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Originally Posted by JinnKai
Bitch is a word that describes a subset of the female gender, characterized by anger and bitter resentment. Does that mean that using a term like bitch, applied to the larger set (women) should not be offensive?
You're using the same flawed logic for redneck if you say that because it applies to a SPECIFIC subset that it's not offensive when applied to the larger set. Some women wear "bitch" like a badge of honor, yet it doesn't define all or even most women. Call a random girl on a street a "bitch" and don't expect it to be taken rudely? Naive. (Thank you whomever corrected my spelling of this word earlier)
I'm offended when someone calls me a redneck, because it denigrates my race (yes, race), my intelligence, my political ideology, and my attitude towards life. Bitch, nigger, and cracker all fall into these same categories. I don't see how you can justify it as NOT being a racial slur because it applies to a subset of a larger set; you've seen above that it is flawed logic. By this logic, calling a white man a nigger would mean that nigger isn't racial because it applies only to your status is a hierarchy and not a race.
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My experience has been that "bitch" is generally used to mean "a woman I dislike" for whatever reason, or is used as a generic insult for any woman. "Nigger", and "cracker" are good parallels, as they are again, used as insults for groups the speaker dislikes, or as generic insults for, respectively, black people and white people.
"Redneck" isn't really parallel, as it doesn't refer to any specific ethnic group,
nor is it used as a generic insult for all white people or for that matter, any specific ethnicity. It refers to a group of people based on attitudes, belief systems and lifestyle.
A better parallel would be, say nerd or geek. Like the words nerd or geek, redneck is frequently used as an insult, particularly by outsiders, but can also be merely descriptive of a given set of behaviors.