As always - if you’re saying a word is comparable to the n-word, and you are able to use your word in public as a non-black person, it’s not like the n-word
Frankly that’s something I do not understand. Why this single specific word? We have dozens of terrible offensive words. Why this specific one is considered so bad we cannot even talk about it directly, even when merely discussing it? I would think discussing it and not directing it at someone would be pretty reasonable. As with every single other word.
Non-American here. I also didn’t get this, thinking it’s just puritanical bullshit. Some Americans seem obsessed with auto-censorship.
Anyway, I finally understood while watching Django Unchained. It’s an extremely dehumanising word, meant to separate people (who have rights) from things which do not. It’s a tool to be able to do this distinction and then do unspeakable evil to specific people because they don’t count as people and so it’s alright.
Now remember that slavery was ended* only relatively recently, segregation was a thing during the lifetimes of many people and this mindset of black people not being even human is still prevalent…
The word is meant to be always used in hostility and it’s still being used like that today. That’s why you want to steer clear of it.
Django Unchained
Isn’t it ironic that a movie with so many uses of that word helped you understand that word better?
To me it seems a very good reason to believe that people shouldn’t be afraid of the syntax of the word, but definitely oppose the use when the semantic is the despicable one.
There’s an equivalent for homosexuals
In my opinion, the intellectually disabled too. Unfortunately, many people make all kinds of excuses why that word, which has been used to bully the disabled for decades, is an acceptable one.
Is one of the other words associated with 200 years of chattel slavery?
And things even worse than slavery towards them. And that a lot of racists who would likely shoot black people still use that word on purpose. And that there’s still a lot of those people.
Negro is pretty gosh darn close, but I guess it’s just not quite as derogatory.
It’s weird being told that a regular color in your native language could get you beat up to a pulp in another country.
To my non-American ears “negro” sounds far worse actually. Probably because of how rare it is in comparison.
To my Hispanic ears, “n—o” sounds like an Anglophone saying “black”. Even when used derogatorily, my immediate first thought is that they pronounced it incorrectly, then the rest of the associated matters kick in and I realize what they are really saying.
Imagine if in the Hispanosphere , the word “black” was almost synonymous with the n-word.
But yeah, don’t use n—o in English to refer to or describe anyone.
It was used in place of black for a longer period, and wasn’t necessarily considered a slur in and of itself. But of course if you say it with a sneer, even “black” can be used as an insult.
For example a lot of books (even written by people of color) used “negro” and “coloured” etc. interchangeably up to the mid-late 20th century. But in modern context very few people use it in a manner that isn’t derogatory.
I still have trouble referring to a person as ‘black’. It feels like a slur, or at least an inappropriate racial caricature (they’re not really black!) and it still surprises me that it’s become the acceptable and inoffensive term.
The n word almost seemed more mild, being about the same thing (an inappropriate way to describe race from skin colour), but linguistically removed (I’m not a native Latin speaker*) so I can feel it’s just a word, no need to be intrinsically good or bad.
- Or Spanish, whatever
From my experience, black people want to be called black. I’m a white kid, but was raised in a foster family with three black siblings and other black family, including some that lived in a ghetto in another city. It was the 90s and early 2000s, so we watched some BET, we watched the Boondocks, we listened to thug rap, we watched shows with black characters such as All That and Cousin Skeeter. Because it was all a part of my brothers’ culture, and they felt attached to it, and “black culture” was cool to all of us. And in anything we participated in I’ve never heard a single African-American who didn’t call themselves “black” and be fine being called that. Maybe there are some rich people like Obama or Tom of The Boondocks who wouldn’t call themselves “black”, but they seem to be of a different lifestyle and culture than that.
I’ve also sometimes made the argument in defense of “black”, that “African-American” is mildly politically-incorrect itself— not that I have a problem with the term, just the hyper-vigilant enforcing of it. Because it’s not synonymous with skin color itself, it’s a statement about where they came from. We don’t call white people “European-Americans”; and what do we call non-black African-Americans from, say, Egypt or South America? So… yeah.
Probably no, not in this specific form, that being said I don’t want to compare one tragedy to another. There are lots of disgusting parts of the human history, and that’s certainly one of them.
The only equivalent I can think of starts with k and is a slur for Jewish people, and it’s much less commonly heard.
What about something related to the indigenous peoples of the Americas?
We killed them and displaced the rest so damn fast that we forgot all the major slurs for them
Obese is a medical term though and Dr … PhD should know that.
Not saying that the person in the post is correct in conflating those words, I don’t think that’s accurate at all.
However, it is disheartening to see so many ill-informed comments about fatness here… It’s way, way more complicated than just “calories in/calories out”. Even the extent to which it’s unhealthy is more complicated; obesity is linked to higher risk of heart disease, but also linked to higher probability of surviving strokes/etc. A lot of the problem stems from the fact that BMI is a nearly useless metric.
It’s a clinical term, and being obese is something that 90%+ of the time, you have a choice in.
Nobody picks their race. You cannot change your race.
What I’m saying is, no, those terms are not remotely the same.
being obese is something that 90%+ of the time, you have a choice in
A big part of an individual’s build is genetic. Saying you “choose to be obese” is akin to saying you “choose to be tan”. Truer for some people than others, and often more a question of degree than state. But telling a Samoan to just stop being big is about as practical as insisting a Swede needs to stop being so fucking tall.
Nobody picks their race.
Race is a social construct. You’ve got significantly more control over your perceived race than your perceived weight, as even adjustments to your outfit and accent can cause people to place you in radically different ethnic groups.
My sicilian mother was regularly mistaken as hispanic, simply because she was shorter, slightly tanner, knew more spanish than her Mayo-American neighbors. I’ve got a Philippian friend who regularly code-switches between East Asian, Polynesian, and White depending on who is around. And even generic whiteness becomes extremely relative when you’re in Europe. Being from anywhere east of Germany might as well make you a filthy mudblood (nevermind the beef between English, French, Spanish, German, and Italian folks). A bit of accent work and a certain haircut can put you on the other side of the continent.
Diet determines someone’s body weight. If you don’t eat, you don’t gain. Once you gain it’s incredibly hard to lose. Once you lose it’s incredibly easy to gain.
I have lost 21 pounds in 2 months from calorie counting. I gained 60 pounds in 3 years by ordering a ton of delivery. I yoyo’d many times in the past 2 years trying to lose the weight using various programs before finding a routine that works for me. All weight gain was due to me making choices that increased calorie intake. No one forced me to eat anything, I did it to myself.
Genetic factors may make weight loss more difficult but it is never impossible. There is no possible way that if you do not eat you will gain weight. Unless you have a handful of extremely rare conditions it’s going to be the things you choose to eat and how much of them you eat that determine weight gain, alongside exercise. Some people swear that they do everything right with calorie counting but still gain weight but the reality is that if the average XXX pound person needs 1800 calories to maintain and you eat 1600 and still gain, perhaps your unique body really needs 1400 or 1200 to lose. Or maybe you’re blessed with a great metabolism and 2500 calories will be burnt for you so you can eat up to that without any issues.
Mental health challenges make it hard to stick with a routine diet for some but it’s still technically possible to lose weight even if your brain won’t let you stop eating. If someone gave you an appropriate balanced diet and there were no other possible source of calories for you, you’re gonna lose weight. You might go crazy because you can’t have dressing on your salad and perhaps even wish you were dead instead of eating less, but you would lose weight.
Beyond weight
In terms of height, diet can influence height somewhat (especially in terms of deficits causing stunted growth) but your maximum height is almost entirely due to genetics. You get very little choice in that. You can’t choose to drink more milk and gain a foot of height. Once your body stops producing the right growth hormone you just stop getting taller.
In terms of skin color, there’s very little you can do about that beyond genetics. You can paint your body with fake tan or sit in the sun to get darker or hide indoors out of sunlight to be “lighter” than if you went outdoors but there’s no way to will your body to stop producing melanin.
In terms of “cultural behaviors” that you seem to call race based on how you describe it, you can choose to behave like someone from any walk of life if you learn how to do so. You can learn other languages, social norms, customs and beliefs and act on them. You are not born any more “white”, “italian”, “irish”, “kenyan” or “thai” culturally than anybody else. You learn the local culture from your experiences. Switching between the cultures has nothing to do with genetics. We’re just most likely to be born into cultural groups that have the same genetics as us, the exceptions tend to be when you’re adopted or your parents happen to already be a different culture than their genetic heritage’s or your parents have different cultures.
I can’t believe I had to write any of this out. I’ll probably get downvoted because no one wants to hear the absolute truth of whatever thing they can’t do that they want to blame something else to feel better for their lack of discipline, but we can choose to behave however we really want to. I don’t give a shit how fat or skinny someone is, I care about the content of their character, their beliefs and their actions. I’m not going to point this shit out in polite company because it’s not my business and I believe everyone should be able to choose to do to their bodies and their lives however they wish. Doesn’t change the facts though.
Diet determines someone’s body weight.
Dietary needs vary by individual need. You need more calories to feed an adult than a child. You need more calories to feed a professional athlete than an office schlub. And that’s before you get into food availability by region or the opportunity cost of accessing nutritious foods in a given neighborhood radius.
I can’t believe I had to write any of this out.
You’re overly simplistic and reductive, just like every other high minded bigot.
I love how you glossed over what I said to pick up a strawman argument which is aligned with what I said. e.g. everyone’s needs are different. My exact quote from the post you replied to:
the reality is that if the average XXX pound person needs 1800 calories to maintain and you eat 1600 and still gain, perhaps your unique body really needs 1400 or 1200 to lose. Or maybe you’re blessed with a great metabolism and 2500 calories will be burnt for you so you can eat up to that without any issues.
You can believe whatever you want but assuming i’m bigoted means you probably didn’t read everything I wrote. It’s a really, really long post for social media. The irony is your complaints of it being reductive though. If you want scientific papers perhaps you should be looking at nature instead.
You can believe whatever you want
This isn’t a question of belief but of established nutritional practice. “Just eat fewer calories” isn’t a panacea, because people don’t respond in the same way to calorie deficits. Composition of diet, opportunity for exercise, age, physical health… you almost seem to hit on it when you talk about metabolism, but then you skitter right past when you conclude “Just eat more/less”.
It’s a rudimentary understanding of how people gain and lose weight, and it inevitably leads people towards crash diets and weight loss drugs that ruin your body in pursuit of a certain popular aesthetic.
Retard was a clinical term as well, so was mongoloid idiot and imbecile.
I don’t agree with the fatty in the post at all, just saying.
Neither of those things are something you can choose to be. Similar to race, its something you’re generally born with. (Or a tragic accident could cause brain issues as well)
They are not the same as obesity. Some people don’t have a choice, and it can be genetics, but the VAST majority it is a life style “choice”.
It’s quite literally the medical term… i… I am an obese man, I am an obese man mostly of my own doing, their might be some psychological or socioeconomic reasons, but it’s mostly the fact that food is good, exercise sucks, and impulse control. I wasn’t born this way, I wasn’t treated as nonhuman for something beyond my control, and obese is not used for the sole purpose of being derogatory.
Those two words are very, very different. Even if you are obese because of a thyroid, or injury, or whatever, a doctor can, and will call you obese in your medical reports. And if you can’t handle that because you can’t handle that slight uncomfortability, no wonder you are still obese.
Obese people acting like they can’t control it is precisely why they’re obese. It’s vile to discriminate against someone for their height, race, sexual orientation, and other factors because they have no control or choice over those things. But if someone makes a bad choice that negatively affects their own health and others around them, it’s acceptable to tell that person it’s unsafe. Shaming them is ineffective, but just pretending being obese is normal and healthy isn’t ok either. These folks need help.
Don’t even start with me on thyroid disorders, those are a small fraction of people who are obese and even they do not defy basic laws of thermodynamics. Eat less than you burn, it’s basic math. You may not be able to control the disorder but you are in control of how you respond to it.
Obese people acting like they can’t control it is precisely why they’re obese.
Body Mass Index doesn’t do a good job of scaling by height. Its much easier to qualify as “obese” when you’re 6’ tall, simply because your frame is so much larger. And quite a few people really are just larger. Samoans are large folks, which is why they produce so many football linemen. South Americans tend to be a lot smaller and leaner by their nature.
You can change your diet to cut out the excess sugars and limit your carbs, but a person whose body demands 5000 calories a day is simply not going to be the same size as someone who can get by perfectly fine on less than 1500.
I hope you also saying it to smokers, drinkers, etc.!
Maybe bring back the “slow suicide” and “brain damage” jokes for them, or at least call them “self harm”, that will be totally not counterproductive or anything!
