#'i'm sure that their responses will be calm and their counterarguments nuanced and respectful'

[cheeseanonioncrisps]

Honestly, I love this meme because it's useful when people start claiming that stuff like "boomer" is a slur (no it isn't, primarily because I've never heard it used as an insult on its own, and because people only started saying it was a slur when the phrase "okay boomer" went viral. Like, it seems pretty clear that it's the dismissive "okay" that people actually have a problem with— they're not crying into their pillows at night because somebody called them "boomer"), but can we just agree that this is the stupidest logic ever?

Like, by this logic, it was totally fine when everybody and their mother was using the n-word without repercussions until about thirty or forty years ago. Hell, my Mum remembers going with her Mum to buy "n-word brown" (only they didn't use 'n-word', which according to this was totally fine because everyone was doing it at the time) fabric for her school uniform.

And, to be clear, this wasn't my grandmother being racist. This was the school sending home a letter saying "make sure you get that n-word brown fabric for your uniform" and then the two of them going to the shop to buy the fabric that was listed specifically on the sign as being that colour. Because this was the sixties or seventies and I cannot express how totally normalised this sort of thing was.

It's why people censor Enid Blyton books now, because every time she gave a character a black dog as a pet she would insist on giving it one of the most common dog names for the era, which I'm sure you can probably guess.

But, by this logic, that was all totally fine. Using the word directly to a black person was probably fine as well, since I'm sure nobody had any particular qualms about doing that back then. It's arguably still fine today, so long as you're at a clan rally, or any other setting that's sufficiently racist enough that nobody would censor the word.

And it's stupid because censoring the word isn't just a reflection of how bad it makes people feel, it's a reflection of how much society cares (about this specific issue, to be clear. It absolutely doesn't mean that society necessarily gives a shit about the group in question beyond not using this specific word).

The n-word didn't just magically become bad a few short decades ago. It's just that society went "hey, this word has been used so badly that a lot of people have actual trauma attached to it. Maybe using it in casual conversation makes us dickheads" and stopped using it. It was still bad before, people just didn't care.

I mean, I hear the word "r*tard" used casually in conversation but, as I have just aptly demonstrated, people in the disabled community usually choose to censor at least one letter, because we're more aware of its use as a slur. Hell, I used it to refer to myself in a poem about my disability recently, and even in that context of reclaiming the term, my first instinct was to censor it on the page. Is it as bad (or, I guess, almost as bad? Since we're only censoring one letter, rather than all but one of them?) in that context but not in others?

People will usually censor the f-slur in all situations, except for that one line in Fairytale of New York, in which case a lot of people will actually freak out if you censor it, because people do care about not using that word, but they don't care as much as they do about their favourite Christmas song. But, again, that doesn't mean that the word magically becomes okay in that context.

And yeah, I would not be surprised there are some communities out there where the word John is using is censored. Because 'can I say it on TV without being fired' is a really bollocks way to decide whether or not a word is bad.

So yeah, I like the meme, I'll continue to reblog posts using it, but I really kinda hate that the origin of it was "making fun of people with disabilities is fine, because otherwise I'd get in trouble for doing so!"

#yeah #i like john mulaney #to be clear #but this is not my favourite bit of his #slurs #racism #tw racism #ableism #tw ableism #john mulaney #n-word meme #meme #you ever make a post and just think #'wow. waking up tomorrow and seeing how people responded to this is going to be *fun*' #'i'm sure that their responses will be calm and their counterarguments nuanced and respectful' #today i take on both right wing people #and john mulaney fans #but still this has been bugging me for a while #snd what else am I to be doing at 3am the night before I have to get up early to visit my grandparents in Wales? #homophobia #tw homophobia