I once had to explain to my father why calling Asian sport bikes “rice rockets” is racist. He didn’t get it and went on to talk about how he got “gyped” by a guy trying to sell him one when he was in his 30s.
It takes a lot of introspection and work to get past culturally ingrained bigotry. I was a teenager in the 90s. Back then, and still through the 2000’s via internet culture, everyone and everything was a “fag”. I didn’t recognize that it was a problem until way later than I should have, and I still almost say it sometimes. I don’t have any problem with gay people. It’s just a weird form of muscle memory. People don’t understand that listeners don’t know what their intentions are. They just know what you said. You gotta internalize that fact before you can change your language.
Good question. It was the late 90s so it wasn’t like we were living in Jim Crow but there was no where near the same amount of recognition of the difficulties people of color face like we see now. He never intentionally racist. On the contrary, I do remember him spending a night in the drunk tank after got into a parking lot brawl between him and Puerto Rican friends and some assholes who called them a bunch of slurs.
I once had to explain to my father why calling Asian sport bikes “rice rockets” is racist. He didn’t get it and went on to talk about how he got “gyped” by a guy trying to sell him one when he was in his 30s.
It takes a lot of introspection and work to get past culturally ingrained bigotry. I was a teenager in the 90s. Back then, and still through the 2000’s via internet culture, everyone and everything was a “fag”. I didn’t recognize that it was a problem until way later than I should have, and I still almost say it sometimes. I don’t have any problem with gay people. It’s just a weird form of muscle memory. People don’t understand that listeners don’t know what their intentions are. They just know what you said. You gotta internalize that fact before you can change your language.
It’s one of those things, is it worse that it’s used without understanding that it was initially a racist term?
Good question. It was the late 90s so it wasn’t like we were living in Jim Crow but there was no where near the same amount of recognition of the difficulties people of color face like we see now. He never intentionally racist. On the contrary, I do remember him spending a night in the drunk tank after got into a parking lot brawl between him and Puerto Rican friends and some assholes who called them a bunch of slurs.