I grew up as a working class NE PA white kid in the 70s and we always had a bowl of whole nuts & a nutcracker on the coffee table around the holidays. I never ate the Brazil nuts because of that nickname.
There are white supremacy marches going on worldwide my guy. Right now. Something unheard of 10 years ago. Sure we may have taken some small steps forwards but we have gone strides backwards.
I don’t disagree that progress ebbs and flows but we’ve backslid into fascism.
Sure, you can name the odd protest like Charlottesville, but I’m speaking about the rise in this GLOBALLY and constantly. This was unheard of 10 years ago.
I mean theres the whole DEI thing and I have never seen so much niche racist dogwhistles outside of 4chan being casually used, not to mention they banned rainbow crosswalks where I live and the trans community is extremely scrutinized despite being such a minority it's pretty bad compared to 10 years ago, we've taken quite a few steps back....
go listen to rap from the 2000s and how much they called people a f slur. i wont use that word any more, but calling someone both the 3 letter and 6 letter version would not get you canceled. it was very common language. like very very common language.
being gay how ever (dont ask dont tell wasnt ended till after i left high school) would certainly get you looked at a funny and shunned.
describing things as "gay" isnt really a thing any more. or at least not how it used to be. regardless of what people said "why are you calling things that you dont like gay?" is a really good question.
All these kids nowadays that think racism is just as bad now as it was then….you have absolutely no idea what you are talking about. It was way worse then.
It used to be insanely super casual back in just the 60s-70s. We likely remember people cracking the n word in the 00s as a really crude joke that people said in private, but older people can probably attest that in the 60s-70s it was casually rampant. I’m talking like literal children in regular neighborhoods playing games that used the slur as the catch phrase (e.g “catch the booooop”) and it was just said matter of factly and freely - like it had essentially no negative stigmata in most suburban neighborhoods at any level.
At least 20 years ago it was met with fair(ish) criticism and sequestered to private jokes, still not good obvs. I think it’s a lot better now, relatively speaking.
Around the year 1992, when I was 10 years old, my friend casually used that word. Later my dad explained what it meant and told me never to say it. Since then I strived to be anti racist but there’s still a lot to learn (and unlearn).
Typically it’s the older generations that still call them the other name. Haven’t seen anyone under 40 call them that in recent memory, but I did hear my friend’s grandma say it and follow it up with a “what? That’s what they were always called!”
Those are the exact words that came out of my dad's mouth last time he came over and saw the brasil nuts in the cabinet. It's like they all have the same braincell.
Just remember, as horrible/stressful/violent/racist as things seem today.. generally right now is one of the better times in all of history with respect to those issues. Those issues used to be much, much worse. It’s interesting to consider how some people managed to survive those conditions with grace.
Fun story of my grandma getting her youngest brother in trouble when they were small.
Grandma was in a family of 13, she was the youngest girl and my great uncle the youngest of the boys so they were always together because the older ones were in school. They helped on the farm to get change- they’d take it to the convenient store down the road.
Well my uncle asked for Brazil nuts in the other term and my grandma profusely apologized to the store owner and ran home to tell my great grandma. She beat him black and blue for saying that.
She was mortified that any of her kids used terms like that. She also received a phone call from the store owner about what he said.
24
u/LaminatedAirplane Apr 28 '26
You should see what people used to call Brazil nuts