Weird thing I found on Gawker

It’s a story about racists who’ve finally got the point that it’s unsavory to refer to blacks as “niggers” and have adopted a new, seemingly iodine vernacular. Calling blacks “Canadians.” Um … OK? They could have kept the “n” word if they weren’t so intent on saying it in print or with recording devices around. And I’m pretty sure racists still fling the term around at home and amongst friends. Canadians really doesn’t drive home the hatred, know-what-I-mean? It’s still rather appalling though, even unsettling to me, but given that it’s no longer acceptable to be openly racist this was bound to happen. Prejudice and bigotry don’t disappear just because the discussion has been taken off the table.

Has anyone ever heard this before? Gawker got it from an article that ran in the National Post on Thursday.

Quote the NP:

Stefan Dollinger, a postdoctoral fellow in linguistics at University of British Columbia and director of the university’s Canadian English lab, speculated that the slur reflects a sense of Canadians as the other.

“This ‘code’ word, is the replacement of a no-longer tolerated label for one outsider group, with, from the U.S. view, another outsider group: Canadians. It could have been terms for Mexicans, Latinos etc. but this would have been too obvious,” he said. “What’s left? Right, the guys to the north.”

daniellebelton

2 responses to “Weird thing I found on Gawker”

  1. TheBlue Avatar
    TheBlue

    I think it’s just one more word to add to the list. Look at all the “signifying” names used for whites (I won’t go into them). But many of them sound like anything but slurs or racial references. In fact, many blacks have worked out ways to discuss whites as whites even within their earshot. What I have always found comforting is the idea that almost all serious racists, by which I mean folks whose intellectual capacity is so degraded as to actually believe that racial differences matter in terms of human worth, are generally not in positions where their opinions matter — they tend to be poorly educated and living in places we wouldn’t want to be anyway. (These folks I vigorously distinguish from the run-of-them-mill self-interested white who conveniently uses race to get himself ahead or to make himself seem smarter to himself and his peers. He likely does not have a genuine belief in the “otherness” of blacks, preferring instead to feign such a belief when it gets him some benefit).Blacks are called all kinds of things, just as are whites, Jews, Latinos, etc…It’s natural to label people and we’ll never escape it. This seems to be one instance where a group of racial thinkers came up with a two for one — a way, with subtlety, to disparage two groups they think fit for derision: blacks and foreigners.I think it’s one of the more clever ideas this group has had in a long time. And for a group as little talented and generally unsuccessful as they, the racists should take this moment as something of an (im)moral victory.

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  2. The Black Snob Avatar
    The Black Snob

    About the politicians who use race to manipulate bigoted whites to get into public office, I often get into debates with others about various Republicans true intentions. Like Bush, for example. I don’t consider him a racist. I mostly consider him negligent and incompetent. Corrupt even. But an actual racist would not respect another black as their equal and Condi Rice and George W. are joined at the hip. I think that as a conservative he disagrees with blacks’ views on civil rights issues because he thinks the civil rights’ laws unfairly punish whites for past sins.I don’t really think he acknowledges the scourge of racism and the long shadow it still casts on American society. But many in power think their responsibility to minorities ended after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Much like the Republican abolitionists who fought to free us would eventually abandon us with the same people who once owned and terrorized us. They thought it all ended with the passage of the thirteenth amendment.I think a lot of people, like Bush, deluded themselves in this manner.

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