Like, Slurs aren’t just “mean names” you know? Slurs are slurs for a reason. Slurs are words with long painful histories. Slurs are words weighed down with death, pain, sadness, loss. You can’t just throw them around to show how edgy you are, how much you don’t care. If you feel like you’ve just gotta toss out a slur to make your point then tbh you’re argument obviously isn’t strong enough to stand on its own.
There is never an appropriate time to use a slur that doesn’t belong to you. If you’ve got no claim to a word then keep it out of your damn mouth
The problem I have with this is that some words people call slurs fit this description and others don’t.
It’s pretty much impossible for a white USian to say the N word without reference to that history. But a USian woman calling herself a bitch may not be talking about how men have used it to demean women at all, and many people would not even hear her saying “my boss is such a bitch, but I’m terrified to leave, please can I vent to you?” as an endorsement of a man calling that boss inferior to men.
In part because of these differences, I can’t universally endorse “keep it out of your damn mouth.”
But your example doesn’t work because the slur belongs to this hypothetical woman? So it’s not what the OP is talking about.
The second case, where she is calling her boss a bitch (another woman, not herself) does. Which is why I included it.
I get what you’re saying but I still think the OP wasn’t really talking about those sorts of situations. “white USian using the n word” isn’t equal to “us woman using ‘bitch’” even beyond the differences between the words themselves. op is saying “white people, keep the n word out of your damn mouths, men, keep ‘bitch’ out of your damn mouths”
I understand your point of view, definitely! I hope you can also understand mine, which is that when you say something really universalizing like “keep it out of your damn mouth,” you’re going to catch people that you really don’t want to be catching in your prohibition there.
Like, it’s no skin off my back if a British guy who was negatively impacted by Margaret Thatcher’s policies calls her a bitch or a term for the female anatomy. It doesn’t harm me. It wouldn’t make me wonder what he thinks of all women, because in context he clearly would be talking about someone with power over him. Why would I want to police him, rather than allow him to express his feelings without requiring him to Think Twice, Be Nice? Just because I have one of those myself?
More than that, though, I think not recognizing that dehumanizing or demeaning words vary in severity is really a problem.
My go-to example of this is (and I’m pretty sure at least one of the people involved in this follows me, so if I get any of this wrong, guys, please jump in and correct me) that some years back, there was a… Feminists With Disabilities, I think it was, web page, where some articles discussed the ableist history of words. And they didn’t just talk about, say, cripple as a noun or the R word or why people aren’t big fans of the term “handicapped.” They also talked about words like lame, the history of words like idiot, dumb, etc.
Their goal wasn’t to get people to stop using words like idiot, or as I’ve seen it many a time, to splatter out “cr*zy” and “st*pid.” Their goal wasn’t to prescribe language changes at all. Their goal was to get people thinking about how words we all use have ableist histories and how those histories influence how just about everyone talks and thinks.
Fast forward to today, where I, a person with a mobility impairment, have been snarked at for saying it’s okay to say “the loss of funding dealt the project a crippling blow.” Because I couldn’t possibly be an activist in my real life if I don’t care about that, or if I think that use is worlds away from how I felt when someone called me a cripple to my face. Or that splattering just makes a word more obvious.
The people who were part of this – and many others, too – have a tag now, “ableism is not a list of words.” Because people took those posts and decided that if they “keep things out of their damn mouths,” they’re done. There’s no more work they need to do. They don’t know the first thing about access and they balk at real requests to consider things, but because you say “that’s crazy!” and they say “re-word that sentence” and “cr*zy is a slur,” they don’t have to listen to you.
That whole mess has meant I have a HUGELY HIGH BAR before I say to people “don’t use that word.” The N-word clears it. The R-word does too. A few other things do.
Not much else does, for me.
And I really dislike the implication that I somehow don’t understand the opposing view if I hold this one. I get that view! I used to hold it. I used to yell at people for saying “lame” even though I didn’t experience it as hurtful at all, because Words, They Matter So Much.
I don’t hold that view any more. I now think people use word fights to make things easy for themselves.
If everyone’s busy arguing over how to describe the murders, no one has to get around to stopping them.
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