• dancedancedance@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    While I appreciate the anger please consider that “mediocre <ethnicity>” is not a very nice way to phrase this. Also given the recent demographic pole there are many “white” people here who are likely on your side. It particularly hurts when people on your side use language like this.

    • at_an_angle@lemmy.one
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      1 year ago

      As a mediocre white man living in the midwest, I know who that headline is aimed at and its not me.

      It’s aimed at the Faux News consuming mediocre white people. Not the “liberal” white man I am.

      • dancedancedance@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

        My concern is with the words themselves not who they’re aimed at.

        As an aside you should never consider yourself mediocre. Good people are far from mediocre.

    • Gil (he/they)@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      While I appreciate the anger please consider that “mediocre <ethnicity>” is not a very nice way to phrase this.

      They are using the original title of the article. As per the sidebar rules - “Preserve the original title when possible.”

      Also given the recent demographic pole there are many “white” people here who are likely on your side. It particularly hurts when people on your side use language like this.

      To be honest, I don’t find this phrasing nearly as harmful as people of color being told for decades that they weren’t as qualified or deserving to be admitted into Ivy League schools compared to white applicants and that the only reason they were “allowed” is because of their race. Nor does it really compare to the harm caused by decades of subjugation, discrimination, and generational wealth disparity.

      • dancedancedance@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

        Didn’t realize it was the original title.

        No it doesn’t compare. It can still be hurtful. These aren’t mutually exclusive.

      • Evergreen5970@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

        I’m pretty oversensitive to tone because I’ve never been faced with discrimination or bullying in my life despite being a queer autistic Asian female. I was ignored. So I never had to “toughen up” to ribbing let alone nasty tones borne of frustration with discrimination. And man does “mediocre whites” bother me a good deal. I do not blame OP though, it’s just the original title and using it is part of the rules. I’m probably an anomaly and everyone else with my demographic uses this language because they’ve had to deal with more crap from majority identities than I have. But I still really do not like the dismissal and namecalling of anybody based on an uncontrollable part of birth, “punching up” or not. I don’t like punching anybody.

        I get why it’s done and don’t want to fight about how I’m the tone police, I know that tendency of myself because of how oversensitive I am. It’ll probably never sit right with me and I honestly think it would be callous of me to sit and make myself comfortable with this. I get why people do it and why this smaller harm is nothing compared to tons of discrimination, but I think I’m allowed to be hurt for others by this too.

        This is mostly on me for not blocking Politics, going to go do that right now. Pretty leftist but I know I need to stay away from emotionally-charged political discussions for this very reason. I get really upset about this kind of language even though I understand why it happens and that I “should” be siding with the language users instead of the majority who isn’t exactly being called inferior and subhuman by the title of the post. And objectively, every race has its mediocre people. I know my position can be upsetting to people who just want to vent and expect a safe space for that on Beehaw (I picked Beehaw for its safe space status too) and end up getting pushback that can look really close to “actually this mean wording is worse than the discrimination you experience every day and you have no right to ever be frustrated or less-than-perfectly-diplomatic in your speech.”

        If it helps any, I also tone police when I see people talk in a similar way about minorities. Going to go block Politics now so I don’t do this again, but also not deleting this statement because I stand by my feelings about hating punching—up or down.