[Versus]

Originally Posted by Despanan

Anyway, I don't think it's inappropriate. Clearly you disagree, so feel free to think I'm wrong/racist. I really don't give a crap what either of you think.

I'm continually amazed how you can always miss the fucking point.

Despanan, I don't give a shit how close to American slavery that Magdelin laundries are. I don't fucking care that those women were not property, that they were not bought and sold like they were things. I did not make comparisons between the two and I did not argue that they were or were not slaves.

What's fucked up is that you, as an American, know full fucking well that slavery is a racialized word in this country. You fucking know this. You can argue about it's definition all you fucking want and how it can be applied into a non-racialized context, but you know that it has picked up that additional weight in America.

Jesus Christ, I hear the same fucking bullshit from people who try to argue with me why they should be able to say ******. They fucking know why they can't say it. Nobody is that fucking stupid. They are pretending to be race blind on the outside, and on the inside they are making a conscious decision that their need to say it is more important then the pain it causes the people who hear it.

Obviously, you're clever enough to know that you can't socially get away with saying nigga. But hey, now I'm unreasonable if I don't forgive you since you apologized, right? After all, you DIDN'T MEAN to apologize to Saya, rather then me. You DIDN'T MEAN to imply that there is, in fact, an appropriate use of the word or a place for it. You DIDN'T MEAN to defend yourself by explaining your thought process.

So, apparently, up until friggin' 1996 the Catholic Church in Ireland was keeping "fallen" women against their will, in virtual slavery, taking their children away from them to raise in their orphanages, and using them for free labor in their for-profit laundry business. They beat them, they tortured them, they robbed them of all their possessions and gave them new names.

Here, you said virtual slavery. NOT QUITE slavery, but almost.

Here's the website of a group which is trying to get justice for the women, as of now neither the Catholic Church nor the Irish government has so much as apologized for keeping these women in SLAVERY.

And here, you removed the qualifier of "virtual" and just went ahead and did it, even to use caps lock for emphasis.

Do you know what this says to me? This says that no matter what the fuck you say, you knew that it's not the appropriate word to use because it's been so racialized. And then you just went ahead and did it, probably after thinking about it for a little bit. I mean, they have a lot of the same characteristics, right? It's close enough, isn't it? You even LISTED the similarities, probably with American slavery in mind as a direct comparison in your fucking head. You made a conscious decision that regardless of it's racialized context, it was okay to do. You made a conscious decision that, despite how it might make other people feel, your ability to decide when to use a racialized word was more important. You made a conscious decision that your freedom took precedence over an entire race.

So yeah, you're fucking racist. But do you know what the worst part is? That you don't fucking care.