Sometimes a slur is just a slur!

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When I was a kid, I'd sometimes get beaten up for various reasons (chief among them was probably my razor sharp wit and willingness to share my opinions with those larger and dumber than me).

Often, after getting beaten up, I'd complain to my mom, and decry some racial slur they threw my way while beating on me: "he called me a towel-head, camel-jockey or sand-nigger" seemed popular for someone of my ethnic background and coloring... though WOP and beaner weren't uncommon for the ethnically confused.

My mom would say with the nurturing/caring concern of Nurse Ratched, 'it's not them, it's you'.

She would go on to elaborate, that if people don't like you, and you keep pissing them off, they will beat and insult you. But it's completely personal. They may or may not hate all towel-heads, but that attack, wasn't against all towel-heads, it was strictly an attack on you. So don't generalize and whine about things you don't know (like they're all racists), accept that they're assholes with anger issues, and you probably deserved it for provoking them with your words.

Ignoring the validity of the last part (since I still don't agree that snotty quips deserve bloody noses), she had a point.

There's an adage, "never attribute to malice that which can be more easily explained by stupidity/incompetence". Well, my variant of that, is, "never attribute to racism, that which is more easily explained by your own actions".

If we knee-jerk assume everything is racism (even insults directed at us as individuals because of OUR actions), then that's probably more a reflection on our biases/paranoia, than any reality. You have no real evidence that person secretly harbors superiority complex of whites, or inferiority complexes of whatever shade you are. There are a lot of jerks in life, there are very few real racists in America -- so Occam's Razor: that which is simplest and most likely, is the better conclusion to jump to.

So that stuck with me, and I shared it with others, to the annoyance of many who had a vested interest in perpetual victimhood and injustice. For a variant of that reply, in a later article, I got physical death threats (with someone looking up my home address and mailing me intimidation/warnings). People are so entrenched in their racial/gender/etc. victim mentality, that they see everything in the world as proof of their view.. And if you disagree with them on that, then you're some hate-filled bigot that goes to parties with bald-tattoo'd and sheet wearing compatriots (thus anything they say or do to you, is justified in their minds). They feel they get to do to you, what they imagine you want to do (or did to them) -- without every questioning whether the conclusions they're leaping to are the correct ones.


Racism, Sexism, Homophobia
My-CryBully Large.png
The more you dilute/expand and abuse a word, the weaker the meaning becomes. And the crybullies are abusing words like Racism, Sexism, Homophobia, Islamophobia, and so on, by either not understanding the meaning, or putting their agenda above the truth. This article tries to explain what is (and is NOT) an 'ism. Because obviously a lot of people seem to be getting their understanding wrong.

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