On Oct 7, 2006, at 10:10 AM, Ronn!Blankenship wrote:
At 10:42 AM Saturday 10/7/2006, pencimen wrote:
Charlie wrote:
> Hmm. I think intent is important. Some words may have been
offensive
> once, but 50 years is a long time in language. "Pom" used to be
> offensive in Oz, but it's not now, unless it's accompanied by an
> adjective (usually "whinging"...).
pffft! WTF is whinging?
Of course intent is important, and I know Ronn didn't mean to be
offensive, but when my wife arrived in the U.S. some fourty years ago
she experienced the use of these terms in their pejorative sense and
though she has pretty thick skin, I know their use upsets her.
And sixty-odd years ago, when my father and several million others
were
fighting in the Pacific, most words to describe "the enemy" were
frequently used in a pejorative sense. As long ago as twenty-five to
thirty years ago, however, I had conversations with members of the
groups Rob mentioned in which they used that three-letter word or the
five-letter adjective derived from it by doubling the final consonant
and adding a -y in its dual meaning as referring to brisk temperatures
as well as those from a certain part of the world without anyone
taking
offense. However, I will conjecture that the offensiveness of the
term
to a particular person might be a generational thing, as to whether
one
one's immediate family personally experienced it as a pejorative as
opposed to something which happened to "someone else." I should have
thought about the fact that there are some still alive who did
experience it personally and might not find it funny, even if
others of
a younger generation make the same comment themselves . . .
My wife, born Peggy Kikoshima, has been known to quip, "It's a bit Nippy
out, better put on my Japet"... Her use of the terms Nip and Jap in a
joking reference to her race does not necessarily confer permission to
do so to others: It is no more appropriate for Gaijin to refer to
persons of Japanese ancestry as Nips or Japs any more than it would be a
good idea for a Caucasian to drive into Compton and, hearing the locals
referring to each other as "Nigga," to join them in using that epithet.
Peggy is unusually insensitive to matters of race: so blind to it, in
fact, that she sometimes wraps all the way around to saying some mildly
inappropriate things. Her best friend at Hewlett-Packard for a number
of years was nicknamed "The Negress of the North". Janine liked the
name, but I've seen others cringe when Peggy used it to refer to her.
Peggy grew up in Sunnyvale, CA in the 1960s, relatively free from the
racism that her parents dealt with (both were interned in Minidoka,
Idaho), but not entirely so: In elementary school, the father of one
of her classmates, Stanley Harris (a famed Tuskeegee Airman), came
into the classroom to find his son at a corner table in the back with
Peggy and David Daliwahl, who is Indian, and another Japanese classmate.
Mr. Harris was infuriated to find all the "colored" kids segregated to
the corner table.
Of course, Peggy was just happy to be with the "cool kids"...
As it turns out, the reason that that particular bunch of kids went to
school together at all was that they had all bought houses in a
development of Eichler homes. Joseph Eichler was a pioneer in anti-
racist housing. The Kikoshimas and Daliwahls and Harrises ended up in
the same neighborhood because of racism elsewhere.
I suspect that Peggy grew up with her insensitivity to matters of race
because of her parents internment (her dad always very pointedly taught
them that they were no better and no worse than anyone else because of
their ethnicity), and because of Joseph Eichler's anti-racist housing
policies.
Dave
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