As an example from my son, a 13 year old white kid, gave me is that if you have one of the "diversity cards" (minority, LGBQT+, female sometimes, or some other thing) than you get to joke and talk in a way than those that don't have such a card. So his friends that are gay or black or indian or disabled are able to tease each other about it and have more liberty to use terms that my son is not allowed to. The gay kid can joke with the indian kid about wearing a turban (they are middle schoolers, their understanding of life is still a bit shaky) or whatever. My son is on the bottom of the pack for all of that. We talk about it and we're still working through the fairness of the situation. He's an empathic kid, and is decently informed for his age, so he gets it, but it also sucks to grow up in a world of "bias is wrong except against white people and especially against white males".
I see this often with gangs I grew up around. Black people can call each other niggers in a casual, non-attack way. But as soon as a white person does it, it’s racist.
It will be interesting to see if music changes this. I mostly listen to classical and older pop/rock/folk but recently decided to see what is current and so listened to the entire Billboard Hot 100.
There was a lot of rap and hip-hop with lyrics that prominently and repeatedly used that word. I wondered then about what happens when non-Black fans sing along with such a song on radio or streaming or at a concert.
I did some research and it seems that a small minority of the artists think that people who sing along should sing all the words regardless of race, with most thinking non-Blacks should not sing that word. Some in the latter group also feel that it is a losing battle to try to stop it.
I think those that want to stop it can succeed--for now. If I ever feel the urge for example to sing along to some rap or hip-hop song I'll have no trouble remembering to skip the N-word part. I've long known that this is a word I should not be saying except under special circumstances where it is clear I should say it and that singing along is probably not special circumstances.
That works for me because I'm adult and when I learned the word as a kid I learned it as a derogatory term.
But now that the N-word is in popular music that plenty of non-Blacks listen to, there will be kids who grow up from the start with that in the music they listen to. It will be a word they naturally learn as part of normal language acquisition without learning the most negative connotations.
I bet it will be lot harder to get that generation to not use it when singing alone, or to not adopt it with the positive meanings that it sometime has when used in rap or hip-hop.
kendrick lamar is a good example regarding your first example. he has this song, good kid maad city, where nigga is used in about every single sentence. the whole hook is full with it.
at a concert, he invited a white girl to rap the song on stage. of course she went full with it. he stopped the track after she rapped nigga a few times during the track l and began to.blame her on stage for it. of course the whole crowd went with it.
i mean. what a god damn motherfucker. seriously. i dont want to know what the girl was going through mentally. it must have been horror.
the obsession with the n word is crazy anyway. of course i dont use it in mh regular life..but when i quote a rap song, i quote it literally ofc.
Because there is a contextual difference!
Historical context matters, and saying things like "all lives matter" or "we're all the same (so we should be able to use the same words?)" actually undermine the collective struggle this group of people has had to deal with.
Life isn't binary, it's always more complex than that. It's not rational to just do a "reset" at this point in time and say "oh, i have nothing to do with what my predecessors have engaged in, so i can't be held accountable"... because that's not true, the predecessors lives and actions directly affect ones life.
I understand that sometimes the direct outrage over something small might seem ridiculous, but at the same time I don't understand why people have such a problem with just not using a certain word. It really isn't hard...
It means "servant" basically, and it's about an apparent difference in social classes. If I ask a barista "you can also mow my lawn if you want to make some money" it's an insult that the barista can't even refute, but if I ask my friend the same, he'll take it as a joke.
I understand this quite well, I've felt this myself in the past too, that feeling of being "not in the club". Thanks for your explanation. One does get over it, and one also learns eventually that it's something not restricted to race / sexual orientation etc., it can be similar just with a group of people from a certain neighbourhood etc. But having it be based on race can be hard for a kid in the "out" group. How to deal with that, basically, to learn to let it roll off your shoulders, to learn how to navigate your own position in a group, is a lesson to be learned, sometimes not easy to get the intricate ins and outs of how to behave. I completely get it.
Thanks for the nuanced understanding! We've been giving our son basically that advice as he learns to navigate the situation. It's tough because he's a pretty strict rules-follower, and so it upsets him to hear kids breaking the "ism" rules! We say, "let it roll of you like water off a duck's butt" :) He's learning ... I think.
Intersectionality at play here, your son is part of the "oppressor" class and is essentially viewed as beneficiary of privilege by virtue of his melanin content, therefore he is not allowed to say, do or question certain things. It's a sad state of affairs.
FYI I'm an immigrant from Africa with 3 daughters but I've instilled in them the values I was raised with, that everyone is deserving of respect, dignity and are precious in the eyes of God.
I'm curious how white (as a percentage) the school is, as I could imagine a correlation with the extent/intensity of this experience. If white kids are enough of a majority, that alone probably offsets the effect somewhat, but where white is also a local minority, perhaps the collective privilege starts to get so cloudy that the notion of "punching up/down" starts to fall apart. And substitute "straight white male" as needed, of course, although I've refrained above in order to use the words "majority/minority" in simple terms.
I feel so sorry for your boy. He deserves a dad who loves him more than virtue signaling. Your boy is thrown into the world with no preexisting moral guilt. And you, his father, are justifying rather than decrying the racial discrimination of your own son, while apparently trying to stand on the alter of that very discrimination.
My son is fine, he is well loved and he knows it - I teach him compassion and understanding while still standing up for himself. I'm sorry you live in such a black and white world lacking nuance. It must be a struggle for you such that you need to tell an internet stranger how little he loves his son.
“[born with] no preexisting moral guilt” — Is that some attempt to re-frame ignorance?
I have teenage kids and they sure as hell have been raised to understand, from a young age, that while they are in an unfairly advantaged group today, a few generations ago and they would have been rounded up, stripped of everything they worked hard for, and put in camps. And yet, even that fate was objectively better than other groups at the same time. What you call “moral guilt” I call empathy. Maybe this is simply what you mean by “virtue signaling”, but I want my kids to always look for those around them who are stumbling, unable to get back up, or who may just not have enough, and then to give help. But they won’t see them without empathy for those situations, and they won’t have that empathy without an understanding of the struggles.
Just commenting to confirm that they are not actually handing out anything called a diversity card that gives you permission to do anything.
edit: also want to make sure that "teen mental health" includes the 75% of kids that are not straight, non-disabled white boys. If those kids are included then this probably isn't a reasonable explanation.
So ... funny story there. There is the concept of the "N-word pass" that black kids will "give out" to non-black kids "allowing" them a use of the n-word in front of them. I had heard about this several years ago, but now several of the black kids in my son's school are giving them out occasionally. I advised my son to never use the option were he to receive one!
Not a physical card in this situation, but there are stories that some kids in other schools actually give out physical cards.
It's not a real concept.. it's just a meme. There's no "pass" that will grant you anything, and if there is a black person who says such a silly thing to a white person it's just shenanigans. Still won't change the context of the white person using the N-word after that anyway, especially it's historical context in the US.
Also what I surely find interesting is that I only ever hear white people talk about an "N-word pass"...
It's a very real thing, literally happens weekly in my son's friend group, and yes kids are allowed to "redeem" it. Ask a teacher at a diverse school if it is real or not.
Can you please stop posting flamewar comments to HN? We've already had to ask you this and, I'm sad to say, you've posted a ton of such comments. That's not ok here, and we ban such accounts.
I don't want to ban you because your substantive points are interesting and welcome, but this sort of internet attack is not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
They have a say in what remains of the power structures created by their white supremacist ancestors, the privileges that system provides and the inequities those privileges feed on. They could be working to dismantle those power structures, but they have to recognize that they exist first and that yes by default all things are not equal.
Ignoring that fact or obsessing over petty things like not having a pass to say the n-word doesn't help anyone or accomplish anything productive.
I'm going to put this as simple as possible: Stop having kids fight or worry about adult problems.
Surely, we don't have to write a five paragraph essay on the problem with perpetuating hate cycles among children in a thread about plummeting teen mental health.
Let it go. You got a million other places to open this debate.
>Stop having kids fight or worry about adult problems.
Have you ever seen Mister Rogers, or grown up poor or in a bad neighborhood? Kids have to worry about adult problems all the time. They often don't have a choice in the matter.
Leaving them to learn about the adult world only when they become adults is cruel, and beyond the point at which they will have ceased to care unless they were taught to at an early age.
>Surely, we don't have to write a five paragraph essay on the problem with perpetuating hate cycles among children in a thread about plummeting teen mental health.
I never said anything about hate, nor does the linked article make any implication about "hate cycles," but it's telling that you immediately tried to make that link.
They don't have to be fighting for your cause, even if you believe that cause is noble. If someone driving a white honda totals your car, you don't harass random drivers of white cars. This cult of skin & genitals, that's called "progressive" for unknown reasons, is a shallow lunacy that's appealing to people who can't see further than the skin color.
I don't understand this intentional misreading of comments that's so pervasive. Even if they're not entirely clear, you can usually deduce what they mean.
Why is his son singled out based on his skin color and unable to do things that his peers are officially sanctioned by the school? Not sure what that sounds ok to you? That seems like regular ole racism to me. That's a bit insane don't you think?
You interpret the anecdote as involving something official? I interpreted it as pertaining to social norms being enforced by only the students themselves. Kids hassling each other for "playing nonexistent white/straight/male cards" or "playing a card they don't have" is quite different from authority figures imposing equivalent policies. I mean, on some level the subject of the enforcement is in a similar position regardless of the nature of the enforcement, but we should at least agree on what we're dealing with here.
People tell stories on hackernews. If you don't take the story to be true, take it as hypothetical value. Not everything on the internet needs a scientific study to be discussed.
I would think the existence of an inherently inequal standard here, and/or the idea of watering down the impact of harmful speech, is the problem more than wanting some perverse privilege to tell bigoted jokes. When and where I grew up I still remember black leaders critical of hip-hop for trying to normalise the n-word - the view being it was objectionable for anyone to launder the term.
Not OP, but the processing of learning that being X isn't a joke in and of itself taught me respect for other groups. You compare the joke about being gay vs a joke that someone is gay. One is a funny commentary on the gay experience, and the other is homophobic. Learning that difference, through experience help teach me where to draw the line between appreciating other cultures and cultural appropriation. And yeah a lot of these lessons can be taught other ways, but I have often found experience to be the best teacher. We should encourage kids to discover better morals and not just follow the morals they are taught. We learned a lot over the past century letting kids do that, we shouldn't stop now. The youngest generation has constantly shown the older how to be more accepting of neighbors, and kinder to our friends.
