Ok, with all the racial comments lately, how about OURSELVES?

[Archae]

How many of us will admit to using racial comments decades ago?

I'll start.
When I was really young, as in under 10, when my friends and I were roughhousing outside, and we piled on top on each other, we didn't yell "dog pile!"
We yelled "N***** pile!"
We didn't really know. We just said it.

We learned later, over the years just how bad that word was.

[defendandprotect]

1. IMO, "black" should also go with any other reference to anyone's color ...including "white" --

there is no such thing as "white" -- we're all people of color --

[MercutioATC]

2. Maybe gender descriptors should go away ...and age descriptors...and weight and height descriptors

They're all "discriminatory" by definition.


...of course, we'd all be reduced to:

You: "Look at that person!"

Me: "The woman with the blonde hair?"

You: "No THAT one!"

Me: "The fat kid?"

You: "No, not that one, the one beside the OTHER person."

Me: "Oh, you mean the black guy?"


...which, to be honest, is a lot more effort than I'm willing to expend.

[defendandprotect]

5. Let's just start with "black" and "white" ...... Let's accomplish at least that -- !!

[abelenkpe]

3. My five year old asked me the other day

Why some people were brown and others weren't. Kids are so perceptive. We're taught to refer to one another as black or white.

[KittyWampus]

7. My friend in 1st grade combed my hair & then I combed her hair saying "your hair feels different"

my little friend then explained "that's because I'm black".

I never noticed before that, some people's skin is darker.

Weird, to think a 5 year old wouldn't notice something like that. But there you go. :)

I was more likely to notice who would be nice to me and who would make fun.

[Brickbat]

12. When my son was in day care,

there was a boy there who had a black dad and a white mom. The whole county was almost 100% white of Scandinavian extraction. My son, M, and this boy, D, became very good friends. When D came over to our house for M's birthday party, his mom came with and hung out. She said she was interested in seeing M, who has (and had then) long, thick, golden curls. She said D would come home from day care raving about the crazy hair that M had, and she was always like, "Um, D honey, you're the one with the odd hair in this town." :rofl:

[gateley]

4. We called Brazil nuts n****** toes when we were kids, although we didn't know

it was a disparaging word about a race of people. I must have learned it at school, because the first time my mother heard me say it, she said, they are Brazil nuts, don't call them that name again.

[GreenPartyVoter]

6. Not racist, but bigoted. We used to call each other queerbait on the playground, and I

am sure I must have put something or other down as "that's so gay!" at least a few times when I was young. :(

[EFerrari]

8. My two cousins used "that's so gay" when they were in grade school.

I had no idea what they were talking about and turns out, neither did they. One of them has a gay kid in college right now who is doing great. :)

[Archae]

10. George Carlin brought this up too, on one of his albums.

Back when he was a kid, a "fag" was a sissy.
He admitted to that.

My relatives, (the older ones including my Dad,) used to use the term "Jew a guy down" to indicate they had haggled a better price.

Us kids would hear that and we didn't know what it meant really, until we got older.

[Bucky]

9. Thank you for this. Yes, a nation's casual, familiar racial shortsightedness won't evolve overnight.

I once used the N word relating something another kid had been saying. I was 7 or 8 at the time. My dad, who had only been half listening, turned around and popped the shit out of me. I never got around to explaining that I wasn't actually using that word for myself. Doesn't matter. I learned a boundary that day. Maybe not the best way to learn it, but inarguably effective.

[apocalypsehow]

11. My mom washed my mouth out with soap when I used the "N" word after hearing it on the recess yard.

That was when I was in second grade, and I gagged for thirty minutes - "we don't use that word," she said, "only trashy people talk like that." Can still taste the soap in the back of my throat.

Now, intellectually, as I matured, I became well aware of why it should not be used. But that warm bar of soap was effective for keeping that word from coming out of my mouth ever since. I'm glad she did it.

Now: await the inevitable bagging and hating on my mom for taking a disciplinary action in 1974 that was appropriate to her time and American culture then that would not fly today. Plus the inevitable "if you're glad she did it you must approve of using that method in 2010," yada, yada, yada...

You've practically got to be a trained litigator to post about controversial actions anymore.

[gleaner]

13. I never really did ....

my Dad was a racist and used every word you don't want people to say that he could think of. At a very early age my mother took me aside and told me that he was wrong to do that. She said that using ugly words to describe people was no better than hitting them and she forbade us to hit people.

Also I grew up in the 50s in a neighborhood with absolutely no diversity. I did not see a person of another race, any other race until I was in high school. She was a lovely Asian girl who went on to become an opera singer. She talked about voice lessons and what she wanted to do. To me, that was more interesting than the fact that she looked different. Besides, she was beautiful. Who could knock that?