new Resident Evil taking
place in...Africa. Obviously, any zombies in Africa would
be...uhh...African? Oh, holy shit, *now* all hell breaks loose.
Surprise, surprise, *now* some crazed fucking nutjob climbs out of the
woodwork and starts squawking all over about how overtly racist this
game suddenly is. Same fucking game as the rest of the decade-old
series, just different location. But no, *now* it's racist. So where the
fuck was she when the rest of the series was made? Off deciding "Oh,
well it's obviously ok if they're killing whiteys!" or some such? Bah.
In any case, so much for equality.
Nobody (at least in the US) discriminates against Italians or Irish
anymore. Oh, they used to get a lot of crap. Hell, they got *plenty* of
shit from people. All ethnic groups in the US did at some point in time.
But then it was dwarfed by the whole African slavery thing, and civil
rights and women's lib, etc so everyone forgot to continue worrying
about Irish discrimination, Italian discrimination, etc. *That's* what
killed it off. Not some idiotic, self-perpetuating, discrimination witch
hunt.
Anti-white derogatory stuff no longer exists *because* we all just shrug
it off. Nobody's choosing to be offended, therefore it can't offend. It
has no teeth. Because we've given it none.
This happened for one reason: Because we lost all our remaining excuses
to be offended. Hell, as americans, we're all too busy playing guilt
trip anyway over some crap that was pulled (in *part* of the country) by
some grossly unethical asshats who none of us have ever even met (let
alone *been* one) because they've all been dead and gone for over a century.
Point of all this being, and history has proved this, discrimination
will always be kept alive in the hearts of people who insist on forever
being offended by it. It might still exist. Or it might not. But whether
or not it exists has long since stopped being relevant, and if/when it
ends we'll never even notice anyway. Because as soon as it does go away,
it will only continue living on as a specter, built and maintained by
those who choose to believe in it, all because they're too afraid to
relinquish their comfortable, familiar self-identity as a "victim" of
some vague, conveniently hidden, indentity-less, anyone-or-anything villain.
More information about the Digitalmars-d
mailing list