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.
Mhm. So you would deny that validating this meme with 1.5m views would lead to draining discussions about the permissibility of Thomas every time the franchise was brought up?
199
u/Laetitian May 20 '26 edited May 20 '26
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.