"As stated above, I’m an urban dwelling, engaged community member and I was unaware of this usage. Nor does the word “thug” conjure up an image of a young black man for me. "
I bet you also think a “strapping young buck” is just a built dude. “And what’s the harm with calling someone buff? I’ve never heard anyone use the phrase negatively…”
Ignorance is understandable, willfully refusing to accept that your chosen definition doesn’t match colloquial use goes to a bit darker of a territory.
I live in a city. I can consider myself “urban”. I have also heard persons use “urban” in a highly derogatory manner (not so ironically, those social conservatives tend to be the biggest abusers of “political correctness”.)
Hell, I swear I’ve seen Jezebel stories that express outrage at things the main Gawker site does. Maybe I misremember, but so much of it is clickbait and raising outrage.
Part of being fair means that you apply your values equally to all situations. You are not allowed to judge one person more harshly than another simply because of your personal feelings. That is irrational, and ultimately destructive. Just because the editor appears sexist doesn’t necessarily mean they are also racist, and until I see reasonable evidence of such (which I would be quite happy to receive), I withhold any condemnation on that front.
This conversation is one reason I’m glad things are different these days. A year ago, you probably just would have been banned for saying that.
Even if he didn’t know… Still racist. If he acknowledged that through his ignorance he said something VERY bad (as opposed to only calling someone a whore which would have still been pretty bad) I would be willing to down grade the offense to “problematic” as opposed to “assholic”.
No, if you were racist you’d understand exactly what’s being implied by these terms. I’d just say that your personal experience just hasn’t brought you into contact with the sadly common use of racist dog whistles (or maybe you’re just not paying attention).
I’m not quite sure what sort of world you’d like to live in, but it seems to be one where people are not equal in the eyes of the law. That’s not a good world, in my opinion.
Your example is interesting, but it is also slightly misleading, because it is easy to imagine that the big guy would do more damage to the small woman. If that were the case, then yes, he should be punished more. But if the slap has the same magnitude and causes the same amount of damage, for example, disconnecting a retina, then no, the punishment should be the same. You could argue that the big guy deserves less protection because he should protect himself, but that leads to a situation the justice system is explicitly there to prevent.
I’m saying that your attempts to claim that nobody should reach that assumption because you haven’t reached that level of contextual awareness doesn’t reflect well on you, not necessarily that you’re a racist.
At best, someone who plays dumb about classic dogwhistles and can’t see how they get used regularly in society is not that intellectually curious.
@Mike_Hanrahan: If he honestly didn’t know, it’d still be sexist and sleazy. I doubt the person cared enough to parse what he was saying in the first place.
This is all a debate about what he balance of hate/disrespect vs thoughtlessness combined to make the terrible and unprofessional response.
I can definitely see how, a quick and thoughtless remark might have blown up in the face of some dude that didn’t associate the word urban with black and uses “whore” in this context only to mean, one who only does things for money. Whore, along with the word “pimp” and “rape”, is used frequently in culture and media to describe inoffensive ideas, with words that many find offensive.
All that said, the responder clearly needs to learn a tough lesson about how to communicate with strangers in professional settings and their termination should be quick even if they aren’t a mouth breathing sexist racist. Although we can’t rule out that they are indeed prejudiced idiot.
Sigh. Bad enough that anyone responds to anyone this way. Worse that they respond to someone declining to donate unpaid content this way. Personally, my reaction if I was speaking for SciAm would be to decide that the whole blog was tainted by this and formally repudiate it – if possible, shut it down hard and restart it under new name and new (emphatically clear) policies about content solicitation and general editorial practice.
I appreciate having situational/contexual awareness of what happens in society. Pardon me, I do project that on you, you appear proud of how little you know and you appear to have little interest in changing this.
“Urban” is commonly used to represent black culture when you are talking about persons, even more commonly used in an insulting dogwhistle. “Urban” when used towards cities, unsurprisingly refers to planning and dwelling patterns.
Do you usually have these many problems when dealing with words? Do dictionaries confuse and befuddle you?
You don’t have to necessarily agree with our conclusions, but you seem so utterly unable to understand a word that contains varying definitions.
The potential defamation would not be of her, but of the person she is alleging made these comments. If it turns out he didn’t make those comments and the emails posted were inaccurate, then the statements could be construed as defamatory.
Thanks to this thread, I now know the Boing Boing readership is way more racist than me. I come from an area that still has an active KKK presence, and I’d never heard the supposedly racist slur “urban whore”, or that “urban” is obviously referring to black people. Thanks, Boing Boing! I’ve been educated in how to be a proper racist now.
That post makes it sound like they removed the post for liability reasons, during the investigation process. I’m guessing there was a series of meatings where “Omek”, whoever that happens to be, got screamed at a lot, and then got told how serious the situation was, talked some more, and if it was a desk job in an actual office, probably escorted off the premises.
Whether the public shaming made any difference, I don’t know; maybe going through the “proper channels” wouldn’t have yeilded the proper results. I’m not sure I’d be any more civil. Probably less civil.
