EDIT: Black people took a word that meant something horrible and made it into such a good thing among themselves that even white people want in on the goodness of the word. How is that not a huge cultural achievement that they should be proud of and allow the broader culture to take up? Doesn't it show the strength of their community to make something awful into something good?
If we're going to have this debate via videos, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRJy48JWiHk
The entire topic is the age-old setup of distracting the the plebs by pitting them against each other. All "White people" didn't enslave Black people - the ruling class did, and got the less powerful in on the take to backstop it. Once that specific oppressive system became untenable, they just moved onto the next one.
People will cheer the takedown of this "powerful" guy, while they've just ruined the unlucky slob of the week. Their need for progress will have been fulfilled, keeping the ongoing lucrative oppressions safely out of their sights.
The whole world doesn’t have to answer to the crimes of Americans, Western Europe, and West Africa. That’s (presumably) your baggage, not mine. By contrast my ancestors have a lot to answer for where Tatars are concerned, and yet you fellow “white” person, had nothing to do with it.
Writing 'the n-word' is similar to saying 'the f word' or 'the c bomb' - everyone knows what we're referring to, and I suspect many simply mentally substitute the actual word as they read.
There's some Le Guin style 'power of true names' thing going on with the myriad words that are somewhere on the sensitive-to-offensive spectrum for whoever you may be talking to or near.
It's especially tricky for non-USA persons, as a lot of US pop-culture is exported, and it comes bundled with a surfeit of political, social, and historical cruft we are expected to track.
In AU it famously caught out one of our comedians in 1979 during an award show, when he used the word 'boy' with Muhammad Ali [1] -- spectacularly neither the host, nor pretty much anyone watching in the ballroom or at home, had any idea it meant something other than someone younger than you, let alone something derogatory.
The wonderful comedian Reginald D Hunter has a strong opinion on the matter -- basically that as long as we all keep skirting around certain words they'll maintain their regrettably powerful effect over people -- but he has the benefit of being in a demographic (black and a comedian) that, by social convention, can casually drop the word. Anyway, I love the idea, but I have no idea how we can get there from here.
[1] Search: bert newton muhammad ali
Using the N-word is bad if you’re not black not because the word has any power, but because it is a litmus test for whether you acknowledge the reality of racial disparity in the US or instead choose to deny it. It can be hard for foreigners to understand, sure, but that doesn’t make it illegitimate. There’s lots of testy subjects in societies all over the world.
In response to:
> The N word continues to have power in the US because black Americans continue to be second class citizens in their own country.
I'd say a) for those of us not in the US we notice that the 'power' of the word infiltrates the rest of the word, and b) that's not the reason.
I suggest the actual reason is that the vast majority of people continue to tacitly agree that it maintain its power.
As noted above, I'm an outsider looking in, and I'm sure there's a lot of history and nuances that I'm oblivious to.
Not really an argument, and as noted above I already do - but find it tricky as it's a moving target (not just those two words, but the greater field of word choice), and it's not as though there's a regular 'all hands' meeting for black people, women, Irish, Asians, short people, people who like coriander, etc where they decide collectively what the official position will be for their demographic.
As noted, I consider Reginald Hunter's opinion -- he thinks you, me, he, and everyone else should use the word a lot in order to remove / defuse its power.
Living in Australia there's a bunch of generally harmless words that are evidently quite powerful in the US. Always amusing to hear stories from friends travelling through the US who get hateful looks for using pussy, fanny, arse, and of course the c word, in casual conversation. But we (I speak for all Australians, naturally) don't think you (everyone else on the planet) needs to track our cultural foibles.
Edit because I realize that I'm going to be super downvoted: I understand the history and the reasoning behind it, and I would agree with the termination as it is "American" common sense. But coming from another country it is still strange to me that there are a couple of well defined words that are COMPLETELY forbidden, and that saying any of those words will immediately terminate any job, relation, everything that you worked for.
I was driving around my own neighborhood looking at a house they were building behind ours (no one owned it and they didn’t even have the drywall up) and someone was looking at me like I was scoping the unfinished house out and kept looking until I drove in my garage.
Another time I was outside dressed in slacks and a polo after coming home from work talking to the (White) yard guy who was covered in grass and one of the neighbors just walked up and started talking to him asking about how long as he lived in the neighborhood completely ignoring me.
This happened in the South in the 80s...
Maybe you should learn American history then.
I probably don't have all the emotional background on this subject as you have, growing up in America, but that doesn't change my observation.
http://money.cnn.com/2018/06/22/news/companies/netflix-spoke...
Sensitive, like the recent internal protests at Google, Amazon, and Microsoft over political matters.
* Amazon - https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/06/amazon-workers-t...
* Microsoft - https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/19/technology/tech-companies...
* Google - https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/04/technology/google-letter-...
Due to this degree of social sensitivity I will never relocate to the west coast for employment.
Alright, I'll ask it: why? Or, perhaps a better question: how can you justify saying that there are situations in which it is constructive for a black person to say it but not for a white person? Is this not simply its own form of racism? As a word, I understand that it has cultural charge, but why should people's right to speak a word be derived simply from who they happened to be born to, an event completely outside of their control?
Black people took ownership of the word. White people using it is disrespectful to that fact, as well as to the complex, terrible history and large impacts that history is still having even today.
What if the white people invent some other insulting words to replace the n-word? Do the black people automatically own those words as well? Say, after the word becomes enough popular?
I think censoring the language never solves the problem. The attitude is much more important. If by chance a black person is a racist toward other black people, and using the n-word to humiliate other black people, his use of the word should be as offensive as the white, right?
Wait, what? Black employees have a "group"?
How many different race, culture, sexuality, and gender identity groups are there at Netflix? Is this internal corporate tribalism an American tech company thing?
I don't see why a (say) large French company would blink at (say) Swedish employees having an employee group of people interested in Swedish culture, who have a Swedish-style coffee break once a month, and organize events around midsummer and other holidays.
Do you think a Swedish employee group at Crédit Agricole is a problem?
You make "internal corporate tribalism" sound like a bad thing. Is a photography club also internal corporate tribalism?
For the employees, I would think it strange that they group themselves as such within the company since their common interest in Swedish culture has nothing to do with Crédit Agricole. If they want to organize events around midsummer I would expect them to conduct all of that organizing outside of the business.
I don't think it's a problem for them, but I guess I just find it somewhat inappropriate.
For the company, yes, I think it's closer to being a problem. I would think there's a near 100% chance that there would be some kind of HR related issue that comes about because of the existence of this group. Doesn't matter how innocent it is. Someone, at some point, is going to have an issue, and there's just no good reason for the company to allow it. Employees can gather for their special coffee meetups and plan holiday events outside of the business.
Of course not, anyone can join that group even if they're not a particularly good photographer at that time. The test of membership is 'personal interest' which is not an inherent, immutable trait.
But a Swedish-ex-pats group directly conflicts with equality ( everyone has the same opportunities ) on a corporate scale and diversity ( tolerate and leverage differences ) on a group scale. I would protest to C-level management if such a group existed on company premises or company time. And I'd hope they'd align with me, else come the time for the E&D report there might be some interesting comments.
- He is stupid to not know the social untold rules, such as never say the "n-word".
- Those untold rules are also so stupid to start with. How is it ok to say the "n-word" but not the original form. They are the same thing.
That kind of rings hollow while Netflix continues to offer movies in which non-Black people use this word-that-shall-not-be-named.
If you're offended about words that offend you may not want to work in an industry where they're discussed.
>The first incident was several months ago in a PR meeting about sensitive words. Several people afterwards told him how inappropriate and hurtful his use of the N-word was, and Jonathan apologised to those that had been in the meeting. We hoped this was an awful anomaly never to be repeated.
Guy slipped up, apologized, and was warned. Makes sense to me.
> Three months later he spoke to a meeting of our Black Employees @ Netflix group and did not bring it up, which was understood by many in the meeting to mean he didn’t care and didn’t accept accountability for his words.
Why was he expected to bring up unintentional mistakes made months ago? At what point can someone be allowed to let bygones be bygones?
> For non-Black people, the word should not be spoken as there is almost no context in which it is appropriate or constructive (even when singing a song or reading a script). There is not a way to neutralize the emotion and history behind the word in any context. The use of the phrase “N-word” was created as a euphemism, and the norm, with the intention of providing an acceptable replacement and moving people away from using the specific word. When a person violates this norm, it creates resentment, intense frustration, and great offense for many.
Perhaps I’m not coming from the same cultural background as Reed (or his PR advisers) I don’t really understand how the mere utterance of a word, without the intention to offend or even to use it as anything other than a descriptor for the word itself, can be this offensive. For my part, I’m trans, and I don’t feel “resentment, intense frustration, and great offense” when I hear people speaking slurs referentially, as long as they’re trying to refer to the words themselves as opposed to using them as labels for a person or group.
I would find it very helpful if someone can explain this to me.
You call that concept facism.
vs.
> "Thanks. Rise high, fall fast. All on a couple of words...." [Later deleted]
Something tells me that even after being fired, he still doesn't get it.
For someone who leads a team specialized in communicating with the public, seems incredibly tone deaf.
His use was descriptive, and descriptive use of the word is not how it was used in the past. Sure, maybe some people get offended - let them be. American society has a victimhood complex and we should stop playing into it - it only encourages it.
We're not in preschool anymore. If someone descriptively saying a word offends you so much, you need to grow up.
During a meeting about offensive words in comedy, Friedland said the word "nigger". We don't know the context, but we do know that people who were in the room with him were uncomfortable with his using it.
Later, he met with two black employees to talk about his use of the word during the meeting about offensive words. During this meeting, he used the word again.
Now, I can appreciate the incandescent radioactivity of that word. I can, I think, begin to imagine what a black person might feel upon hearing a white person say it.
But at some point we have to be able to talk about words as words. If you're having a discussion about offensive language, the demand that one word be euphemized is infantile. So, too, if you're having a discussion about some people's reaction to the use of that word. We have to be able to recognize that the discussion of a word as a word, and the use of that word as an epithet, are completely separate phenomena.
By way of illustration, if a sociologist were to conduct a study about the use of racial epithets among various groups of people, would you expect them to publish a paper that analyzed the use of "the N-word", or would you expect them to analyze the use of the word "nigger"? If the former, why? Of what stuff is built this wall of timid prevarication?
I grew up in the south. It's been probably 30 years since I heard anyone use the dreaded word in the traditional derogatory and demeaning way. But, like every other American, I've heard it used thousands upon thousands of times in the new way, and I know exactly what it means: "man", or sometimes just "person". That's all it means. I wish that word had died long ago. But it's still here, for better or worse, and everyone knows it means man/person.
Did the people who supposedly took great offense at the use of this word take great offense at its usage by other people throughout daily life, including being used in probably thousands of programs on Netflix itself?
That last part is pretty silly...
