The Workermonkey

Sunday, January 09, 2005

something you might appreciate 

# posted by josh @ 1/09/2005 10:18:00 PM

tonight i went to dinner with some "friends" here. anyway, my friend charley is married to an italian woman, stephania. and by italian i mean actually from italy, accent and all, not just italian-american. anyway, we were talking about language at dinner, and she mentioned how shocked she is about some things that americans can't or don't say. here's an example:

she was at a friends house and they ordered pizza from a delivery place. the uniforms for the place were black. the delivery man was black. her friend asked her to give the guy the check, and stephania said "where is he i don't see anyone. it's pitch black outside." an obvious mistake, but after she paid the guy and he left her american friend gasped with disbelief.

such oversensitivity tied to political correctness. in italy, it's not offensive if it's not meant with malice. something else she said was it's weird how some people won't call people black. in describing a person they will tiptoe around that, or maybe say african-american. she found this really odd, especially since people call her white, not caucasion. so what's the difference??

why, in america, do we place such importance on the actual words, rather than their meaning? if it's meant to be offensive, or said with malice, that's one thing, but why do we tiptoe around certain words or phrases or descriptions.

it limits the ways we can say what we mean. we're so uptight. don't get me wrong, i think racial and gender equality are important, but i don't think changing what we say is the best way to achieve it. and let's face it, affirmative action is just reverse racism/sexism quite often. i dont necessarily have an answer, so maybe i'm not being helpful, but i think our speech has been limited in a ridiculous way and i'm not sure why.

ok well trailing off and i got class tomorrow

peace in the northeast

1 comments

I never really liked the whole tiptoeing scene myself. It took awhile, but I concluded that the hippest way to nonoffensively refer to coloreds is "brothers" or "sisters". It kind of calls forth the whole 60's black empowerment thing, as well as our common human respect for one another.

"come on, man...where can we score some rock?"

"I dunno....go talk to those brothers - they probably know."

By  DJ Booze Piñata, at Monday, January 10, 2005 11:16:00 AM  

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