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Arizona Republican refers to Black Americans as 'colored people' in House floor debate
(www.nbcnews.com)
this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2023
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Euphemism treadmill.
In any sensitive, socially fraught context, terminology will just change faster than in other areas of life.
That's why we no longer use terms like idiot, retard, cripple, imbecile, etc. as neutral, objective terminology. Instead, terms that where initially used as objective, clinical terminology are now exclusively used as slurs and insults.
It's just that when it comes to race, some people (and it's often people not affected by it) have a hard time accepting that concept.
To be fair, if I heared someone say "colored people" I would not be at all surprised to later hear them say "retard" in the same setting.
An easy way to pick out racists in the modern day is if they just casually call black people "blacks." It seems to be one of the words that, although it's not used by non-racists, hasn't been phased out by some of the less explicit racists yet in the way "colored people" has.
Yeah, dead giveaway, they saw "black people" and removed "people" in their head so the verbiage is bound to follow.
As we've seen over the past decade (well, past few decades, tbh), changing the word only moves the objectionable meaning onto the new word. The goal is to address the meaning, but it feels like so much energy is being spent on addressing the words themselves that the meaning never gets dealt with...
...which I guess is understandable for those who have given up hope of the meaning being addressed, but then why spend the effort on the word?
It's been going on for much longer. Just look up all the clinical terms that came into use in the Victorian era. There's been an ongoing effort to come up with better terminology. Words came into existence in an effort to have neutral terminology to refer to certain symptoms or conditions or to categorize people or chronic illnesses or ethnicities etc.
It's just that we no longer use terms like "moron" or "lunatic" or "retard" or "fool" or "insane" or "Mongol" as neutral, objective, clinical terminology.
I think many people get used (and attached) to the terminology that they learned when growing up, unaware that this terminology has been changing at a rapid pace for centuries now, and then get all bent out of shape when they're being told that the words they were taught as kids are no longer the preferred way of referring to certain conditions/ethnicities/demographic groups etc.
And of course, then there are people who use those expressions with the full intention to insult and malign, only to feign ignorance when called out: "But that's the word people have always been using! Why are you getting so upset?"
It would help if people would stop being aholes and turning terms into offensive ones by intentionally using them insult. "autism" is being used online sometimes in place of "retard" now as an insult. Won't be long before those of us on the spectrum need a new term because of these clowns.
Every insult word to call someone stupid was once a clinical term (including stupid). I am not kidding look it up that's quite a long history of doing this, people suck.