Regarding the Grist for Right -Wing Outrage, I find it ironic that these universities are coming up with lists that ban words that might offend a very small subset of society ("brown bag" offending those who knew about exclusionary practices of black college sorority women) and yet the F-bomb is increasingly thrown around in casual speech and I hear it daily.
Lori Lightfoot record on crime..strike 1 Lori Lightfoot promise to have a transparent administration..strike 2. Lori Lightfoot handling of street racing and noise by having a NASCAR event in center city…strike 3. I will NOT be voting for her this year.
“But the “haters” rhetoric merely reinforces the impression that Lightfoot is thin-skinned and combative, taking personally the frustrations that many Chicagoans feel.” -- Zorn
“Haters” can mean people who contentiously oppose one another in political contests, frequently resulting in the use of the term “hate” to mean some sort of (racial in this case) discrimination; if the opposition disagrees with the contravening views, then automatically they are labeled racists: It is code for racial discrimination against African Americans generally. In essence, in this sense, calling political opponents “haters” -- often a false-accusation -- is to conflate “hatred” – racial discrimination -- with political opposition; it is manipulative, deceptive, and false; it is a gross generalization. To oppose one another in political contests is in the nature of the contest itself; to be accused in the arena of “hatred” by one another in the sense it's used in the mayor’s campaign ad is misleading: Political opposition is not hatred (especially in the legal sense dealing with proscribed hate-motivated speech).
So, will Pete Buttigieg be requiring the FAA to reimburse the passengers that were affected by the NOTAM outage they caused? An antiquated system that they bungled the maintenance on. Seems like the guy that has been slamming the industry might want to do more than just look into it after promising to be so aggressive with the airlines. Maybe also come up with a plan to do something about all of the antiquated FAA air traffic systems.
The Stanford guy took down the list because it was a hot potato, not because it was a bad idea. His claim that it was 'counter to inclusivity' is vague and disingenuous. I think it is more likely that they found the backlash too annoying and not that they found it valid.
I put prayer alongside country and old-time music - things that people feel intellectually and culturally allergic to without understanding how these things work for millions or billions of smart people. I’m immediately unimpressed by those opinions if I probe and see they are uninformed, and probably locked onto as schoolkids.
I don’t like the use of the term “straight” to mean heterosexual. Such use suggests that those of us who aren’t heterosexual are crooked or immoral. I think the etymology of the use of the word “straight” to mean heterosexual would reflect that. One of the definitions of “straight” is “upright.” In the Boy Scout oath, Boy Scouts are taught to pledge to do their best to keep themselves “morally straight.” Does that mean that those of us who aren’t heterosexual are morally crooked? Now, I don’t freak out when people use the term “straight” to mean heterosexual. I just figure the speaker is probably a clueless heterosexual, unaware of the offensive nature of that use of the word. There is some validity to both sides in the “cancel culture” debate. The opponents of “cancel culture” tend to feel that policing their language to make it less offensive to marginalized communities is an unnecessary restriction on their “freedom.” And the folks on the other side tend to favor draconian penalties for the use of language which was acceptable during our lifetimes.
Are you saying that gay people don't use the term "straight" all the time? I would challenge that. I also challenge the notion that it connotes moral rectitude for heterosexualiy. I suspect it connotes conventionality, predictability, an adherence to traditional societal norms of gendered attraction.
Would you want anyone to try to draw negative inferences from "gay"? Like, what, heterosexuals are less lighthearted and Happy? That would be making too many inferences and probing common usage for meaning that just isn't there.
We will have to agree to disagree about whether the use of the term “straight” to mean heterosexual marginalizes gay people. How do you feel about the use of the term “breeder” to describe heterosexual people?
You see, if a heterosexual person told me that they were offended by the use of the term “breeders” to describe heterosexuals, I don’t think I would argue with them about the validity of their feelings by instructing them that the term just means that they are more likely to have children biologically. I think I would listen to them, try to understand why they were offended, and then make an effort not to use that term in the future.
I would even suggest that your use of the term “societal norms of gendered attraction” suggests that homosexuality is outside the norm, which it is not.
If you think the term breeders is “hilarious,” it doesn’t take much to make you laugh. I’ll be sure to invite you to be part of my audience when I next do standup.
What norm? People who are oriented homosexually are in various parts of the country and world often objects of religious condemnation by at least some people-of-faith – Jewish, Christian, and Muslim – as it is ecclesiastically proscribed; homosexuality in all its forms is viewed as “sin.” On the other hand, secular society rejects this view and has taken an opposing position; and there are concerted efforts in society now to reduce and eliminate this religiously motivated restriction through a normalization campaign of homosexuality. All of this means that religious and secular culture are at odds on this issue, and both perspectives need representation in public and private spheres of influence: Norms are relative, and in many places in America and the world today homosexuality is considered abnormal behavior.
No. Both perspectives do not need representation in public and private spheres of influence. The idea that homosexuality is a sin (evil) is itself evil. That idea is as evil as the idea that white people are better or smarter or superior to black and brown people. Bigotry is bigotry whether or not it is clothed in religious vestments. And, of course, it should be noted that the Episcopal Church, and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America both eschew the view that same sex love is sinful. Eventually the Catholic Church will admit that it was wrong and conduct same sex marriages. It will be a while though. It took the Catholic Church 359 years to apologize to Galileo for punishing him for his theory that the earth revolves around the sun.
Straight is gay slang, not something invented by heterosexuals to describe or differentiate themselves. Maybe the concern is 'appropriation', which makes its use by heterosexual's wrong or corrupting of its meaning. Still seems like a stretch.
BobE, this is sort of like Trump saying “many people are saying . . .” You have unnamed and unidentified gay friends who disagree with me, and assert that, therefore, I am wrong. I don’t know how helpful that is. Here are just a couple internet sites that agree with me, although even if there were none, that would not mean I was wrong.
ad hominem argument, joanie - you'd fail the Intro to Logic exam. you can do better than that. you claim to speak for all gay people - and i don't know [or care] if you are gay. i speak only of the subset of gay people i know.
The Illinois Assault weapon ban is farcical. political theater. The Highland Park shooting is the only instance of a mass shooting with an 'assault weapon' in Illinois, ever. There is no evidence that the ban would have prevented the deranged murderer from killing multiple people that day. There is also nothing in the ban to address the gang crime that killed and wounded people in Chicago last year, which were more than 100 times as many as Highland Park. Conflating legal gun ownership and behavior with rampant violent crime is worse than useless. It isn't even a symbolic step in the right direction as it addresses no part of the problem.
As to your derisive remark about mental illness, a UC San Diego study found that 80% of mass shooters had severe, untreated mental illness.
The strengthening of the 'red flag' law, adding an anti-gun trafficking role to the state, and banning components to convert firearms to fully automatic are useful parts of the law. But they are also useless, if they are not properly funded for staffing and training of the appropriate agencies. Which is the current state of our grossly understaffed and underfunded state police, crime labs, and gun trafficking investigation capability.
Yet again, the ludicrous notion that to see, hear, or read something that offends is to sustain actual “harm” reappears, and in two items this week. This patently false and utterly asinine idea seems to have spread to all corners of our culture, but clearly, college students have a particular susceptibility to it.
A while back, Dick Cavett wrote an essay entitled “In Defense of Offense” (it can be found in one of his collections). Among the many great points that he made, he wondered how and why we arrived at a place where being offended by something became one of life’s great cataclysms, like losing a limb, or a child. He also pondered the boring, barren banality of a life lead free from offense of any kind, and the feats of avoidance that one would need to undertake in order to achieve this. But the best, and most prescient point that he made was his lament of, to paraphrase, the infantilism of the phrase “the n-word”. Why must a word that everyone knows be endowed with such magical powers that it is not allowed to be uttered? How did these powers grow so great that they could enable the censoring of Mark Twain? What other artists and works should not go untouched? Joseph Conrad (“Person of Color of the Narcissus” maybe)? John and Yoko (“Woman is the N-Word of the World”)?
The irony is that the people that promote all of this nonsense say they are “progressive”. To believe that a word cannot be spoken lest it anger the gods is anything but progress.
Does anyone other than I see an optics problem with people in the culturally dominant group telling members of disparaged minority groups that their feelings of offense in regard to certain language that relates to the minority group or its history are not valid feelings? Is it the place of a person in the culturally dominant group to tell people in the disparaged minority group to “suck it up,” that this is the way we speak?
"Does anyone other than I see an optics problem with people in the culturally dominant group telling members of disparaged minority groups that their feelings of offense in regard to certain language that relates to the minority group or its history are not valid feelings? Is it the place of a person in the culturally dominant group to tell people in the disparaged minority group to “suck it up,” that this is the way we speak?" -- Wimmer
This is a problem that may be viewed broadly as a grievance dealing with “victim-racism,” a form of so-called social justice. The main problem I see is that, as it is, the “minority groups,” the allegedly “sensitive” groups, are offended by the sometimes insensitive speech of people in more “dominant” cultural positions; it tends to be a gross overgeneralization that all people in the alleged offensive cultural speech groups are racial-oppressors/adversaries. Has there been any offensive speech that has happened vice versa: Have the minority groups ever offended (sensitive) people in the majority groups? What narrative is that? Are the unilateral assumptions fair-and-free reporting by people in the media – how so? If not, why not? The (false) assumption seems to be that most if not all in the minority are victims of the dominant groups. This seems to be and appears to assume that all people in the smaller groups have been and are being oppressed /offended by their more dominant fellows – in this case race seems to be the dividing line socially. The scholar Adam Smith seemed to hold that social advancement through free-enterprise and capitalism were principles for everyone to practice. In his book, the Wealth of the Nations, hard work and success are closely aligned.
Your comment, and other comments here, kind of prove my point, I think. Many people in the culturally dominant group are absolutely tone deaf about this issue. They think offensive speech directed at members of the culturally dominant group is equivalent (carries the same sting) as offensive speech directed at members of a disparaged minority group. Those things are not equivalent at all, and they don’t carry the same sting. The person in the culturally dominant group can shrug his shoulders and say to himself, “I’m still the top of the food chain here, culturally speaking.” Whereas offensive speech to the member of the disparaged minority group is just another reminder that he is, culturally speaking, viewed as “the other” or “less than.” There is a reason why the n-word is treated different than the word “honkie.” No one uses the term “the h-word.” And I guess if you haven’t ever been a member of a disparaged minority group, it would take some actual effort, some empathy to understand the difference. And many people are not willing to make that effort. They are too occupied with the chip on their own shoulder.
“Many people in the culturally dominant group are absolutely tone deaf about this issue. They think offensive speech directed at members of the culturally dominant group is equivalent (carries the same sting) as offensive speech directed at members of a disparaged minority group. Those things are not equivalent at all, and they don’t carry the same sting.” -- Wimmer
Thanks, Joanie, for your insight. How do we know what the other person is thinking unless they speak, and if their speech is socially off-putting and we eliminate it through a legislative disregard for genuine freedom of speech, by banning it, then we’re running in regressive circles. Who is to say how a person or a people – dominant or minority – experience a denigrating word or line of speech when compared with another: What is the measure and who regulates it? Additionally, how can we say that that the minority group is more sensitive to seemingly objectionable speech than the dominant group – how do we know that? If two people from opposing and differing groups insult each other, who is to say which one, or which representative group is more thick-skinned than the other, who is more sensitive or takes the insults more personally? It seems like too complex a situation to claim that antiracial antagonism (equally considered on both sides) hurts one more than the other: What is the measure of that sensitivity? How do we know this? The use of the word honky, just as the “n-word,” directed at a racially sensitive person or group will likely upset them on both sides, very possibly, somewhat equally. If this isn’t true, how is it that the minority group compared with the dominant group is more offended by the language? Why?
This article of the Picayune Sentinel did not discuss legislation that banned speech. You can still use the n-word without violating the law. You can call an African-American attorney a shoe-shine boy without breaking the law. People v. Redwood, 335 Ill. App. 3d 189 (4th Dist. 2002). You have the “right” to be a complete a**hole. This issue of the Picayune Sentinel did not concern the government limiting anybody’s speech. It concerned private colleges and universities making choices about what language and conduct is appropriate for their employees, which those colleges and universities have every right to do. You can say anything you want, but you can’t say anything you want and be a representative of Albion College. As to your question about why epithets directed to members of disparaged minority groups carry more sting than epithets directed to those in the dominant cultural group, I already answered that. You just chose to ignore my answer.
What the articles were really about was the fallacy that to be offended is to be harmed, a gross distortion of reality that has gained tremendous traction in colleges and universities, institutions that are supposed to strengthen minds, but over the last 30 years (and especially the last ten) have been actively engaged in a program to weaken them. You don’t seem to be concerned by this, but I think that you should be.
Emotional distress is harm. The Illinois Supreme Court recognized the tort of intentional or reckless infliction of emotional distress sixty-two years ago in Knierim v. Izzo, 22 Ill. 2d 73 (1961). It’s not a distortion of reality to say that to be offended is to be harmed. It’s an accepted fact. If I post naked pictures of your wife all over town, and that causes her emotional distress, she has been harmed. What this opposition to “cancel culture” really is all about is white heterosexual males becoming upset that our culture is changing, and that there are now social consequences for bullying and derisive insensitive language that they used to be able to use with impunity.
“This issue of the Picayune Sentinel did not concern the government limiting anybody’s speech. It concerned private colleges and universities making choices about what language and conduct is appropriate for their employees, which those colleges and universities have every right to do.” -- Wimmer
I appreciate Joanie’s legal insights, but her digs – implied personal insults -- in her last few replies to me do nothing but harm her effort to prove her point: The fact remains that we have been discussing the social regulation of language, which extends eventually to institutional policy, legislation, and enforcement. But how would a ban of the h-word (honky), for example, have any cultural traction at all? It is foolish attempting to ban speech, but perhaps imposing a universal speech code will work. This proposed solution to the problem of interpersonal/group speech control, which I think is nonsense (people have rejected since the time of Aristotle). I’m not off point or missing the point in any way by broadening or extending this line of thought; speech control in schools – in this case, Albion College, is a foolish overreach. We really started this conversation about personal/group (racial) sensitivity, which is not a misguided, convoluted delusion; but reason in this context speaks for all to hear: People of a broad range of interpersonal differences can be equally sensitive to mutual racial antagonism, a commonplace understanding amongst many people in our diverse culture.
Not many people see this the way I do, but the description “sucks” is problematic. It clearly derives from anti-gay and possibly misogynistic attitudes. It comes from cocksucker - an old insult aimed at men only, equating them with homosexuals.
Oh, Eric - please, please, please - bring back the Songs of Bad Cheer show!
Regarding the Grist for Right -Wing Outrage, I find it ironic that these universities are coming up with lists that ban words that might offend a very small subset of society ("brown bag" offending those who knew about exclusionary practices of black college sorority women) and yet the F-bomb is increasingly thrown around in casual speech and I hear it daily.
Lori Lightfoot record on crime..strike 1 Lori Lightfoot promise to have a transparent administration..strike 2. Lori Lightfoot handling of street racing and noise by having a NASCAR event in center city…strike 3. I will NOT be voting for her this year.
Only had to wait a week for a big rebound in funny tweets. Thanks!
I thought the Paul Vallas commercials were pretty good. The Brandon Johnson ad was just empty claims and promises.
“But the “haters” rhetoric merely reinforces the impression that Lightfoot is thin-skinned and combative, taking personally the frustrations that many Chicagoans feel.” -- Zorn
“Haters” can mean people who contentiously oppose one another in political contests, frequently resulting in the use of the term “hate” to mean some sort of (racial in this case) discrimination; if the opposition disagrees with the contravening views, then automatically they are labeled racists: It is code for racial discrimination against African Americans generally. In essence, in this sense, calling political opponents “haters” -- often a false-accusation -- is to conflate “hatred” – racial discrimination -- with political opposition; it is manipulative, deceptive, and false; it is a gross generalization. To oppose one another in political contests is in the nature of the contest itself; to be accused in the arena of “hatred” by one another in the sense it's used in the mayor’s campaign ad is misleading: Political opposition is not hatred (especially in the legal sense dealing with proscribed hate-motivated speech).
So, will Pete Buttigieg be requiring the FAA to reimburse the passengers that were affected by the NOTAM outage they caused? An antiquated system that they bungled the maintenance on. Seems like the guy that has been slamming the industry might want to do more than just look into it after promising to be so aggressive with the airlines. Maybe also come up with a plan to do something about all of the antiquated FAA air traffic systems.
The Stanford guy took down the list because it was a hot potato, not because it was a bad idea. His claim that it was 'counter to inclusivity' is vague and disingenuous. I think it is more likely that they found the backlash too annoying and not that they found it valid.
I put prayer alongside country and old-time music - things that people feel intellectually and culturally allergic to without understanding how these things work for millions or billions of smart people. I’m immediately unimpressed by those opinions if I probe and see they are uninformed, and probably locked onto as schoolkids.
I don’t like the use of the term “straight” to mean heterosexual. Such use suggests that those of us who aren’t heterosexual are crooked or immoral. I think the etymology of the use of the word “straight” to mean heterosexual would reflect that. One of the definitions of “straight” is “upright.” In the Boy Scout oath, Boy Scouts are taught to pledge to do their best to keep themselves “morally straight.” Does that mean that those of us who aren’t heterosexual are morally crooked? Now, I don’t freak out when people use the term “straight” to mean heterosexual. I just figure the speaker is probably a clueless heterosexual, unaware of the offensive nature of that use of the word. There is some validity to both sides in the “cancel culture” debate. The opponents of “cancel culture” tend to feel that policing their language to make it less offensive to marginalized communities is an unnecessary restriction on their “freedom.” And the folks on the other side tend to favor draconian penalties for the use of language which was acceptable during our lifetimes.
Are you saying that gay people don't use the term "straight" all the time? I would challenge that. I also challenge the notion that it connotes moral rectitude for heterosexualiy. I suspect it connotes conventionality, predictability, an adherence to traditional societal norms of gendered attraction.
Would you want anyone to try to draw negative inferences from "gay"? Like, what, heterosexuals are less lighthearted and Happy? That would be making too many inferences and probing common usage for meaning that just isn't there.
We will have to agree to disagree about whether the use of the term “straight” to mean heterosexual marginalizes gay people. How do you feel about the use of the term “breeder” to describe heterosexual people?
You see, if a heterosexual person told me that they were offended by the use of the term “breeders” to describe heterosexuals, I don’t think I would argue with them about the validity of their feelings by instructing them that the term just means that they are more likely to have children biologically. I think I would listen to them, try to understand why they were offended, and then make an effort not to use that term in the future.
I would even suggest that your use of the term “societal norms of gendered attraction” suggests that homosexuality is outside the norm, which it is not.
I’ve gotta say, I had never heard the term “breeders” until today, and now that I have, I think it’s hilarious.
Also, do you think anyone regards San Francisco’s Lombard Street as morally deficient in contrast to other avenues?
If you think the term breeders is “hilarious,” it doesn’t take much to make you laugh. I’ll be sure to invite you to be part of my audience when I next do standup.
What norm? People who are oriented homosexually are in various parts of the country and world often objects of religious condemnation by at least some people-of-faith – Jewish, Christian, and Muslim – as it is ecclesiastically proscribed; homosexuality in all its forms is viewed as “sin.” On the other hand, secular society rejects this view and has taken an opposing position; and there are concerted efforts in society now to reduce and eliminate this religiously motivated restriction through a normalization campaign of homosexuality. All of this means that religious and secular culture are at odds on this issue, and both perspectives need representation in public and private spheres of influence: Norms are relative, and in many places in America and the world today homosexuality is considered abnormal behavior.
No. Both perspectives do not need representation in public and private spheres of influence. The idea that homosexuality is a sin (evil) is itself evil. That idea is as evil as the idea that white people are better or smarter or superior to black and brown people. Bigotry is bigotry whether or not it is clothed in religious vestments. And, of course, it should be noted that the Episcopal Church, and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America both eschew the view that same sex love is sinful. Eventually the Catholic Church will admit that it was wrong and conduct same sex marriages. It will be a while though. It took the Catholic Church 359 years to apologize to Galileo for punishing him for his theory that the earth revolves around the sun.
Straight is gay slang, not something invented by heterosexuals to describe or differentiate themselves. Maybe the concern is 'appropriation', which makes its use by heterosexual's wrong or corrupting of its meaning. Still seems like a stretch.
overreaction - my gay friends disagree with you. see eric's reply below.
BobE, this is sort of like Trump saying “many people are saying . . .” You have unnamed and unidentified gay friends who disagree with me, and assert that, therefore, I am wrong. I don’t know how helpful that is. Here are just a couple internet sites that agree with me, although even if there were none, that would not mean I was wrong.
https://www.teachwire.net/news/dont-say-straight-when-you-mean-heterosexual-schools-homophobia-and-why-language-matters/
https://www.bgdblog.org/2017/05/de-normalizing-heteros-dont-use-word-straight/
ad hominem argument, joanie - you'd fail the Intro to Logic exam. you can do better than that. you claim to speak for all gay people - and i don't know [or care] if you are gay. i speak only of the subset of gay people i know.
The Illinois Assault weapon ban is farcical. political theater. The Highland Park shooting is the only instance of a mass shooting with an 'assault weapon' in Illinois, ever. There is no evidence that the ban would have prevented the deranged murderer from killing multiple people that day. There is also nothing in the ban to address the gang crime that killed and wounded people in Chicago last year, which were more than 100 times as many as Highland Park. Conflating legal gun ownership and behavior with rampant violent crime is worse than useless. It isn't even a symbolic step in the right direction as it addresses no part of the problem.
As to your derisive remark about mental illness, a UC San Diego study found that 80% of mass shooters had severe, untreated mental illness.
https://myhealth.ucsd.edu/RelatedItems/6,1653363897
The strengthening of the 'red flag' law, adding an anti-gun trafficking role to the state, and banning components to convert firearms to fully automatic are useful parts of the law. But they are also useless, if they are not properly funded for staffing and training of the appropriate agencies. Which is the current state of our grossly understaffed and underfunded state police, crime labs, and gun trafficking investigation capability.
If field work is offensive, what's next? Factory worker? Or are we only to consider terms involving people of color?
Yet again, the ludicrous notion that to see, hear, or read something that offends is to sustain actual “harm” reappears, and in two items this week. This patently false and utterly asinine idea seems to have spread to all corners of our culture, but clearly, college students have a particular susceptibility to it.
A while back, Dick Cavett wrote an essay entitled “In Defense of Offense” (it can be found in one of his collections). Among the many great points that he made, he wondered how and why we arrived at a place where being offended by something became one of life’s great cataclysms, like losing a limb, or a child. He also pondered the boring, barren banality of a life lead free from offense of any kind, and the feats of avoidance that one would need to undertake in order to achieve this. But the best, and most prescient point that he made was his lament of, to paraphrase, the infantilism of the phrase “the n-word”. Why must a word that everyone knows be endowed with such magical powers that it is not allowed to be uttered? How did these powers grow so great that they could enable the censoring of Mark Twain? What other artists and works should not go untouched? Joseph Conrad (“Person of Color of the Narcissus” maybe)? John and Yoko (“Woman is the N-Word of the World”)?
The irony is that the people that promote all of this nonsense say they are “progressive”. To believe that a word cannot be spoken lest it anger the gods is anything but progress.
Why exactly, are “Oriental” and “committed suicide” supposed to be objectionable?
Does anyone other than I see an optics problem with people in the culturally dominant group telling members of disparaged minority groups that their feelings of offense in regard to certain language that relates to the minority group or its history are not valid feelings? Is it the place of a person in the culturally dominant group to tell people in the disparaged minority group to “suck it up,” that this is the way we speak?
"Does anyone other than I see an optics problem with people in the culturally dominant group telling members of disparaged minority groups that their feelings of offense in regard to certain language that relates to the minority group or its history are not valid feelings? Is it the place of a person in the culturally dominant group to tell people in the disparaged minority group to “suck it up,” that this is the way we speak?" -- Wimmer
This is a problem that may be viewed broadly as a grievance dealing with “victim-racism,” a form of so-called social justice. The main problem I see is that, as it is, the “minority groups,” the allegedly “sensitive” groups, are offended by the sometimes insensitive speech of people in more “dominant” cultural positions; it tends to be a gross overgeneralization that all people in the alleged offensive cultural speech groups are racial-oppressors/adversaries. Has there been any offensive speech that has happened vice versa: Have the minority groups ever offended (sensitive) people in the majority groups? What narrative is that? Are the unilateral assumptions fair-and-free reporting by people in the media – how so? If not, why not? The (false) assumption seems to be that most if not all in the minority are victims of the dominant groups. This seems to be and appears to assume that all people in the smaller groups have been and are being oppressed /offended by their more dominant fellows – in this case race seems to be the dividing line socially. The scholar Adam Smith seemed to hold that social advancement through free-enterprise and capitalism were principles for everyone to practice. In his book, the Wealth of the Nations, hard work and success are closely aligned.
Your comment, and other comments here, kind of prove my point, I think. Many people in the culturally dominant group are absolutely tone deaf about this issue. They think offensive speech directed at members of the culturally dominant group is equivalent (carries the same sting) as offensive speech directed at members of a disparaged minority group. Those things are not equivalent at all, and they don’t carry the same sting. The person in the culturally dominant group can shrug his shoulders and say to himself, “I’m still the top of the food chain here, culturally speaking.” Whereas offensive speech to the member of the disparaged minority group is just another reminder that he is, culturally speaking, viewed as “the other” or “less than.” There is a reason why the n-word is treated different than the word “honkie.” No one uses the term “the h-word.” And I guess if you haven’t ever been a member of a disparaged minority group, it would take some actual effort, some empathy to understand the difference. And many people are not willing to make that effort. They are too occupied with the chip on their own shoulder.
“Many people in the culturally dominant group are absolutely tone deaf about this issue. They think offensive speech directed at members of the culturally dominant group is equivalent (carries the same sting) as offensive speech directed at members of a disparaged minority group. Those things are not equivalent at all, and they don’t carry the same sting.” -- Wimmer
Thanks, Joanie, for your insight. How do we know what the other person is thinking unless they speak, and if their speech is socially off-putting and we eliminate it through a legislative disregard for genuine freedom of speech, by banning it, then we’re running in regressive circles. Who is to say how a person or a people – dominant or minority – experience a denigrating word or line of speech when compared with another: What is the measure and who regulates it? Additionally, how can we say that that the minority group is more sensitive to seemingly objectionable speech than the dominant group – how do we know that? If two people from opposing and differing groups insult each other, who is to say which one, or which representative group is more thick-skinned than the other, who is more sensitive or takes the insults more personally? It seems like too complex a situation to claim that antiracial antagonism (equally considered on both sides) hurts one more than the other: What is the measure of that sensitivity? How do we know this? The use of the word honky, just as the “n-word,” directed at a racially sensitive person or group will likely upset them on both sides, very possibly, somewhat equally. If this isn’t true, how is it that the minority group compared with the dominant group is more offended by the language? Why?
This article of the Picayune Sentinel did not discuss legislation that banned speech. You can still use the n-word without violating the law. You can call an African-American attorney a shoe-shine boy without breaking the law. People v. Redwood, 335 Ill. App. 3d 189 (4th Dist. 2002). You have the “right” to be a complete a**hole. This issue of the Picayune Sentinel did not concern the government limiting anybody’s speech. It concerned private colleges and universities making choices about what language and conduct is appropriate for their employees, which those colleges and universities have every right to do. You can say anything you want, but you can’t say anything you want and be a representative of Albion College. As to your question about why epithets directed to members of disparaged minority groups carry more sting than epithets directed to those in the dominant cultural group, I already answered that. You just chose to ignore my answer.
https://caselaw.findlaw.com/il-court-of-appeals/1448977.html
What the articles were really about was the fallacy that to be offended is to be harmed, a gross distortion of reality that has gained tremendous traction in colleges and universities, institutions that are supposed to strengthen minds, but over the last 30 years (and especially the last ten) have been actively engaged in a program to weaken them. You don’t seem to be concerned by this, but I think that you should be.
Emotional distress is harm. The Illinois Supreme Court recognized the tort of intentional or reckless infliction of emotional distress sixty-two years ago in Knierim v. Izzo, 22 Ill. 2d 73 (1961). It’s not a distortion of reality to say that to be offended is to be harmed. It’s an accepted fact. If I post naked pictures of your wife all over town, and that causes her emotional distress, she has been harmed. What this opposition to “cancel culture” really is all about is white heterosexual males becoming upset that our culture is changing, and that there are now social consequences for bullying and derisive insensitive language that they used to be able to use with impunity.
“This issue of the Picayune Sentinel did not concern the government limiting anybody’s speech. It concerned private colleges and universities making choices about what language and conduct is appropriate for their employees, which those colleges and universities have every right to do.” -- Wimmer
I appreciate Joanie’s legal insights, but her digs – implied personal insults -- in her last few replies to me do nothing but harm her effort to prove her point: The fact remains that we have been discussing the social regulation of language, which extends eventually to institutional policy, legislation, and enforcement. But how would a ban of the h-word (honky), for example, have any cultural traction at all? It is foolish attempting to ban speech, but perhaps imposing a universal speech code will work. This proposed solution to the problem of interpersonal/group speech control, which I think is nonsense (people have rejected since the time of Aristotle). I’m not off point or missing the point in any way by broadening or extending this line of thought; speech control in schools – in this case, Albion College, is a foolish overreach. We really started this conversation about personal/group (racial) sensitivity, which is not a misguided, convoluted delusion; but reason in this context speaks for all to hear: People of a broad range of interpersonal differences can be equally sensitive to mutual racial antagonism, a commonplace understanding amongst many people in our diverse culture.
Not many people see this the way I do, but the description “sucks” is problematic. It clearly derives from anti-gay and possibly misogynistic attitudes. It comes from cocksucker - an old insult aimed at men only, equating them with homosexuals.