Teamliquid hostile to minorities? - Page 5

On April 14 2007 21:36 ilovezil wrote:
I haven't read through your entire argument, but I did notice the part in retaliation to my post.

Never have I said that. Now you're putting words into my mouth. I only suggested that TRUE, you can try talking to people about it like you're doing now, but I believe the best way to have done it is to pm the right moderators. They are the ones who are running this site, after all. You didn't have to create a full thread about it, at least without what I just suggested. Think about it: what did you accomplish so far? You've done nothign but cause chaos on both sides of the argument and get Fakesteve temp-banned.

On April 14 2007 21:36 ilovezil wrote:

I respect the fact that you want the world to be a more harmonious place in terms of racial tributes. What I cannot stand, however, is the methods you're employing to get them accomplished. Also, if I look at some of the things you've said such as "Teamliquid hostile to minorities?" (labelling), the free use of "white boy" (labelling again), then relating this place to your supposedly immature high school and a fraternity (labelled once more), I get the underwhelming feeling that you need to look at yourself first.

On April 15 2007 10:34 Myxomatosis wrote:
i think that when used tastefully, nigger is quite a funny work.
ex. "fuck yo couch, nigga!"

On April 15 2007 10:42 bine wrote:


What makes it tasteful is that the writer is black. The N word can be hilarious, but in the same way you don't find white professional comedians casually dropping the word all the time, it's strikingly less tasteful, and mostly less funny, when said by white people here.

On April 15 2007 12:50 bErAtEd- wrote:


There shouldn't be a double standard set around the word nigger. If black people don't like to be called nigger then they shouldn't call each other nigger or nigga or anything referencing it. Its ignorant to think otherwise.

What makes it tasteful is that the writer is black. The N word can be hilarious, but in the same way you don't find white professional comedians casually dropping the word all the time, it's strikingly less tasteful, and mostly less funny, when said by white people here.

Just because a lot of young white men think it's funny doesn't mean that racism and vulgar prejudice should be tolerated. Please, someone clarify tl.net's position on this and please, start enforcing it.

I think it's important to be consistent, not just banning people for some disgusting things while chuckling in response to others. When a member of the staff repeatedly uses the N word and claims that it might be legitimate to "hate all black girls" because they have "loud, shreeky voices", participating in the same bullshit macho racist crap as the wayward children, there's a problem that needs to be addressed.

WHAT I want to say, following Bush's reasoning, is that a similar forgetting of history has in recent years allowed some people to argue, and argue persuasively, that affirmative action is reverse racism. The very phrase "reverse racism" contains the argument in exactly the form to which Bush objected: In this country whites once set themselves apart from blacks and claimed privileges for themselves while denying them to others. Now, on the basis of race, blacks are claiming special status and reserving for themselves privileges they deny to others. Isn't one as bad as the other? The answer is no. One can see why by imagining that it is not 1993 but 1955, and that we are in a town in the South with two more or less distinct communities, one white and one black. No doubt each community would have a ready store of dismissive epithets, ridiculing stories, self serving folk myths, and expressions of plain hatred, all directed at the other community, and all based in racial hostility. Yet to regard their respective racisms-if that is the word-as equivalent would be bizarre, for the hostility of one group stems not from any wrong done to it but from its wish to protect its ability to deprive citizens of their voting rights, to limit access to educational institutions, to prevent entry into the economy except at the lowest and most menial levels, and to force members of the stigmatized group to ride in the back of the bus. The hostility of the other group is the result of these actions, and whereas hostility and racial anger are unhappy facts wherever they are found, a distinction must surely be made between the ideological hostility of the oppressors and the experience-based hostility of those who have been oppressed. Not to make that distinction is, adapting George Bush's words, to twist history and forget the terrible plight of African-Americans in the more than 200 years of this country's existence. Moreover, to equate the efforts to remedy that plight with the actions that produced it is to twist history even further. Those efforts, designed to redress the imbalances caused by long-standing discrimination, are called affirmative action; to argue that affirmative action, which gives preferential treatment to disadvantaged minorities as part of a plan to achieve social equality, is no different from the policies that created the disadvantages in the first place is a travesty of reasoning. "Reverse racism" is a cogent description of affirmative action only if one considers the cancer of racism to be morally and medically indistinguishable from the therapy we apply to it. A cancer is an invasion of the body's equilibrium, and so is chemotherapy; but we do not decline to fight the disease because the medicine we em ploy is also disruptive of normal functioning. Strong illness, strong remedy: the formula is as appropriate to the health of the body politic as it is to that of the body proper.

At this point someone will always say, "But two wrongs don't make a right; if it was wrong to treat blacks unfairly, it is wrong to give blacks preference and thereby treat whites unfairly." This objection is just another version of the forgetting and rewriting of history. The work is done by the adverb "unfairly," which suggests two more or less equal parties, one of whom has been unjustly penalized by an incompetent umpire. But blacks have not simply been treated unfairly; they have been subjected first to decades of slavery, and then to decades of second-class citizenship, wide spread legalized discrimination, economic persecution, educational deprivation, and cultural stigmatization. They have been bought, sold, killed, beaten, raped, excluded, exploited. shamed, and scorned for a very long time. The word "unfair" is hardly an adequate description of their experience, and the belated gift of "fairness" in the form of a resolution no longer to discriminate against them legally is hardly an adequate remedy for the deep disadvantages that the prior discrimination has produced. When the deck is stacked against you in more ways than you can even count, it is small consolation to hear that you are now free to enter the game and take your chances.

But unfortunately it's not up to us (white people) to decide when and if that term stops being offensive. It may be growing in its use in the white world, but it's still considered unacceptable for white people to say that word in any sort of joking way by most of the American adult population anyway. Think about it this way: would you make the jokes you're making in front of a black person you just met? If the answer is no, making the joke on a public forum where it can and will be read by people of a variety of ethnic backgrounds probably isn't the best idea.