Words are meaningless on their own aren’t they? “Cool” has no meaning on its own. “On fleek” has no meaning. “Bodacious.” Yet the word you use there will tend to be per us ex certain ways. It is hard to picture the latest coolest star using “bodacious” in earnest, try inventing some slang for cool. Start saying “The Hendersons bushes” for anything cool. See if it catches on or anyone understands.
So words have no meaning, what’s the big deal right…?
Except… it isn’t about the word usually. It’s much more than a word. We can say the same words to different people and that changes everything, different situations. Try it. To a partner or family member say: “want to miss me don’t you?” Now say that to an angry person at a bar. Wow. Different.
But it goes deeper than that because behind the power of a word is its history. So slurs, insults, “curse words” generally aren’t nice or good to say. To anyone sure, but contextually some are worlds than others. Someone who has struggled with weight and teasing their whole life is likely going to be far more hurt than someone with a confident body image if you call them weight based insults. Someone who has lost a child to miscarriage probably has a greater personal reaction to jokes and insults about dead babies and infertility.
Now, I hope you’d have the intelligence to realize how perhaps a word that for about 400 years has been used in a context from other races to demean, degrade, dehumanize, show hate, contempt, condescension to an entire group- a word that is intrinsically intertwined with slavery, murder, branding and mutilation of humans, rape, subjugation, discrimination, social and personal destruction- such a word Carrie’s ALOT of baggage to it. The meaning of the word is not relevant, the context of the word and history are. Now, I’m sure you’ll find some white folk who have been insulted, perhaps excluded, by the word cracker. Dig deep enough you’ll even find perhaps a few examples of deaths that occurred while men screamed “cracker” or such and it was the last words some poor fellow heard in this life, words of hate in a hateful tone or perhaps spoken with the giddy glee of a twisted soul enjoying their race based murder.
Buuuut… sorry revisionist historians. You don’t have 400 years of global examples linking that word to the ruination and suffering of generations of whites who were excluded from having human rights, participating in society or even in being considered human, under a society and language where such words were common and quasi universal.
I’m going to go ahead and say no one should be slurring each other, race is particularly a dumb one as it is an entirely man made concept that is vague and cultural and not only as a generality fails to reflect diversity within a group identified as like,” but doesn’t even take into account cultural and ethnic factors or other circumstances that differ between people who are superficially similar enough to share the label. So they are all bad slurs,
but yeah. Some are worse than others. Some carry far darker pasts and as far as words that hurt, have caused far far more hurt. On a certain scale we just can’t compare wrongs. The Holocaust or the rape of Nanking? By the numbers one is far greater. We can argue- pick the people who had the “worst” or “best” possible experiences and outcomes in each and try to use those, or the “worst.” We can try to compare a percentage of deaths to total population or say that sheer numbers are enough to declare a choice. So many things one might argue but they are both horrible things of unimaginable scale and wrongness. We don’t need to compare. We can’t compare.
But this isn’t that. Comparing certain slurs used against “black people” and certain slurs used against white people is less like comparing the Holocaust to the rape of Nanking than comparing the rape of Nanking to the audiences who were at the theatrical release of Rob Schneider’s “The Animal.” One of those things is very clearly not like the other.
So words have no meaning, what’s the big deal right…?
Except… it isn’t about the word usually. It’s much more than a word. We can say the same words to different people and that changes everything, different situations. Try it. To a partner or family member say: “want to miss me don’t you?” Now say that to an angry person at a bar. Wow. Different.
I’m going to go ahead and say no one should be slurring each other, race is particularly a dumb one as it is an entirely man made concept that is vague and cultural and not only as a generality fails to reflect diversity within a group identified as like,” but doesn’t even take into account cultural and ethnic factors or other circumstances that differ between people who are superficially similar enough to share the label. So they are all bad slurs,