Should millions of American be second class citizens and have to hear themselves being called racial slurs so a white dude can keep his job? Is he such a special snowflake that he can do whatever and never have consequences for his actions?
Public utterances of racial slurs AREN’T public shaming of a large portion of our population?
Well no, not when it’s done by the free market or by a government shut down… /s
I find all the hand wringing over ‘public shaming’ and “humiliation” of this particular person of privilege to be ironic, considering this country’s ugly history and recent events:
The willful obtuseness is mind boggling …
Absolutely not. I can understand why they fired him.
The public shaming on the other hand, may not be warranted. There are many people out there who are clearly racist and they deserve to be called out.
I have brain damage and often stutter and mix up my words. I’ve definitely said some embarrassing stuff that way without the intention of saying it. I’m just glad it wasn’t recorded and broadcast over the internet.
Maybe he will learn not to call one of the most important public figures of the 20th century a racial slur…
And that’s not your fault of course, but I’m going to make a leap here and assume that you do not make a living publicly speaking on TV, either, knowing your limitations in that regard…
Dude made a choice to make his living on TV. A choice… he isn’t suffering from brain damage and make a mistake that someone put up online for the world to see. He actively pursued a career as someone who would regularly been seen on TV…
I hope he has his family, I wish him a basic social and medical safety net.
He doubtless has tons of empathetic supporters and sympathetic news articles.
I’m also pretty sure that they explained to him when he began performing his weather bit in public, that he might have a response from the public that would affect his professional fortunes, and that response might not be “fair” in the philosophic sense. The station might have had to let him go because he started sneezing too much on air.
That doesn’t mean he should be put in a cage, but, again, losing a public platform because the public loses their taste for you, happens every day, for non-racist speech. The reason people are giving EXTRA sympathy to this guy is because they are uneasy with the idea of racist words being a cause for dismissal.
People are giving EXTRA care to the “ruination” of this guy’s career, over people who had their lives “ruined” for not giving the weekly forecast in a peppy enough way, who lost their jobs without using a common racist trope.
The difference between embarrassment and humiliation is that you embarrass yourself, and you are humiliated by others.
If he chose to work in TV, he willingly put himself out there on TV. Ignoring his intentions, he said what sounds like a racist word, and was fired. That’s fair.
By spreading his mistake, he is being humiliated. He will not be permitted to live his life in the same way, based on no other evidence than what sounds like some mixed up words.
And if dude is willfully racist instead of just pedestrian, accidentally racist?
Dude is not going to have his life ruined most likely. He’ll land on his feet, I’m sure and the world will move on to something else.
At some point, people NEED to take responsibility for what they do in life, this guy especially. We’ve let this racist (accidental or not) shit go for too long. It’s long past time for people to say it’s NOT acceptable to throw around racial terms, accidental or not.
So go we all.
But we know people like that, without having to wonder. I notice you correct your posts moments after you submit them. We all make mistakes when we communicate. There must have been times where you said something and it sounded bad, but that didn’t reflect what you meant. Imagine if someone had recorded it and
it went viral. If we need to use the internet as a weapon, we should be certain who it’s being used against.
It’s generally for clarification or to correct grammar, and it’s never been for a fucking racial slur. That shit does not come out of my mouth either, even when singing along to rap songs, because I know it’s hurtful. I’m fairly certain I’ve said insensitive things, but a racial slur ain’t one of them son, even if it was something that sounded racially insensitive.
Yea, I had this happen to me once. I told the CEO he was wrong, but what he heard was “go fuck yourself”. What can I say, it happens. 
Let me share something personal with you: At a place I worked a few years ago, one of my neighbours was being racist. He would regularly call one of our coworkers a sand n-word. I’d told him to cut it out, but one day he and another neighbour were were whispering and giggling about him right next to me.
It went on for maybe half an hour, when finally I wrote him a message in chat asking him to stop. I said, “Can you cut out the whispering and giggling?”. If I’d accused him of being racist, he would deny it, because in chat there would be a record, so I didn’t even mention it. Only he and I knew the context. Anyway, this turned into a long conversation where I basically lost it on him.
Finally they stopped, but the next day when I came into work, no one would speak to me, and I wasn’t invited for lunch. The racist had shared my messages with the entire office, without telling them what it was in regards to. The ostracism continued for months until I finally left to work somewhere else.
At the new place, I discovered the “Stop whispering and giggling” messages had been shared there as well. I was assumed to be an asshole from the very day I started. When I tried to bring up the reasoning behind the messages, people refused to talk about it.
5 years later, it still comes up at each job I start. People have no idea what my internal thought process was, just an out of context conversation where I appear to flip out over nothing.
So, I’m asking people in this community as someone who’s experienced ostracism from humiliation to consider that we don’t know what he was thinking, and that he may not deserve what he’s got.
So what exactly is it that you want from everyone here? I saw this story in my news feed before I saw BB- as you say, it went viral. No one, including the publisher here could have made it happen or stopped it from happening.
This is the world of social media and internet news that we all live in, and the horses are long gone from that barn, whether we like it or not.
Good question to an apples and oranges comparison.
The weatherman in question didn’t have someone share private messages without his permission; there was no betrayal of presumed privacy which resulted in years of vindictive retaliatory ostracization.
He “misspoke” a well known racial slur on television, and didn’t immediately say “OMG, my tongue got twisted and that came out completely wrong, folks; please forgive me.” Instead he tried to act as if it hadn’t happened. Then when there was a backlash he offered the requisite nonpology, “Sorry if anyone felt offended.”
I’ve also been ridiculed and treated unfairly more than once in my time, but I’ll be damned if that means I’m gonna automatically join the pity party over some guy that got fired for cause.
I take offense at the idea that because he no longer has a nice, cushy job and because some people might give him the stink eye that “his life has been ruined.”
There are not hordes of vigilantes laying in wait outside his house, threatening to burn it to the ground. He’s not in jail, he’s not bankrupt or crippled by debt, he’s not sick from any debilitating disease. He’s not being exploited, beaten or mistreated, and no one he cares about has been threatened, injured or killed.
I could go on and on about all the unfortunate circumstances that equate to actual ‘ruination’ for most people, but an upper class White dude getting a pink slip surely ain’t one of them.
Sometimes doing the right thing is hard. Doesn’t mean it isn’t the right thing to do…
But why not go to HR?
Me too. Others here too. As far as I know, none of it was from blurting out a racial slur. Mine certainly wasn’t. Mine was just for existing as a weirdo.
[ETA] And on top of that, my outright rejection of racism in HS likely contributed to my own ostracism. So my NOT blurting out racial slurs hurt ME for years.
Ditto; scrawny art nerds were not a part of the cool crowd where I grew up - we were ‘easy targets.’ Add being a woman and a person of color on top of that, and we could trade horror stories for eons…
Indeed! But here we are, having survived the assholes, yeah?
Also, I’m pretty sure no one probably cared if we were humiliated or not… I can say for sure, very few people gave a shit if I felt that way.
Absolutely.
And so will the temporarily unemployed weatherman.
