Obligatory:
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Man, the insane contortions white people will go through to deny racism, even when it’s staring them right in the face…
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I don’t think he meant to be racist, and I don’t think he should lose his job, but I can understand why the employer would fire him. I’ve definitely seen people mess up at work accidentally and be fired over it.
The news station doesn’t want racism to be part of it’s branding, which is something I wish more media outlets would take a stance on. Because we have the internet shaming/humiliation machine, it doesn’t matter if he meant it or not. The mob wants blood and they’ll go after the station if they don’t fire him.
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Once again, since some people just can’t seem to get it through their heads:
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Kind of this. Right?
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Sure, if we’re doing understatements now! 
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Or. Ya know. Behind the scenes he’s done shit like this before so maybe they aren’t firing him for “one tiny slip up” but instead a pattern of behavior?
Or is that just too much of a stretch.
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Now, now… it’s much more likely that a white man just had a slip up rather that he’d have said a racial slur before… /s
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Like I said at the top. It’s possible to be canned for one slip of the tongue nowadays. But it’s rare and I tend to doubt that is what happened here.
As others have stated. Employers tend to be very thorough about terminating people and ensuring they have proper cause.
But why would we reasonably conclude that a duck is a duck.
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You’re right, of course. Any POC who had a slip of the tongue would be dealt with even more harshly. I guess I’d just prefer to live in a world where the will to change the world can be reflected in material conditions rather than all energy being devoted to winning the spectacular representation of gawker/NYT/breitbart headlines. It’s incredibly disempowering.
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You do realize that for people of color, racism is PART of the material conditions of life, yeah? It shapes the material conditions in some pretty concrete ways.
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You’re the one who offered a defense which assumed he would have had to say it intentionally. All I did was point out that that is not the case.
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I second this.
And for people who lamely defend him, saying “Loother Coon” is a quasi-spoonerism for “Loother King”… sorry, “Martin Luther Coon” is an extremely common epithet of white racists. It is part of the racist lexicon. Sure, it was “just” a Freudian slip. But he has to explain how this was such a comfortable slip to make.
For reference: a US senator casually uses a distinct racist phrase because it was evidently in his personal lexicon. (If you’ve ever heard the audio of the telephone call, his defense that he had “no idea what the phrase meant” was laughable.)
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Either way, it’s speculation. Should he have his life ruined based on speculation?
Oh, the feckless hyperbole!
HIS LIFE WILL NOT BE RUINED BECAUSE HE LOST HIS JOB.
As the shameless predatory mastubator Louis CK once famously said:
Try being Black or a woman sometime…
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Yes, he should have his life ruined based on speculation.
As everyone knows, losing a job once is a life ruiner, and as everyone also knows, a weather presenter has always been a hereditary position and lifetime appointment.
And it was probably the first time he’d ever encountered the name, so that’s another explanation you could use for his mistake. Why are public figures always expected to know the obscure pronunciation of people’s names?
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I’m speaking of the public shaming/humiliation not losing his job. I’m surprised more people can’t empathize with what that would be like. You can’t escape it, and many people who go though it consider suicide. If he was overtly racist, fine, throw him to the dogs, but it’s at least plausible that it was just an accident.
