this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2024
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Because it's not your place to tell people from a marginalized group how they are allowed to interact with the slurs that have been used against them. Reclaiming words and for once holding the power around the word is their right if they so choose.
It's your job as a parent to explain the historical and social context to your children. You have work to do if your child is bothered they can't call other kids a slur that those children have reclaimed. It does nobody any good to bury our heads in the sand, say persecuted people can't say it if my privileged child can't say it, and pretend there's no complex history there.
Marginalization is not universal or absolute. You can easily have people who are marginalized in some contexts, and privileged in others.
An easy example is religion.
A christian in Spain is probably considered part of the majority and privileged, meanwhile, that same person could be subject to intense persecution in a country like Saudi Arabia because of the same beliefs.
The same can be applied to this child being bullied by their racist peers.
It's not absolute, yes. But we're not talking about any situation—specifically white and black children using a specific racial slur. One of those belongs to a group that has been (and still is) systematically persecuted with that term connected. The other has not. We're not seriously going to say that one white kid potentially being bullied is somehow comparable to the history of societal persecution against black people I hope.
The point I was making is it's not reasonable to turn one situation of someone being bullied as evidence that black people are not allowed to use the n word if white people can't. That's it. I'm really amazed that is somehow controversial.
My kids should not be punished for things they have never caused and never said. We need to stop punishing for sins of the past.
It isn't punishing for sins of the past, it's punishing for sins if the present. If your daughter calls a black classmate a slur today, then that happened today. The reason why it's bad has to do with a whole lot of history, but it was still said today.
Nobody is going around suspending students because their great granddaddy used a slur in 1840.
No my daughter doesn't say that. The black students taunt her and call her it and say she can't say it. She is respectful.
How is it taunting if she doesn't want to say it back? The entirety of her response could be, "Yep." It wouldn't be taunting for someone to tell me, "You can't do nuclear physics." I would agree with them and be slightly confused why they were apparently out of the blue stating it.
If she's truly being randomly bullied, that's not going to be solved by telling black people they can't use that word. A bully would just say something else. This is a rather easy one to deflect.
Then what are you complaining about? A white girl saying "nigger" is disgusting anyway. They might as well taunt her for not being allowed to eat feces. If she's a decent person she'll have the same inclination to do that as to say slurs.