Dolan wrote:Hm, I'm not sure forgetting is a good way of coping. It's always going to haunt you and you'll have to always make sure you keep your guard up, in case it comes up. I think acceptance is a better one. Black people should just accept the "nigger" word and move on, stop being offended by a word that essentially means nothing but some way in which they were classified by white colonists and explorers in the past. At least, that's just my opinion, I think it'd be more effective.
Perhaps. But my point was more about words becoming obsolete and no longer being included in everyday vocabulary. People almost never call Asians “gooks” these days to the point that most don’t even know what it means. Why? I don’t think it’s because Asians just accepted it and them not being offended took the fun out of it for everyone else. “Gook” could have still lingered on as a harmless way to refer to Asians like you suggested with the N word, but it disappeared almost entirely instead.
I think it has more to do with the fact that 1) Asians never use it to refer to each other and 2) them being offended by the word was actually effective negative reinforcement for everyone else to stop using it. That way, any serious person wanting to do business or interact with Asians wouldn’t use the word. Sure, some people may have still used the term to make fun of Asians from time to time, but they would either grow up and learn that being respectful to others is necessary to live in our society or become ostracized as racist bigots. After enough time, “gook” was used less and less until it practically died out and the following generation of people never even heard of it.
Dolan wrote:OK, now we're getting somewhere. Self-deprecation, in-joke, irony. But then that doesn't help you build a sense of self-respect if you keep having a low opinion on yourself.
Well, it’s not meant to build self-respect. In fact, I’d argue that most people who make self-deprecating jokes have a pretty high opinion of themselves, because they know their insecurities can’t be used against them and they have a laugh about them instead.
The scientific term for China creating free units is Mitoe-sis.
I intend all my puns.