I agree with everything except for the N-word R-word comparison. I think the history of the N-word is significantly worse but I see what you’re saying.
I agree that the N-word is far worse - I didn’t mean to equate them but to use it as a point of comparison. The really fucking hateful and widespread usages of the n-word mostly date back to the 70s - it’s now used almost exclusively by badge wearing racists… so it has had about fifty years of pop culture non-hateful uses but is still clearly unacceptable.
The R-word was seeing widespread usage a mere twenty years ago - it’s still part of the active memory of millennials and older.
An interesting comparison might be gypsy (I type it out only because I can’t think of a clear way to abbreviate it) which is seen as an unacceptable slur (especially in the verb form) which had fallen out of social use in the 50s - even that word (though it is less openly hateful) is still pretty unacceptable.
It’s a similar story for other less common racial slurs - once a word becomes such a hateful slur it seems like the most common social response is to just abandon it with reclamation being a rarity and confined to the in group in every case I can think of (the n-word and the f-word both have gained some usage within their communities but it isn’t universal… I have an extremely negative memory of the f-word which makes me uncomfortable even when people I trust use it).
I agree with everything except for the N-word R-word comparison. I think the history of the N-word is significantly worse but I see what you’re saying.
I agree that the N-word is far worse - I didn’t mean to equate them but to use it as a point of comparison. The really fucking hateful and widespread usages of the n-word mostly date back to the 70s - it’s now used almost exclusively by badge wearing racists… so it has had about fifty years of pop culture non-hateful uses but is still clearly unacceptable.
The R-word was seeing widespread usage a mere twenty years ago - it’s still part of the active memory of millennials and older.
An interesting comparison might be gypsy (I type it out only because I can’t think of a clear way to abbreviate it) which is seen as an unacceptable slur (especially in the verb form) which had fallen out of social use in the 50s - even that word (though it is less openly hateful) is still pretty unacceptable.
It’s a similar story for other less common racial slurs - once a word becomes such a hateful slur it seems like the most common social response is to just abandon it with reclamation being a rarity and confined to the in group in every case I can think of (the n-word and the f-word both have gained some usage within their communities but it isn’t universal… I have an extremely negative memory of the f-word which makes me uncomfortable even when people I trust use it).