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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Obese is a medical term though and Dr … PhD should know that.
Also, I don’t agree with the OP and think it’s fucking dumb, but let’s not forget that “retard” used to be a medical term as well
As was “negro” - and that’s kinda the point; just because a word is “official” doesn’t make it not discriminatory, just that the discrimination was backed by the power of institutions.
I don’t 100% buy the argument that the two words are equivalent, but I can see how “oh you can’t come here you are obese” could feel similarly arbitrary as “oh you can’t come here you are black”
That comparison is so bad that I’m not sure you are making it in good faith. Being mentally handicapped or belonging to a minority is not a choice, being obese is.
If you make the conscious choice to be obese you really can’t complain about the consequences the same way the former can. And you especially can’t complain about people referring to you by the medically correct term
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.
Despite popular believe, people doesn’t and can’t suddenly turn black as they pleased, while body weight is something you can at least control through dedication.
Until next time ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ
Also known as the “obesity is a personal moral failing” hypothesis.
I think there’s a danger in oversimplifying.
On the one end, some people do have a hard time or maybe even actually impossible time to fight their obesity.
On the other end, a lot of people are dismissive of trying to lose weight and hide behind “body positivity” and “obese people can’t help it” when they could really get a lot of results if they actually took it seriously. A relative of mine has been obese for decades, even as the diabetes came on the general take away they had was “apply medicine, keep living how I like”. Then when their liver started failing due to the fat and got the prognosis that they were probably going to die in a matter of months, they found the motivation to lose 40 pounds, in the goal of extending their life a little. Now they have what is, by all appearances, a healthy liver again. They also have much better mobility, reduced joint pain, blood sugar that doesn’t need medication anymore. Though they are still stuck with a lot of the damage already done, losing weight has been a great boon to their life, and something they always had dismissed as being something other people could do but they were just stuck that way.
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”.
Your medical status is not a racial slur.
But neither is your skin colour expressed in Latin. It becomes a slur based on how and when it’s used.
I agree with feeling ‘obese’ is a neutral, objective term for the physical/medical fact. But then, coming from a non-Anerican context, I used to have no sense of the N word being so offensive, any more than any other random insulting (or even affectionate!) term.
In the wrong context, ‘obese’ can certainly be hurtful and inappropriate. I can imagine, for some people, it’s a trigger word of years of pain and mockery.
But neither is your skin colour expressed in Latin.
Niger is Latin… Nigger is not.
While I’m generally not sensitive to these things, claiming something that’s factually not true as a defense of the word is just not okay. Use the word if you really want to use it. If you use it in any other way other than academically (such as discussing the word in of itself)… don’t surprise pikachu when people shun you for it.
Nigger is a diminutive (or at least derivative) of negro, is it not?
Not according to the etymology. https://www.etymonline.com/word/nigger
1786, earlier neger (1568, Scottish and northern England dialect), negar, negur, from French nègre, from Spanish negro (see Negro).
All of these languages are latin-based languages… So there must be a latin root. If you dig further you find
from Latin nigrum (nominative niger) “black, dark, sable, dusky” (applied to the night sky, a storm, the complexion), figuratively “gloomy, unlucky, bad, wicked,”
So yes negro exists in the middle but not as the source necessarily… It would have evolved (if I read the etymology correctly) as Nigrum -> Niger -> Negro/neger/negar/negur -> Nigger.
Good thing the N word is being censored here, otherwise we might actually learn something.
I fucking hate indiscriminate censorship. In some context the word is important in order to learn and educate
It’s your own .world instance that’s doing the censorship.
Oh that’s good to know and also fucked up, I thought they stopped that censoring bullshit. Thank you for letting me know.
How would I go about to see this post outsife ot my .world? I can’t even click the link because it removes it from the URL, this is so fucking stupid.
Negro. Jeez, you really out here saying those words huh?
Jeez, you’re really out here word policing when it’s clear we’re simply talking about the word… You know… not actually attributing it.
You act like just saying “Negro” with no context is any better.
Just like your namesake, you’ve added nothing to the discussion except a bit of toxicity.
Look I’m a fat American and here at least nobody I’ve ever heard has used “obese” as a slur. You hear actual insults, “fatass” comes immediately to mind but there’s plenty of others; I’ve heard plenty of them personally. The OP in the pic is a fucking doctor according to her obscured user name and needs to be far more responsible. Obesity is party of a medical status - being called a land whale is an insult.
Further, the N-word has centuries of racist cultural weight behind it. The word “obese” is far more recent and isn’t used as part of the systematic oppression of an entire ethnic to group - one that makes up an enormous amount of American population.
This isn’t even apples and oranges. This is cantaloupes and blueberries. Not watermelons though, that has racist baggage too.
She’s off her rocker to compare the two, but I do want to say people are policing medical terms as being offense, so maybe she was trying to express (very poorly) that obese should be considered offensive like using the terms retarded, idiot, or what not that started as a medical diagnosis/meaning, and now can be viewed as hurtful. I don’t agree with it because the reasonsaying the term retard is insulting is because the person you are calling it isn’t actually fitting the medical diagnosis, and therefore using a medical term to put other people down. (Doubt it is used by doctors today, they likely have found different ways of expressing a person’s mental growth in terms of comparing to average growth, growth within science and all that). So if we were calling people who were not obese obese to put them down, maybe it would start to make sense, but it hasn’t occured around me much. That said, I have seen jokes made around belimic people calling themself a fat ass for eating say a slice of pizza, but even most movies have moved away from joking about such anymore.
I never used or seen used ‘obese’ as a slur.
Fatty, yes. Absolutely, all the time. Obese, no.
If you’re ‘triggered’ by being called a fatty, stop being fat.
If you’re ‘triggered’ by being called a fatty, stop being fat.
Now that’s a bad take.
We shouldn’t mock people for things they struggle with, even if we think they could just stop.
Struggling with actual problems, sure.
Struggling with being unable to stop shoving burgers in your mouth is not an actual problem.
And saying things like that is exactly why obese people have so much trouble having the confidence to start losing weight. And no, it is not as easy as you are suggesting. We live in an era of processed foods and food deserts where people are so overworked and often with such long commutes that they don’t have the energy or the time to cook a healthy meal when they get home.
Telling those people to stop shoving burgers in their mouth doesn’t help anything.
Also, and I can’t believe this is the second time I’ve had to say this to someone today- have you ever been insulted into making a lifestyle change? I sure haven’t.
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.
Yeah, it’s a sterile medical term that unfortunately takes on other meanings that people dislike. For example, I had a friend who went off the deep end and started claiming that obesity was made up by doctors and began trying to convince me to think likewise. It was kind of eerie to see this otherwise rational person fall for this type of denial over something that made them uncomfortable.
It doesn’t help that some doctors were shitty to him about his weight (a fair and very real complaint) so he insisted it was a systematic problem within the medical establishment to oppress. I don’t doubt it happens but it’s a bit extreme to think it’s solely used to that end and that it’s not a handy label for managing weight and conducting research.
I do agree that if you are obese and have unrelated medical issues the doctors will very much say “you need to lose weight”, and call it done. And that is x10 if you are a woman, for some reason. Yeah, these problems may not be so bad if I was not obese, and they may not have existed is I wasn’t (bulging disks my back, in my case etc.), but the truth is, I am fat, I still need my problems fixed, go ahead and do the surgery to trim the disk that is pinching my nerves to fix my back because otherwise I can’t move and I will just get fatter and my back will just get worse. Perpetually.
It is just laziness and they have a blanket scapegoat to use to get out of doing their job if you walk in and are overweight.
It is just laziness and they have a blanket scapegoat to use to get out of doing their job if you walk in and are overweight.
(Please take the following as pondering general discussions of obesity between doctors/patients and not specifically directed at you.)
This was a really thought-provoking summary for me, your belief that doctors are telling people to lose weight out of “laziness.” If a suggestion like this is lazy, are patients who don’t listen to their doctor somehow not lazy?
The idea that doctors make weight a scapegoat seems prevalent in American healthcare (probably because we’re generally obese). It feels a lot like projection of one’s “laziness” (mentally it’s much more complex than that) onto a doctor, even though that doctor has probably seen hundreds of cases with the same predictable outcomes and knows that appropriate weight management would head off more serious treatment.
Frankly, I think doctors are anything but lazy when they are “forced” to order and perform risky and invasive treatments on a patient who refused to meet them halfway before the treatment became necessary in the first place. I get it, nobody likes being told what to do, especially when it seems (and literally is) so personal. But doctors also don’t like to be told what to do (“fix me!”) when a patient deigns even the gentlest suggestion to take some control of their issues at hand.
I am now 30lbs below my highest weight. The severity of my issues (joint pain, lethargy, depression, etc.) has palpably lessened losing that 30lbs very inconsistently over the last four years. If anything, I think doctors need to better read the psychological resistance many people have with weight loss and then illustrate to, rather than tell, patients how to attain weight loss in ways that don’t seem restrictive.
That 30lbs of mine, could I have done that in 30 weeks or fewer? Sure, but I didn’t want to feel perpetually hungry. In fact, I never even set a goal weight. Instead of thinking “Idgaf about my weight” or “I must lose 20lbs by Christmas!!” I just made the tiniest changes, the biggest one being taking advantage of times I wasn’t hungry by (gasp) not eating.
… Shit, I guess lazy weight loss works, too!
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.
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!
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.
