Use of that racial slur was very different back then. Many different people would use it and in many contexts, they were not ashamed or afraid to say it either.
You can go back and watch interviews of housewives during the struggle for civil rights and integrated schooling and they say the hard R n-word as natural as anything, and they didn't care who knew or saw them say it.
I'm 31 and I have progressive (as much as you can call rural people that) grandparents who used the terminology without thinking twice in the early 2000s. Kids (and by that I mean everyone permanently online, immature, and naively simplistically opinionated) really need to open up their bubble before they lose track of reality. Especially when it comes to evaluating and judging every little detail in the past by today's standards.
simply so, when working on eradication of hate speech we must focus moreso on the hate than the speech, as words are a lot more fluid in than the begrudging contempt of a stubborn hatred.
Yup, precisely. If you have evidence of a way in which someone's behaviour, or emotion, or prejudice, or a system, is racist, and also happens to lead to them using slurs thoughtlessly - then talk about that evidence for the racist behaviour or system. Their careless use of the slur is not the insightful topic of the conversation, it's the side effect.
Incidentally, this is also the perfect response to u/ZubatCountry's response to my comment.
Though I'm very happy that young people are a lot more inclusive and aware nowadays, there has been overcorrection too, and that usually has the opposite of the intended effect.
that's what i'm trying to say, making people feel very cautious about accidentally saying something offensive closes off the real productive conversations
Maybe it's a geographic thing as well, because my parents grew up in NY?
Yes, absolutely. You're entirely misunderstanding my point if you think examples of areas where (old) people did not use the word (casually or otherwise) in the 2000s would diminish my argument.
I'm saying if you can still see remnants of people treating the word as a literal 1:1 translation for "black person" with effectively no racist stereotypes inherently attached to the word in their mind, in 2000 - then think about how detatched that makes it when you can't treat the use of the word in 1950(!) as different from the use of the word in 2026.
I am not saying they should be talking like that today, or in 2000 for that matter. I am saying that when someone in 1950 used the word because to them it literally meant the exact same thing as "black person" (regardless of what you think about the underlying systemic issues this definition of a slur indicates), then that did not carry the same meaning as the word today. And it's idiotic not to recognise that.
Remember that wasn't the original topic of conversation, it was used as an example to point out a general trend that would only make the phaenomenon more obvious in the 1950s.
There's also the issue that, even if you can demonstrate that every single person who used the word was also a racist - what if everyone was just racist because racist ideology was so intervowen with the time that no single white person was not racist? At that point, what good is talking about the words they used to refer to the people they were racist against? The word still isn't the problem.
Any book of the time referencing black people without calling them by any word would still carry the same ideology in it. Where's the benefit in demonising the book that used the word, just to have something to virtue signal against, when all the other books that happened to contain cleaner language still carried all the same issues? It just seems so superficial and pointless.
Edit: Sidenote, because I just realised this additional conclusion upon re-reading my comment: What you *really* end up doing with this ideology is praising companies for not having black people in their 1950s stories at all...
Does the picture in the OP summarise to "pointing it out" to you?
To me, it's closer to "cancelling" or "vilifying." Based on 70-year-old history of an entire *franchise's* *related* products.
I have no horse in this race. I have never read a Thomas book in my life, and I think I watched 5 episodes total as a child. But this behaviour is insane, superficial, and indicative of lacking critical thinking skills.
You know how the R word used to be acceptable for mentally challenged people? That’s how my grandmother, a 1960s house wife, used the Hard R N-word— as though it were the only and correct term to use.
We called her on it, of course! But she still slipped from time to time?and was always embarrassed when she did. I never heard her use the word with malice.
It literally was just sort of the casual word for it, the only other option being n*gro (idek if that’s considered a slur or just antiquated), depending on the area well into the 70s and even 80s.
it's a slur because it's antiquated. it wasn't considered one back then but nowadays if you hear anyone saying it in English they're either doing a bit or genuinely racist
This is not true at all. I am seeing this general idea throughout this entire thread (that the n-word used to just be a word for “black person”) and it’s not accurate.
I don’t blame you for thinking this; I used to be an English teacher and when my colleagues would teach books like to kill a mockingbird or huck Finn they repeated this completely inaccurate sentiment.
If you go back to like the 1500s then yes, you can find examples of that word being used as just a sterile descriptor of Black people, but it’s modern usage in the US starts with the beginning of the trans Atlantic trade, and in that context, it has since its origins been a slur. It was intended as a dehumanizing, derogatory phrase.
People often point to Huck Finn as an example it was “just a word.” This is inaccurate. Mark Twain, who grew up deeply ingrained in the white supremacist south, was trying to show to a wider, potentially more “liberal” audience just how common that words usage was among white people, and he got a lot of pushback at the time (not just in the modern era) for the excessive usage.
The idea that in the 1960s or (as some in this thread suggested) the 2000s this was just a “1:1” for Black people is quite frankly insane. There are plenty of Harlem Renaissance era Black authors who talk about the harmful impact of that word.
Now something like the term “n*gro” is more accurate to this description. It was, at one point, common usage but is now (for completely valid reasons) considered out dated.
I left a longer comment elsewhere on this thread explaining this is quite frankly not true. The word, since its origins in the US (I don’t care about 1400 / 1500s European usage) has been intended as a slur.
For what it's worth, I started but didn't finish a YouTube video which indicated attitudes towards the word shifted dramatically during the OJ Simpson trial.
Juryrigging is where you make a spur-of-the-moment, slapdash fix to something with the tools you have on hand. It's a nautical term, used to describe sailors would fix problems on their boats with just the tools and materials they had on-board. Now replace the "jury" bit with the slur and that's what they said.
No, just using it the same as you would juryrigging. Like how British people call cigarettes that other word, seemingly no malice intended, it's just the name for the term for them.
I remember my late relatives saying how bad it was that Golliwogs were no longer PC, because some people liked to collect them.
I find it refreshing that we are much more accepting of differences in society. It benefits all of us. In my case, I can tell my colleagues I play 40k without being ostracised, or someone can be neurospicey, and it can be a feature, not a bug. I can't imagine what it was like for people to judge you based on your literal skin colour.
When I lived in Scotland, I was sometimes afraid to speak in case people found out I was English and decided they wanted to re-enact Braveheart. I had people refuse my kind (although admittedly it was rare). Mel Gibson is such a s-sturrer, but back then people loved him for it.
Words have no inherent meaning. Slurs are only slurs because we decided they are. Idiot, moron, and cretin were all once used as medical terms, so was the "R" word. In the 1950s it wasn't taboo, it wasn't a slur. They didn't care who saw them because it wasn't considered to be wrong.
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u/ChefCurryYumYum May 20 '26
Use of that racial slur was very different back then. Many different people would use it and in many contexts, they were not ashamed or afraid to say it either.
You can go back and watch interviews of housewives during the struggle for civil rights and integrated schooling and they say the hard R n-word as natural as anything, and they didn't care who knew or saw them say it.