Originally
posted by
SAM_DANGER:
Originally
posted by
tellarion:
Originally
posted by
SAM_DANGER:
Is gypsy a bad word now? When did that start, and who is in charge of sending out the memos?
Can we still call him a moron?
He's Romanian. Yes, there are gypsies in Romania. No, he is not one of them.
Words have whatever power we give them and they depend on how they are used. In the case of this forum, it is used in a derogatory manner aimed at a specific individual based on the location of his birth. Calling him a gypsy in this manner is the same as calling someone a Jew because they are cheap. They are playing on the stereotypes of an incredibly persecuted group of individuals and lumping him into that group in order to denigrate him and assign him the same stereotypes. How you can't see this as racism is beyond me.
I can't see this as racism because it is NOT racism. Gypsy is not a race. Alin is (presumably) Caucasian, and so are probably 90% of the people here who call him a moron.
If I were to call mrford a redneck based solely on the fact that he's from the South, would that be racist, and result in the deletion of entire threads?
People's use here of the word gypsy to make fun of Alin, and Alin's antisemitism are NOT equal. One is racism, one is not. How you can't see that is beyond me.
Fine, it's not racism despite the fact that Gypsies are a fairly distinct ethnic group. Then it's bigotry.
The problem is with the intent behind the words. Using that term is intended to spite him and label him as part of a group of people that is every bit as persecuted as the Jews. Moreso, probably, since anti-anti-semitism is very strong these days.
To be clear, his use of the term Jew is just as denigrating in my opinion, and I'll continue to delete/edit it when I see it, and he should know that. But just because he's doing fluff like that doesn't make it ok for others to do it to him either. And in case it wasn't clear, I'm not saying calling someone a Jew because they're cheap is ok. It's absolutely not, and is the same type of blatant, ignorant bigotry as calling him a gypsy. They're wrong for the same reasons.