this post was submitted on 29 Nov 2023
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Basically, the US obsessing about race but refusing to face it's history with blanket word bans that are frowned upon no matter the context.
The US is clearly not facing their slavery past and instead avoiding the difficult and deeply disturbing vocabulary associated with it.
IMHO there is nothing wrong with the N word used in an history lesson. On the contrary, I think it's especially important to show younger generations how evil some our ancestors were.
And I say that as a french guy living in a city that was extremely important during the slave trade. We know what our ancestors did, we are not proud of it, we don't feel responsible for it but we do make sure it's not forgotten.
Have you spoken to any [other] people that have been subjected to anti-black bigotry directly about how its inclusion would affect them in a lesson?
I am a white man that had a similar view to you. About 10 years ago I had a conversation with a black classmate about appropriate use of that word. It was my position that it's too bad we continually empower the word by avoiding it even in dry intellectual contexts and we shouldn't censor it when reading quotations.
She said:
I made the decision not to say it ever again. Obviously my classmate can't speak for all black people, every person has different experiences, and reactions will be along a continuum. There might be situations where the educational value of using that word explicitly, outweighs the discomfort it causes. But I think it's pretty inappropriate for me to 'whitesplain' prejudice (and the language of prejudice, and the power... of the language of prejudice)
Teachers have to ask themselves: How much will its explicit use enhance the lesson? How many students are we willing to risk alienating? How much time would we like to spend defending our decision to use the word explicitly? How much of that will be class time?
Even with a lengthy preamble setting the perfect context to use it explicitly with minimal potential for alienating students there's a significant chance we'll fuck it up and spend the rest of the class reteaching the class why we think they are wrong to be offended.
Some of them will be disingenuous, some of them will be sincerely offended white soyboys not too dissimilar to me, some of them will be legitimately alienated racialized minorities.
We'd also be implicitly asking the non offended racialized minorities to stick up for us. Their well meaning friends will ask them to weigh in on the subject (and speak for all blacks). It's not fair to them.
In a context where class time is limited, I have to think that students are best served with more lesson time and less meta-discussion. So I don't think it's a good idea to use the word explicitly in educational contexts, unless maybe there's some sort of vetting of students for the course.
Certain individuals and organizations are doing this, sure, but then you have the monumental amount of academic research in the humanities into slavery, you have publicly and privately owned historical sites and museums that explicitly teach about the history of slavery in the United States, and you have a non-trivial amount of media depicting the horrors of slavery. It's not a monolithic cultural rejection in the same way that a nation like Japan has attempted to totally erase any record of its wrongdoings in the first half of the twentieth century.
I think any view that tries to paint the whole US as obsessing over something is extremely incomplete. So extremely incomplete as to be basically pointless. It's just a lot more complicated than that, with different groups thinking different things are important.
I understand that critic.
That being said, I really have never visited a country where race is mentioned as frequently as in the US.
In many European countries I have visited it just didn't seem relevant.
Sometimes it's not just a cliché or a prejudice against a nation, it's just how it is.
I have no doubt at least that the peculiar history of the US has shaped the way racial discourse is prevalent or not in that society.
Would you agree that race is more commonly talked about in the US than in the rest of the world?
I think it's pointless to ask on Lemmy for an accurate depiction of the importance of race in the american society. You may say it's too reductive but I think it's a more productive conversation than your comment. I would much rather have someone politely argue and explain that I'm wrong rather than calling my comment "almost pointless" and basically presenting it as some outlandish and prejudiced caricature of the US.
The "your comment is too reductive and therefore is pointless" could probably be applied to every posts in there. Just saying.
I think the anti immigration right wing rise across several European countries rn shows that they've just never had the dialogue that the US does about race from being such a melting pot, and as such have ignored racial issues and racism in their societies bc they haven't had as terrible of a racist past as the US (Jim Crow laws, neoslavery, etc) that they have to confront. Now that the globalized world is causing more demographic change in Europe there's a loooot more anti-immigration and racist rhetoric. That's not a coincidence.
You do know the Holocaust happened in Europe right?
Other than that, I do agree with you. Europe is still very racist but we like to think we're not. Just because it's less talked about, doesn't mean it's not there.