Dilbert_X wrote:
What do I need to understand?
Black people can call white people crackers because 'its their culture'?
White people can't call black people niggers ever?
If Zimmerman had phoned a friend and said "there's this creepy looking nigger hanging around" his feet wouldn't have touched the ground and he'd be doing life right now - even in the South.
As it is Martin apparently expressed a racist viewpoint, according to pretty well every witness he was on top in the fight, and he's the victim.
first off, 'cracker' is not exactly a devastatingly racist term. i have never heard anyone be insulted or racially oppressed by use of the term 'cracker'. it's on about the same level of disrespect as calling someone a "dude" (a word with a literally pejorative term, just as cracker is too, technically). white people were never enslaved and oppressed and treated as second-class citizens (if they were even treated as human at all). every word has a history and a socially-constituted meaning - denotations and connotations. 'nigger' is pretty obviously an insta-shot of racist espresso, dumping hundreds of years of enslavement and serious civil-rights inequality into one neat trochaic word.
i'm not surprised you have to have this explained to you. 'cracker' is mildly offensive, at best. 'nigger' is a word with serious baggage. words accrete these social meanings through their social history and contextual use. it's obvious 'cracker' is not on a level of taboo as 'nigger'. having this explained to you is patently ludicrous.
and, cf. first point again. 'cracker' is used as casually in street-talk as 'nigga' (different from 'nigger'). it's just phatic talk. it doesn't imply any racist intent whatsoever. it's hard to accuse someone of acting out of racist ideology or hatred when they were the ones being approached and harassed. i'm sure it's really the fault of trayvon's crypto-racist beliefs that zimmerman decided to approach him. right.
Last edited by Uzique The Lesser (2013-07-15 07:29:26)