I don't find it hard to understand why some people can feel hurt when somebody calls them a slur, intending to hurt them. The strong sense of self described above is an apt rejoinder, for those who can cultivate it. I have sympathy and understanding for those who are not yet able to do that.
I don't find it hard to understand why some people can feel hurt when somebody calls them a slur, intending to hurt them. The strong sense of self described above is an apt rejoinder, for those who can cultivate it. I have sympathy and understanding for those who are not yet able to do that.
What's stranger and sometimes nearly pathological is that many people react just as strongly when the word comes up in a context where it's very clearly not intended to hurt them - treating it like the very vibration of the syllables (or the visual text) in itself causes neurological damage. Or will magically materialize a KKK member out of thin air, like Voldemort.
For example, being disciplined or even fired for reading Huck Finn aloud even after issuing trigger warnings. Or writing an article condemning racism but referencing the word as a word (rather than using "n-word").
That feels performative to some degree, rather than being a reaction to hurtful intention. I believe the reaction is largely about demonstrating a form of power-over, "we demonize that word to show that we have the power to do so". But it's not a constructive power, which builds strength and accomplishment - it the power of an excuse for not doing so, the power of valorized victimhood.
But it has (usually, not counting folks like you) unacknowledged downsides by modeling to others that fragility and weaponized victimhood are the path to personal power, rather than strength and accomplishment. The more one outgrows their victim status, the more hollow the outrage at merely seeing or hearing the word in a non-hurtful context. So developing a more secure sense of self winds up "feeling" like losing power-over.
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Or it can be empty virtue signalling, when the person feeling outraged is not even a target.
Reference for example what happenned when Science Fiction author (and strong progressive) Mercedes Lackey accidentally* identified her friend long time Chip Delaney as "colored" while praising him (which did not offend him in the least). Lackey was immediately ejected from the conference for using a "racial slur", her husband (who was not even in the room) was ejected to for being associated with such a racist, the video recordings of the session were sequestered so they would not cause harm to any future viewers, and this was all announced to the whole conference with counselling available to anybody in her session audience who had unfortunately heard the word "colored".
(* how "accidentally"? She says that she's not a good public speaker and when trying to distinguish between the two Samuel Delaneys she verbally stumbled between "black" and "person of color" and accidentally spoke something like "spcolored". So not only was the word never used by racists as a slur, and not only was the man being described fine with it even if she had deliberately used it for him, but she didn't even mean to say it even as a non-slur - but intent doesn't matter, the syllables had escaped her mouth and perhaps permanently harmed the life trajectory of somebody in the audience who heard the cursed phonemes, if counselling fails to heal them).
This was as far as possible from an intentional slur, but it was treated as being just as magically terrible as using the n-word to deliberately hurt somebody. But the con organizers had to prove that they were meticulously virtuous beyond reproach, and had less than zero tolerance for racism.
I fail to see how this is going to produce a freer and better world for anybody. I certainly hope they never get somebody from the NAACP on stage and ask them what the initials stand for. To me it's clear that this religious prohibition against certain syllables being spoken by any non-Black person - in any context whatsoever - is not about protecting real people from real harm, but about asserting social power or social virtue.
I don't find it hard to understand why some people can feel hurt when somebody calls them a slur, intending to hurt them. The strong sense of self described above is an apt rejoinder, for those who can cultivate it. I have sympathy and understanding for those who are not yet able to do that.
What's stranger and sometimes nearly pathological is that many people react just as strongly when the word comes up in a context where it's very clearly not intended to hurt them - treating it like the very vibration of the syllables (or the visual text) in itself causes neurological damage. Or will magically materialize a KKK member out of thin air, like Voldemort.
For example, being disciplined or even fired for reading Huck Finn aloud even after issuing trigger warnings. Or writing an article condemning racism but referencing the word as a word (rather than using "n-word").
That feels performative to some degree, rather than being a reaction to hurtful intention. I believe the reaction is largely about demonstrating a form of power-over, "we demonize that word to show that we have the power to do so". But it's not a constructive power, which builds strength and accomplishment - it the power of an excuse for not doing so, the power of valorized victimhood.
But it has (usually, not counting folks like you) unacknowledged downsides by modeling to others that fragility and weaponized victimhood are the path to personal power, rather than strength and accomplishment. The more one outgrows their victim status, the more hollow the outrage at merely seeing or hearing the word in a non-hurtful context. So developing a more secure sense of self winds up "feeling" like losing power-over.
----
Or it can be empty virtue signalling, when the person feeling outraged is not even a target.
Reference for example what happenned when Science Fiction author (and strong progressive) Mercedes Lackey accidentally* identified her friend long time Chip Delaney as "colored" while praising him (which did not offend him in the least). Lackey was immediately ejected from the conference for using a "racial slur", her husband (who was not even in the room) was ejected to for being associated with such a racist, the video recordings of the session were sequestered so they would not cause harm to any future viewers, and this was all announced to the whole conference with counselling available to anybody in her session audience who had unfortunately heard the word "colored".
(* how "accidentally"? She says that she's not a good public speaker and when trying to distinguish between the two Samuel Delaneys she verbally stumbled between "black" and "person of color" and accidentally spoke something like "spcolored". So not only was the word never used by racists as a slur, and not only was the man being described fine with it even if she had deliberately used it for him, but she didn't even mean to say it even as a non-slur - but intent doesn't matter, the syllables had escaped her mouth and perhaps permanently harmed the life trajectory of somebody in the audience who heard the cursed phonemes, if counselling fails to heal them).
This was as far as possible from an intentional slur, but it was treated as being just as magically terrible as using the n-word to deliberately hurt somebody. But the con organizers had to prove that they were meticulously virtuous beyond reproach, and had less than zero tolerance for racism.
I fail to see how this is going to produce a freer and better world for anybody. I certainly hope they never get somebody from the NAACP on stage and ask them what the initials stand for. To me it's clear that this religious prohibition against certain syllables being spoken by any non-Black person - in any context whatsoever - is not about protecting real people from real harm, but about asserting social power or social virtue.