Comment by daseiner1
5 days ago
they’re not negroes, they’re colored
they’re not colored, they’re African-American
they’re not African-American, they’re black
they’re not black, they’re Black
they’re not Black, they’re People of Color
they’re not People of Color, they’re BIPOC
I wonder what the next twist of the pretzel will look like
If you're truly mystified, and believe this is nothing more than PC linguistic gymnastics, I wonder why you started with "negroes"?
90% of this list is less the slur treadmill and more the MLA/AP Stylebook version treadmill. Nobody's going to get mad at you for writing African American, unless you work for a newspaper, it's largely motivated by MLA and AP wanting to sell new books every year or two, same as how titles were underlined when I was in grade school and now they're italicized.
I thought the underlining thing had more to do with practical limitations of (most people's) handwriting and of common typewriters. Italics, when available, have been preferred for titles as far back as I'm aware.
Why'd you leave the most notable one out of your list?
I don't think that one was ever "acceptable". That being said, literally every term after/including "African-American" in that list is socially acceptable. Not sure what they're going on about.
I'm not so sure. It sure gets used a lot in "Huckleberry Finn", even by people who aren't being malicious. (From my recollection, anyway. It's been ages since I read it.)
The current norm is that it mustn't be said, even in a discussion of that class of words.
Most of those are terms for different things.
Not all people who are black are African American.
Not all people of color are black.
Looking at Elon Musk, some African Americans are white.
I think this just demonstrates that changes to language are not sufficient to erase racism.
It can even have the opposite effect.
As long as assholes finds ways to ruin words for the rest of us, there will always be a new more sensitive / caring way to refer to traditionally oppressed people.
I know it sucks to keep up with things, but what sucks even works is not keeping up, and finding you and the neo nazis using the same language to mean different things. If you care, then you put the work in. That’s all anyone can do.
bipoc means a different thing than black. you should use the word that has the meaning you want.
But using the word he really wanted to use would totally undermine his point, not to mention getting his post flagged.
Yes exactly. The whole debate doesn't change the fact that certain people form the lower class, and those people tend to also have certain physical characteristics, and people don't like lower social class, which makes them dislike those characteristics.
I imagine they look similar to the gymnastics you did to come up with this comment.
I think we should respect someone's preferred language for their identity. It's not that hard.
Seems like you're pointing to a singular imaginary boogeyman out to annoy you?
You should try the better thing of actually considering the history of each of these.
I won't deny that it can be annoying, but considering the specific why of each one is important. Necessary even.
What, IYO, is being twisted here? What should people be called?
Personally, I took the comment to imply that we are not really solving the root issue behind what is driving the change in terminology and thus we are doomed to continue to apply the same (ineffective) solution.
Why is the changing terminology something that needs to be stopped? Does the language used to describe an identity need to be frozen in time?
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Truthfully I think that it is a dialectic process that counterintuitively perpetuates a mentality of victimhood and otherness. The neverending process of being othered//feeling othered//trying to empower oneself in one's otherness is entirely futile. To assimilate, you must assimilate.
I'm well-aware that I'm being rather evasive and I certainly don't think anyone is fooled by what I'm really saying.
Yep, just the age-old trick of creating a problem and then selling an ineffective solution. Unbounded profit!
Absolutely insane equivocation. "Negro" has always been associated with slavery and that's why it was used up until even recently by people like Malcom X. "Colored" is associated with apartheid America in the same way.
African American was a term used around return-to-africa movements and was always heavily associated with non-americanness.
> they’re not black, they’re Black
Somebody has never heard of proper nouns
> they’re not Black, they’re People of Color
Yes... nobody ever called indigenous people negroes. It's not the same thing as black. People use the phrase to talk about more than just black people.
> they’re not People of Color, they’re BIPOC
The I stands for indigenous.