Adult Censorship

[LordLeopold]

The backlash against the term "african american" is usually based on a flawed understanding of the term. The term African American was formed because African Americans are ethnically, historically and culturally distinct from any one African ethnicity. It's a pretty good term for the body of African-descended people whose live in America. For that reason, I don't think any black people in America are going to be offended by someone calling them African American, even if their parents just moved here from Nigeria last year, or if they immigrated here from Haiti as a kid. (Unless, of course, they're a Negrito.) I would say that calling a Haitian expatriot an African American is perfectly justifiable, because he is part of the African diaspora in America.

Ultimately, the line in the sand when it comes to language is a pretty common sense gauge - will a sensible person be offended or irritated by the fact that I am saying this? I have a feeling that a black person is going to be angry if a white person calls him a "nigger" because the word "nigger" was invented by white people to be an insulting and dehumanizing term. The fact of the matter is that language doesn't exist in a vacuum; if it did, none of the symbols we write or noises we make would make any sense, because language has only the arbitrarily chosen meanings we give it. Nobody in their right mind is going to be offended by the word "cake" because "cake" isn't used to mean something offensive. People are going to be offended by the word "fag" when applied to gay people or "Shylock" when applied to a Jew, because they're meant to be offensive. Babbling about how everything is ultimately meaningless and we can only apply individual meanings to things is all well and good, but it's just not the way that societies work, and for good reason. If we all had to reinterpet everything anyone said to try to find their own idosyncratic intent, language would be more trouble than it's worth.

If you want to insist to a Chinese guy that he shouldn't find "Mr. Chinky-chinky-buck-tooth-ching-chong-chang" to be any more offensive than "blanco" because words only mean what we want them to mean, go ahead. But don't whine about it when he kicks your ass.

[Cyrus the virus]

...Should I feel bad at laughing at this insult to the imaginary asian man?

[He'll Scream]

I think it's less about the words and more about the context. There is pretty much no word that really offends me. You could curse all you want waroundme and I could care less, they're just words. But if you were to use them in a way that is intended to provoke me or make me feel bad, THEN i might be offended. I think society puts too much focus on the words and less on the people nowadays.