I’m truly not sure how Jap or Paki became racist terms. Japanese and Pakistani are acceptable words that express nationality. The racist slurs are abbreviations of the full words. How did the abbreviations become offensive? Part of me is genuinely curious and another part of me wonders if all the clever racists were out to lunch when they agreed upon these words as the go-to monosyllabic insult.
I find the fact that abbreviations became slurs terribly lazy on the part of the racists. The primary insults against Chinese and Koreans are entirely separate words. At least that took a little bit of (detestable) thought. Those words have some sort of back story albeit a wicked one. If you’re going to waste that much oxygen being a racist asshole, can’t you at least be clever about it?
This is coming from the same place in my head that got activated whenever bullies tried to pick on me as a little kid. They’d always start with the most obvious tactics, resulting in my comeback of “Seriously? That’s the best you’ve got? Did you come up with that all by yourself or did your mom help you?”
As a white person I cannot fully understand how loaded any of these phrases are when they’re slung at you. One of the worst words we’ve currently got against us is ‘cracker.’ After all of the horrible things white people have done over the centuries, cracker was the cream of the crop? At least ‘white devil’ has a proper ring of villainy to it.
If there is anything to take away from this blog entry, it’s the best way to throw bullies off their game. At the core of their ice planet hearts, all racists are bullies. If they try to tear you down and you insult their insults, they’ve usually got nothing else. Hate has never been a particularly original emotion. If they’re going to hate you for a stupid reason, I say make them work for it.
Music: I Am the Doctor by Murray Gold & the BBC National Orchestra of Wales
No comments:
Post a Comment