> You are trying to tell me that the phrase is supposed to make me think in racist terms, right?
No, I am saying the phrase is meant to be interpreted in a racial context by the target audience while passing off as non-racial. Non of the phrases I listed are racial by the dictionary definition.
The difference between a dog-whistle and a regular whistle is that dog-whistles are inaudible to humans and go unnoticed, hence the "dog-whistle" tag for such coded language.
> You are trying to tell me that the phrase is supposed to make me think in racist terms, right?
No, "dog-whistle" terms seem mundane and can be played off as having the dictionary definition, but to certain people they have a very specific meaning. Your neighbor might say he wants to keep "thugs" out of your neighborhood, which you can naively infer to mean "violent criminals," but to other racists it's a synonym for "niggers." Or maybe you do know what he means, so you call him on it... and he asserts that it just means "violent criminals." That's what makes a dog-whistle.
> You are assuming the intent of the poster. Your "civil rights" example does not capture the same (ambiguous) spirit that the poster's use of "woke" captures.
I gave the benefit of the doubt and a warning that they might be misinterpreted.
> As far as I can perceive it, the majority of people haven't arrived at the conclusion that woke is a slur.
> I certainly wouldn't understand it. I have my doubts that it is even universally understood inside the black community. The most reasonable interpretation is that it is an insult
I'm a 40-year-old out-of-touch white dude and I know exactly what "dog" means in this context. So do my 65-year-old parents.
Maybe your life has been so far removed from mainstream American culture that you haven't heard basic slang for the last quarter-century at least. That doesn't mean it's reasonable or excusable for a working cop.
People are entirely capable of articulating what phrasing is racist dog whistle; when I read, say Ta-Nahesi Coates he is able to elaborate his point even to an audience with a very different context. It happens all the time. I'm asking for someone to actually explicitly explain to me the classist dog whistle in the article so that I can learn something.
> You really can't spend the 30 seconds needed to think about "hmm, maybe be a bit careful about the words I'm using here in case my message gets lost in criticism of my language"?
If I had thought there was a situation where "every second counts" was actually true, it would be human trafficking. You seem to disagree.
> Because it seems to me that using a racist term is more likely to divert the attention from your message, not less.
"Black market" is definitely a "racist" term now? GP only gave it as a potential example, or at least that's how I read it. The point is that wording the message like that is not actually going to divert attention. Except for the few people trying to police speech at every turn—and who will try to harm him over it—even though the message itself did its job (a far more helpful job than the people trying to police speech would ever do, for that matter).
> The implication is that: Only a racist would disagree with me.
rquantz is stating clearly that the word is offensive and implying therefore it's wrong to use it. If that is an issue, I believe it certainly should be raised.
What's interesting is that drawing attention to such things is now what is 'politically incorrect'.
it seems pretty obvious to me what he was doing was contrasting what someone imagines race relations being like and what his actual experience is as a black man in the south
It's quite annoying that it needs to be explained like this, since it should be pretty painfully apparent, but yes.
Sorry but I'm (personally) not particularly inclined to favorably entertain what someone "imagines" about dog-whistle terminology. Their proximity to the ebbs and flows of southern racial 'charm' doesn't hold a candle to what I actually lived through and experienced first hand for 30 years-as a direct recipient of aggressive, racially loaded behavior and speech.
The poll doesn’t prove anything, especially that black people as a race are a hate group. The idea an entire race should be considered a “hate group” is absurd on its face. So one should approach results indicating as such with a big question mark, because they are surprising. That the phrase in question is a white supremacist dog whistle fully explains the results actually.
But to take this poll credulously and throw your hands up in the air as Scott does says a lot. He doesn’t stop there though, he runs with it. With a full throat he declares an end to the idea of our integrated multicultural society. He implores white people to purposefully segregate and insulate themselves from black prior as an act of safety.
I think it’s been pointed out a couple times in this thread how polls can be deceptive. That Scott doesn’t even really grapple with this possibility and instead dives straight to “white flight” mode… well, for his sake I just hope he can get over this phase.
At the time her response was that she doesn't necessarily believe in black superiority... it's just something people should address.
Does this sound ok to your ears? If this was a white supremacist, we would all correctly be shouting about how it's a dog whistle and not an acceptable response.
I wish more people would read 'How to Be an Antiracist.' I believe he's absolute right in that the only way forward is to call out racist beliefs from everyone, not selectively.
Selectively excusing racist beliefs from "our side" will only open the door to more racism.
> For non-Black people, the word should not be spoken as there is almost no context in which it is appropriate or constructive (even when singing a song or reading a script)
> The trope is universal and deeply embedded in American society.
No, it's not. Quit trying to pass yourself off as the ambassador of American culture. The majority of my 50 years on this earth have been spent living in the Midwest or U. S. South, neither of which are exactly hotbeds of racial tolerance and likely the origin of any racial slur you'll hear. And yet when I saw the title it never occurred to me to think of race at all. That is, until your comment showed up and I said to myself, "what the hell is he talking about?"
Sure, there are some racial slurs that involve the word "monkey". But they're not even close to what you're talking about, and if one were to use them one would come off sounding about 76 years old.
That reminds me of a conversation I had nearly a decade ago with a black (African immigrant) friend. I don't remember the details, but basically he said that he was annoyed that the words "dark" and "black" had negative connotations. I knew him well enough to know that he wasn't trolling, and that this was something that had seriously taken an emotional toll on him.
Ever since then I've been thinking about this -- maybe it does bother a lot of black folks? And, think of very little whose conception of words is primitive, and how they might associate the words together.
I don't really know what I'm getting it. It's very hard to make any sort of conclusion here. I mean, what's the cure -- we make a prescriptive linguistic change that color-based words can't be used anymore? That's not happening.
They're just dog whistling about racism, because if you read their comment at arm's length, you would realize that it itself is a negative "modal" argument of the exact form that it seeks to decry.
> There is not a damn thing offensive about a combination of <color><noun>.
Do I ever have a new word for you. Have you ever heard of the term 'yellow peril'? Color coding is a remarkably easy and efficient way to encode racial stereotypes and spread propaganda.
Nowadays the association with said color is lessened (though some elements still appear among racists) but it seems rather ignorant of history to ignore the uses of color coding for racial dogwhistles.
> I don't think there is a racial bias in associating blackness w/ evil or 'whiteness' with good, I rather think it has to do with night/darkness vs day/light. Do you think 'red' as a widely used 'warning light' somehow relates to 'native Americans'?
I think maybe I didn’t make my point clear here. I don’t think that in these particular examples there exists racial bias in the language. The language (most languages) is biased (but not racially) towards associating darkness with evil and light with good. If you personally are experiencing racial bias due to having darker skin, I think language like this can feel very different than it would otherwise, even if the language itself is not explicitly racially biased. I’m not saying we should abandon the whole light/dark evil/good dichotomy, but just pointing out that things built in to the culture that aren’t technically related to race in any way may feel very different if you’re on the “good” side than if you’re on the “bad” side.
> It's not at all difficult to assume that something is offensive to someone, but not to me. It's extremely easy that for any different person, different phrases are considered offensive. But the solution of 'let's create a world where nothing is offensive anymore' seems ludicrous.
I agree that it seems impossible to avoid offending every individual. But, when it’s so easy to avoid using language that has negative connotations for a significant portion of the population, why shouldn’t we? Why cling so tightly to not being kind, out of some kind of slippery-slope assumption that if we give ground and have empathy this once, the word will end?
It’s really odd to me how offended people get by the suggestion that there might be something offensive about the language they use. I have no ties to the words I use. If I want to be friends with someone or to include them in what I’m doing, and they have a problem with some word I use because of some context that I haven’t experienced, it does me no harm to use a different word.
> I always thought there was a 'common sense' approach, pruning any mention of 'slave' as terminology in programming / system administration after decades of use for me seems to be extremely far away from it.
Here I think you’re taking offense at a situation that doesn’t exist. What I’ve seen is people trying to avoid perpetuating the problem by not adding new instances of the world slave to new code/systems, or making updates to use different language when it’s convenient and someone’s already touching the code. These actions hardly seem to me to be pruning any mention of the term from decades’ worth of software.
Language, it’s important to remember, is descriptive, not prescriptive. It is always changing along with society and culture. It’s therefore natural that what is considered acceptable or not is going to change over time, and we’ve always had to deal with this as a society. Look at people wanting to ban books for using words that have become offensive, as an example. The interesting thing about software, as opposed to books or words engraved in stone on monuments, is that it’s often very easy to change the words that are used, because software isn’t a historical artifact but a living thing. And as a living thing, people are going to want it to reflect their own current societal norms. So changes like this seem an inevitable part of a long-lived industry that creates such mutable products.
Regardless, it hardly seems worth getting so worked up over someone else choosing to make this decision in the codebase that they maintain. It is their right as maintainers to do so, and if you disagree so strongly with them making this small token of empathy, you can of course choose to use another filesystem.
No, I am saying the phrase is meant to be interpreted in a racial context by the target audience while passing off as non-racial. Non of the phrases I listed are racial by the dictionary definition.
The difference between a dog-whistle and a regular whistle is that dog-whistles are inaudible to humans and go unnoticed, hence the "dog-whistle" tag for such coded language.
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