Quote:
Originally Posted by Xerxys
^^ Yes, yes, yes!! Only niggers say nigger with the insulting intentions. I am short of words for this thread because it is my experience that very many people don't have a legitimate feeling about the entire issue either way EXCEPT when things don't go their way.
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Neither of you have been in the south, then.
Now, with regards to the topic at hand, it is amazing to me how people want to completely ignore context.
Nigger, the word, comes from the Portuguese word negro. The Portuguese ran the slave trade, so there is no question as to how the word nigger entered the English language. It was a word used to dehumanize African slaves. Dehumanize often in quite literal ways, such as not counting as a full person in the census, etc. As slavery came to pass, racists clang on to the word to reaffirm the status of less than human of blacks in society.
Eventually, blacks started coopting the word, as many discriminated groups do, as a way of empowering themselves.
Now, a word by itself cannot offend anyone. You say nigger to a poor Angolan boy who never heard it before and he wont care. But the fact is that the word is still being used with the intent to offend and dehumanize others in the US. The fact that it is sometimes used in a non-offensive or non-aggressive manner doesn't change that fact. When a white person uses the word nigger as an insult against a black person, that white person is not simply using the word as any other insult, but is using it precisely because of the historical context of the use of that word.
---------- Post added at 09:46 PM ---------- Previous post was at 09:36 PM ----------
Quote:
Originally Posted by FelixP
I don't, not at all. If I think a black dude is being an asshole, I'll call him a nigger. If I think a chinese person is being a dick, I'll call him a chink. If one of my fellow caucasoids being a douchebag, I'll call him a cracker. Really. It's no different from calling someone a shitfuck or a dumbass. And I do see Halanna's point: I went to one school that was 95% black (I was picked on everyday for being white at that one), and another that was about 45% black. The black kids called each other niggers all the time, and often time called white folk cracker (I was personally called snowflake, snowman, pork, whitebread, etc.), but the moment I called any of them a nigger, they were marching in the fucking streets about it. Hell, I've had people make jew jokes about me and I'm not even jewish (I used to have long, curly hair, aptly named jew curls). When I got my hair cut they called it my "post-Auschwitz haircut. My favorite was when some mexican kid said something about me not washing my jew hair, to which I replied "That's funny coming from a kid whose idea of taking a bath is swimming the rio grande." See, it works both ways. I don't have any "white guilt". I didn't beat any black people protesting in Montgomery, and I never stabbed a mexican dude for crossing the tracks.
People get bent out of shape too easily over words. Words have only as much power as you give them.
Oh well, this is starting to look like one of my rascist rants, so I'll stop here.
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The difference between calling someone a dumbass and someone a nigger is that nigger is only offensive because it comes with quite a few centuries worth of slavery and dehumanization. Nigger as a word makes no reference to someone's mental ability (like dumbass) or anything else. There is no way nigger can be used with the intent to offend and not be racist, because that is really all there is to the word: a word that contains the connotation that blacks are less than human.
Before you come back with the "but blacks use it too" argument, the key difference is that blacks have tried to coopt the word to lessen its blow, and whenever they use it on each other, nigger is never the "punchline" of an insult. They never yell "nigger" in isolation at each other, nor will you hear "you're a nigger" said in that way.