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?
There's a few things about this (specifically and in general) that are frustrating.
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.
Let me respectfully submit that you’re missing the point. The N word continues to have power in the US because black Americans continue to be second class citizens in their own country. They live shorter lives, are more likely to be unemployed, make a third less income, are much more likely to be imprisoned, etc. Across the country they continue to live in the same neighborhoods their parents or grandparents were segregated into. Compare slurs addressed to Italian and Irish Americans which, though impolite, probably won’t get you black listed, because Irish and Italians reached economic and social parity with the rest of the country.
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.
I disagree. I 100% agree with and accept that racism is a huge problem, and that black people are definitely at a huge disadvantage in a number of areas. HOWEVER. I think that white people using it is fine as long as it's not serious, targeted harrasment. It's not a litmus test because it finds in me a false positive.
It's not up to you. There is something resembling a consensus among black people and the very large number of people who agree with you about the problem of racism in America that using the word --- even to sing along to a hip-hop song --- signals that you don't care about the word, and are willing to use it casually. You are free to disagree with that consensus. But knowing about it, and using the word anyways, makes a statement. You can't pretend not to know, and people won't care if you try. And there is no amount of message board reasoning you can apply that will reliably scramble the signal you send when you use the word.
You might get lucky --- hell, you'll probably usually be lucky --- and no consequence will befall you for saying the n-word. But eventually your luck will run out.
That's what happened here!
Notice that Netflix makes it pretty clear that this chucklefuck had an opportunity to climb out of the hole he dug for himself. There was a black Netflix employee group. He apparently even addressed it, after the incident. And didn't mention what he'd said. He's not a recent arrival to this country; he's a well-to-do middle-aged white executive. What would it have cost him to mollify their concern? How much sympathy can you muster for him?
Also, it's not like this is unique to black people and the N-word. LGBT people have similar words and we have reached similar detentes about them.
>It's not up to you. There is something resembling a consensus among black people and the very large number of people who agree with you about the problem of racism in America that using the word --- even to sing along to a hip-hop song --- signals that you don't care about the word, and are willing to use it casually.
I think "singing along" is not a sharp enough distinction - the Netflix guy, in a meeting about sensitive words, was presumably saying something like "The words that are awful and completely out of bounds and should never be used, like c-, f- or n-..." Such a use is firmly on the other side of a use-mention boundary in the way that singing along some lyrics is not. So it seems striking (at least to this non-American) that it should be considered heavily tabooed in this way.
In a discussion on reddit, someone said
"Within the last fifteen years, I've had readings in university English classes that contained said word and we're discussed and quoted in class with no one batting an eye. This was also the case in highschool before this. There's a big difference between referring to a Twain or Goines novel and using the word maliciously or with any intent beyond dispassionate quotations."
So are they wrong, or was there a huge shift in the social norm of using the word in the last 15 years (discuss in class vs being ostracized and fired, both for mentioning the word with full awareness of its awful context) or is the consensus not really quite a consensus yet, and asserting that it is, like in the Netflix CEO's letter or your comment, are (well-meant) attempts at driving it further along?
>Also, it's not like this is unique to black people and the N-word. LGBT people have similar words and we have reached similar detentes about them.
That sounds strange to me. Are you sure? Presumably you mean the word f-, but I think I see or hear the word being discussed and quoted in the context and with the awareness of its awfulness quite often without heavy, or any, social consequences.
It's as much up to me as anybody else. I won't be discounted because you think I don't have the right skin color to have a valid opinion.
> There is something resembling a consensus among black people
I doubt you have any reliable way of knowing whether your claim is true, but it wouldn't matter if it was. I simply don't respect your, or anyone else's, racist notions about what skin colors entitle the wearer to say certain words, any more than I would respect racist notions about who gets to use which drinking fountain.
I have no desire to say that word, but if I want to use it, I will, as is my right as a human, and if someone wants to persecute me because they think my skin color does not authorize me to that word, that is their own racist, neo tribalist, re-segregationist thing, and nothing I've done wrong.
A lynching is an extrajudicial execution by a mob. It's clear to me where you're coming from, and that there's no point in us continuing to litigate this.
Now you seem to be pretending not to understand a metaphor. Is that to avoid actually debating the point? And please do let me know where I'm coming from. I'd like to hear that, since it's so clear in your mind.
You can call me a racist all you want. At the end of the day, I'm advocating one standard of conduct for everyone without distinction by race, while my opponents are arguing for discrimination by race when judging conduct, for segregation of parts of our language by race, etc.
What I am saying is that the words you choose and utter send signals, and the signal sent does, in fact, depend on who you are and, in this case, on the color of your skin (if we were discussing the f-word, it would depend instead on whether you were evidently an LGBT person).
That's not a controversial statement. It's an obvious one. You have to work to make it problematic, and the work you put into making it problematic also sends a signal, as does your use of the word "lynching" to describe the termination of a Netflix executive (the subtext of my response to that comment was not that you don't know the definition of the word).
That signal you've sent is what I was referring to when I said there was no point to us litigating this. I feel bad for having left enough of a string dangling for 'pvg to have felt the need to bat at (though I tentatively agree with the sentiment he shared). But now, having explained what I was trying to say for an entire second time, I'm confident there's really no need for either of us to make the same points again in escalating stridency.
This is a deep, deep subthread on a flagged submission to HN that is a day old. We're the only people reading this. There are no stakes to this discussion. I think we can stop needling each other any time.
You say my words send signals, and that the signals depend in this case on the color of my skin. That seems to me to be an evasive way of saying some people will discriminate whether what I'm saying is perfectly OK or terribly offensive based on my race.
If the interpreter sees themselves as a member of a racial group, and thinks that their racial group has ownership over a word, they may get upset if they see an outsider using their word. I understand that. That is what's happening. But the mentality in which someone sees themselves as a member of some separate group because of their race is exactly what I am opposing.
You say our actions send signals. Well, is this guy just drinking water at a water fountain? Is he just sitting on a bus? Or is he sending a "signal" that he thinks he's as good as a white man by drinking from the "wrong" fountain or sitting in the "wrong" seat on the bus? The problem is not entirely within the so-called signal, a big part of it is within the mind of the interpreter.
I know how saying that word would be received by a lot of black people, and I would never do that, as I have a very strong commitment never to harm anyone, and just a lot of general sympathy, compassion, and love for black people. But I have to resist if anyone starts claiming that their race gives them special ownership over words. That is a step in the wrong direction.
'lynching', 'uppity', a bunch of variants of 'they're the real racists', 'neo-segregationists'. You consistently and repeatedly adopt the language of actual oppression and violence against minorities to describe your particular minor grievances. The only people who speak in those terms are racists and racist-apologists. If you don't want people to think you're one of them, find another way to express yourself.
But I have to resist
Yeah, you're joining the Maquis over the jackbooted thuggery of some random person getting fired from Netflix.
I have really no idea what you're talking about with respect to water fountains and busses. Nobody cares who sits where on the bus, except don't take the handicap spots and don't give your bags their own seat.
On the other hand, if you're a white dude and you casually use the N-word, people are going to draw conclusions about you. That's not a Hacker News argument; it is a simple statement of fact, obviously backed up by the article we are commenting on. You can not like that fact all you want, but again, be aware, in the same way that people will draw conclusions about you for using the word, they will also draw conclusions about you for how loudly you protest the injustice of the fact that you can't safely use the word.
> I have really no idea what you're talking about with respect to water fountains and busses.
Assuming good faith here. Let me try again.
The idea is that saying the n-word while not being black sends a signal of not caring about the word, not giving it enough weight, not caring about the plight of black people. Well, I'm saying that's not true. That information is not in the signal.
Suppose a young white person is sitting in a cafe. They raise a phone to their ear and uses the n-word the way that has become normal, to mean man/person: "hey, what up my (n-word)?"
If I overheard that, I wouldn't think anything of it. They're greeting a friend. I just don't have any notions about how only people of certain ethnicities are allowed to use certain words.
If you did have such notions, you might be offended. But that's in the machinery of your own mind, not the signal. The signal was just "how are you, man/person?"
Suppose you (Thomas) see a black man sitting near the front of a bus. What signal is he sending to you? Not much, right? He's just sitting there. Now, suppose it's the 50s, and it's Alabama, and the onlooker is an older white man. What signal do you suppose that guy gets? He might get a signal that an uppity negro thinks he's the equal of a white man. So, where is the problem? In the sitting, or in the looking?
Now, where is the problem in the situation we're talking about? In the speaking of a word that means man/person, or in the hearing of it?
I imagine there are a lot of black people who just loathe the n-word, and never want to hear it from anyone. This is actually the perspective that makes the most sense to me. But they have to concede that the meaning of the word has changed. The vast majority of the time, it just means man/person. Sorry. I would have preferred we just forget the word, but that's not what happened. Now it means man/person, and our squabble is about whether people who never had anything whatsoever to do with the racial persecution of anyone will be firewalled from certain parts of our language because of their perceived ethnic affiliation.
I'm saying no. It's unfair, and it's not a wise way forward, and just unacceptable to me personally.
You are making a normative argument. I am making a positive argument. You aren't acknowledging the positive argument, let alone rebutting it; you just re-type the normative one, with angrier words. You're not going to get anywhere doing that.
Why does it have to be a perfectly accurate litmus test in your eyes? As in, maybe there are very few false positives — who cares? A test that has a tiny false positive rate is usually still a very good test. So it could still function broadly to indicate who does or doesn’t take on-going racial disparity seriously, and if the relatively few genuine false positive people are seen by the public as somehow endorsing that the word’s generic use is OK, it’s probably going to lead to more widespread use by the much greater number of people who plan to use it in the racist, true positive sense, and then disingenuously say it’s “just a word,” or it’s ok because it “wasn’t targeted harassment.”
The people who intend to use such a word in a racist sense will already be expressing racist ideas, so what? I see no reason why the common usage of every word should not be normalized. There should be no word that the simple utterance of it, context-free, is taken as offensive. Not profanity, not slurs, not dialectic variations, whatever. Because that simply acts as a roadblock in communication in that people get hung up on the specific word used. I don't think it has to be a perfect litmus test, but I don't see why it's an even marginally accurate one.
But the utterance comes with conditional probability of racism.
Prob(racist | utters n-word) is high. You’re essentially saying to ignore this fact unless you happen to have extra info to further condition on extra context.
But I see no reason why anyone would. It’s just a matter of basic evidence, basic posterior probability.
I think that it's much easier to simply observe how they use such a word, rather than making blanket statements. If someone says "I'm tired of seeing fucking niggers on the bus all the time!" then they're clearly being callous, racist, and insensitive. If, on the other hand, someone says "let's have an intelligent conversation about usage of the word 'nigger,'" they're clearly not; but the former statement corresponds almost exactly to "I'm tired of seeing fucking black people on the bus all the time!" and the latter to "let's have an intelligent conversation on the use of the n-word." In other words, being racist and using that word are orthogonal; the reason that blatant racists are more likely to use such a word is that they presumably have less ability to see what is socially acceptable or morally right, and that they have less restraint. In other words, racist people's higher likelihood of using such a word is purely incidental, not a direct correlation. An analogy might be getting a higher insurance premium because you live in city X and actuaries notices that city X has a higher-than-average rate of crashes. Even though city X is quite large, and you live towards the north side, but all the crashes happen on the north side because it's a poorer part of town so driving education is worse.
This already is what we do. We observe whether someone just uses the word or if they show the respect of at least referring to it as “the n-word” when there is a meta-context of discussing it.
That’s no different than what you propose, except that there’s far less risk of either incidentally triggering someone for whom the word itself materially carries a weight of trauma, and far less risk of making it seem like the word is OK to say so long as you do mental gymnastics about the context of how you said it (something which people who want to use it racially would like to do to avoid punishment).
Allowing people to scapegoat their clearly racist usage of the word, under the pretense that it’s OK as long as the intended usage is not meant to be offensive, is particularly terrible, as it shifts the blame of “being offended” onto the class of people for whom it is a racial slur. It’s tacit racism endorsement 101.
What you describe seems like it contributes nothing in the way of actually bolstering free speech or better identifying slur usage from discussion usage. The current way already serves those purposes better, and without the extra risks that your described point of view carries with it.
> “I suggest the actual reason is that the vast majority of people continue to tacitly agree that it maintain its power.”
It still seems you really are committed to this point of view, that the word has power only because people continue to agree to a social convention of assigning power to the word. But I think this still continues to miss the point.
It’s not at all about whether enough people choose to assign power to the word so as to force everyone at large to deal with it as a social issue. That’s a selfish way to look at it, like your free speech is your lawn and some punk kids drove their n-word social convention onto your lawn, and you’re yelling “get off my lawn” (as in, make this convention about this word go away). Thinking about it this way, the focus seems to be your freedom to say certain syllables without having to acknowledge any broader historical context about them.
But instead consider that the word, apart from any chosen modern social agenda, does represent a huge and unsolved systemic discrimination and repression towards black people. It does so because of its historical meaning, the contexts within which it has been primarily used, and the clear usage as a racial slur spoken predominantly by white America towards black America.
These are just the facts and context of the word, which we can look at and step back a second and say, well shit, a whole lot of those deviant racism problems are still going on today. And so maybe we ought to be sensitive and respectful and careful about its usage.
This isn’t a social convention to give the word power. It’s not just held up by some stereotypes of progressivism just itching for something to be offended by. It’s an encoding that is highly related to racism problems that are still severe and still on-going and so treating that word, among a variety of types of hateful slurs, with sensitivity is a lot more about acknowledging that than it is about enshrining some syllables with a progressive agenda status.
Overall, if this slightly limits your vocabulary or your ability to use it as a type of shock humor or something — well, that doesn’t seem that important by comparison. It’s not just some people agreeing “well word X is OK for crass humor, but word Y is off limits” ... rather it’s off limits because it commands a basic respect for certain on-going racist aspects of our reality.
Maybe one day long after our current systemic racism has stopped, future people will look back at racial slurs of this era as silly words whose context they don’t understand, and are free to joke about. Sort of how we could look at British insults of the Shakespearean era, or insults of the American Revolutionary War (“turncoats”, “lobsterbacks”), and not feel the intense political charge and visceral hatefulness they evoked at the time of their origination. To us they are silly words.
But that’s because the specific contextual meaning is not still going on, day to day, with visceral consequences for people in their daily lives. But for the racism contextualized by the n-word, it absolutely is still going on.
Fair enough. I think you're misrepresented a couple of my points, and inverted (my) causality suggestion on social convention -> word power, but here's the crux:
> But instead consider that the word, apart from any chosen modern social agenda, does represent a huge and unsolved systemic discrimination and repression towards black people.
Do you think that, for the nebulous entity that is 'America', resolution of this discrimination and repression problem is eased by offering racist people a very powerful language construct they can use to negative effect?
But nobody is offering it to them. It is just an aspect of reality. It would be like asking if the problem of breaking and entering is eased by describing the physics of throwing a rock through a window. The reality is just there, either to be respected or misused.
I would say that any official attempt to delegitimize the claim that use of the n-word is offensive and generally grounds for punishment or reprimand, however, would possibly do huge damage, as it would essentially completely wipe out the meaningfulness of a major symbol of racism in the US. So trying to “take away” the word likely won’t hinder racists at all, yet it will communicate to black people that their suffering won’t be treated with legitimacy.
It could even be basically a form of institutionally gaslighting black people at large. ... “It’s just the n-word. It can’t hurt you unless you let it hurt you.” Basically a nasty form of victim-blaming.
Thank you again - it's always good to have insights from someone who's clearly intelligent and has thought about the subject at some length.
As I noted, I'm outside-looking-in, haven't lived in the culture that's generated this situation, and (not noted, but relevant) have a somewhat optimistic / naive / rationalist view of how the world should be.
Having said that, I feel we're talking past each other a bit here.
You indicated my claim that this particular word has such weight was because everyone (in the US, lesser extent elsewhere) has agreed to treat it as a very powerful word, was wrong, and selfish. You suggest that it's a sensitive word because it represents a 'huge and unsolved systemic discrimination and repression towards black people' ... which I can start to understand (historically), but can't understand how the current attitude helps towards resolving that.
I note you dodged my question in the last exchange, instead offering what my philosophy lecturers may have described as 'pithy aphorisms' such as 'it's just an aspect of reality'. Which is doubtless true. Pretty much everything we experience is an aspect of reality -- though that's not terribly helpful.
The suggestion that the word is a major symbol of racism that we all need to agree to keep alive sounds perverse when worded in that way.
Surely it'd be preferable to actually start to work on that whole actual resolution of racism.
So my previous question was basically whether either is dependent on, or retarded by, the other.
> as far as the n-word and c-word, why not consider the opinion of black people and women in this argument?
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.
> 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.
For future reference, this is a stupid idea.
Certain words have derogatory "power" towards a group because there remains groups of real people who still possess possess real prejudice towards that group and want to dehumanize that group. Nobody cares if you call somebody a "Neanderthal" (extremely offensive, Neanderthals likely possessed an older and more refined culture than the hyperaggressive saipiens) but go to Japan and start talking about "Shina" or go to Germany and use "untermensch" and the fascists will come crawling out of the woodwork like ants drawn to sugar.
There is no reason to believe that using words a lot would remove their power. Instead, history as shown again and again (open a book for gods sakes), normalizing such language only empowers the fascist elements and silences the victims. Normalizing these words is a prelude to bloodshed precisely because they are the leading edge in a real campaign to dehumanize real people. There's a reason the German pre-war press often referred to the traitorous Jews, the Rwandan radio stations often referred to Tutsis as cockroaches and Trump refers to immigrants as animals and rapists. This isn't about "political correctness," this is about removing real people from society.
This may come as a shock, but neither group is really cohesive and homogenous, and therefore each present a multitude of opinions on the topic ranging from permissive to prohibitive.
Obviously the guy should have been fired if the intent was to offend or demean. Personally, I would never in any circumstances use the word. But do we or don't we want black culture to shape all of american culture? The word shows up in movies, TV shows, and music that white people consume and enjoy. When a word is offensive enough that it is derogatory when a white person uses it no matter the context, but okay for a black person, that is a cultural form of separate but equal. Either make the word something everybody can say or nobody can say. I vote the latter but if black people truly want to reclaim the word as a positive, then I am okay with that as long as anybody can use the word (at least with positive intent).
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?
Thank you for sharing. I accept the first half of his argument, which is why I don't use certain words. However, Coates gives himself the freedom to use certain words he would not himself use in situ. The news article posted appears that there is a word that white people cannot utter in any context, even in describing why they don't use it.
The parent didn't ask for a link to a video, so a link to a video cannot be an answer to the question. Perhaps you could summarise or quote the part of the video that you believe answers the question.
> Does racism still exist? Sure, but not for black people more so than any other race.
Black people in the US make a third less income on average than white people. If this is not the result of racism (either ongoing or the lasting effects of past racism), then please tell me what causes that difference.
Ezra Klein has a stat --- I'm trying to track it down, so this is a paraphrase --- that for any given level of income, a black family in America also lives on a block that is 30% less affluent on average than a white family with the same income level.
I don't agree with the GP about racism no longer being an issue. But if you're saying that racism is wholly responsible for the income gap, then what's your answer to exactly the same question applied to Asians vs white people (25% less income for white)?
Men are much more likely than women to commit suicide and be homeless, and many times more likely to be incarcerated. If this is not the result of sexism, please tell me what causes that difference.
One factor in high rates of male homelessness is more agency than women typically have. In other words, they choose to go be homeless as the lesser evil in some lousy situation. It is only one factor and that doesn't change the fact that sexism is actually an issue in such things.
It also doesn't change the fact that this is basically a straw man argument, not pertinent to the question of racism.
The ownership of the n word is a metaphorical reparation for slavery. Its existence is a reminder that white people did something terribly wrong to black people. Much like Holocaust denial it's not just a logical construct but a blasphemous one.
... and the original sin of the Bible. One must always be ready to bend the knee to whatever orator can conjure it.
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.
To me, if you want reparations, economic ones would be more helpful. As strict as the current cultural enforcement of the word is, I see it as only a way to divide and not a way for black culture to be part of all America.
The problem is that like “Black people” the phrase “White people” is meaningless. Plenty of people who Americans would lump together as “blacks” were never enslaved ( or had ancestors enslaved). Plenty of people Americans would lump together has “whites” had nothing to do with the slave trade. I’m of Russian descent for example, and no one in my admittedly very white family tree enslaved anyone of African descent.
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.
I agree with you, and this is the whole issue with identity politics. It is all about categorizing people and assuming everything about them based on their groups.
We should look at the individuals.
Fyi, two years ago I asked 'rayiner (who is active on this thread, and also in the top 10 of all time on this site) whether I should feel guilty about slavery given that I am from a similar situation as yours.
Reed Hasting’s letter is coming from a point of view I find very strange.
>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.
> 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 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)
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?
There's no "rights" at play here. It's just moral and social norms.
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 about other minorities that have never repressed the black using the n-word?
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?
Once again, I ask: why, because someone happens to be born black, do they get 'ownership' of the word? What does it even mean for an ethnic group to have ownership of a word? A single word doesn't have enough meaning to express a complete idea.
You don't have to agree that they have ownership. There are some people who disagree. It's an emergent phenomenon. There is no committee that decides this. But you would be fighting a difficult uphill battle, one that doesn't seem to have much upside (from my perspective).
The word's complex meaning is found in its enormously rich historical and cultural contexts.
This is a very common, slightly less obvious variant of 'how come there is no white history month'. You can google your way to plenty of discussions of it, including a recently very popular Ta-Nehisi Coates video.
I think Johnathan Friedland is really wishing right now that his comments were evaluated within the context of the content of his character, and not the context of the color of his skin.
>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).
That kind of rings hollow while Netflix continues to offer movies in which non-Black people use this word-that-shall-not-be-named.
"Three months later he spoke to a meeting of our Black Employees @ Netflix group..."
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?
Every large company I've visited in Europe seems to have an ex-pat group, based around the cultural identity of "foreigner".
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?
> "Do you think a Swedish employee group at Crédit Agricole is a problem?"
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.
Could you explain more what "nothing to do with Crédit Agricole" means?
I assume a company is interested in the physical and mental health of its employees. Every large company I have visited has internal employee groups for all matter of topics; sports, movies, gardening, art, jogging, and more.
An expat organization can help people get over the culture shock of working in a French company.
Surely "there's a near 100% chance that there would be some kind of HR related issue that comes about because of the existence of" any of these groups, yes?
Yet we see that most companies have such groups.
Could it be that there are benefits which outweigh the possible negatives? Because that's my impression of why companies allow these groups to use company resources.
> Every large company I have visited has internal employee groups for all matter of topics; sports, movies, gardening, art, jogging, and more.
> Yet we see that most companies have such groups.
There's a significant culture difference between us then. My experience is the opposite. I've never seen that. Not saying it doesn't exist, but it's strange to me. I don't doubt that a group can be useful or interesting. In fact I've joined expat groups through meetup.com when I was traveling abroad for months at a time and completely understand the benefits. It's just the idea of having it associated with the corporation I find odd.
Next up: Employees for Palestinian Freedom. At Netflix!
But that's in the US, so what about Sweden? https://www.fsy.se/azfotoklubb/digitala.asp (via Google Translate) shows that AstraZeneca's photo club has a room at AstraZeneca for their equipment.
Or the Accenture in the Philippines; quoting from https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Employee-Review-Accenture-... "They have several clubs for hobbies like Photography Club, Move for dancers, Accenture Pool Band for musicians, Gamers for people who love sports, Run for runners, Working Moms for women/mothers and many other more. Each club have fun activities that saves us breathers from work. You'll get to connect with the others that has the same interest as you."
One of the Accenture clubs in Ireland "aims to promote the use of the Irish language and members engage with fellow Irish speakers within Accenture." - a club based on national/cultural identity, yes?
> Is a photography club also internal corporate tribalism?
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.
I said "an employee group of people interested in Swedish culture". I did not say "Swedish-only group". I think that difference is the nub of this topic.
If a non-Swede were to show up to the Swedish group, and be harassed (eg, be told to leave on the basis of not being a Swede), then that's an civil rights violation already in the US.
Was tejohnso's question specifically about employee groups which discriminate membership on the basis of national origin, sex, etc.?
As I understand US law, an employee organization which uses donated company space or funds and which discriminates on the basis of sex, national origin, veteran status, etc. is covered under the same anti-discrimination laws that the company itself is.
More specifically, "It is illegal to harass an employee because of race, color, religion, sex (including gender identity, sexual orientation, and pregnancy), national origin, age (40 or older), disability or genetic information." ... "The harasser can be the victim's supervisor, a supervisor in another area, a co-worker, or someone who is not an employee of the employer, such as a client or customer." (quotes from https://www.eeoc.gov//laws/practices/ ).
Since tejohnso was talking about things which were at US tech companies, I assumed that tejohnso was referring to currently-legal US practices.
Is "Black Employees @ Netflix group" restricted to only people who self-identify as black? Or is it also open to people who do not consider themselves black? (Eg, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) membership is not limited to colored people). I do not know. Nor do I know if it uses Netflix resources.
I do know that my sister's women's group at a large international company has men who are members.
I think your statement "The test of membership is 'personal interest' which is not an inherent, immutable trait" is too narrow. Religion faith is a mutable trait. Just like we both would reject an on-site employee club which excluded non-Swedes, I would also reject an on-site employee club which exclude non-Protestants.
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.
It may seem strange to someone from another country... but there aren't that many countries that fought a massive, traumatic, bloody war over the issue of slavery. Add in Jim Crow, which only ended about 50 years ago, and you'll find things are a little more fraught than they might be in countries that peacefully abolished slavery (or didn't heavily practice it in the first place).
The idea of “White spaces” is still prevalent just not legal. I go to plenty of places where people look at my family like we don’t belong.
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.
That really stinks. I am curious, do you see as cultural restrictions on the N-word as a way to make a sort of verbal "black space?" Do you think it is appropriate to counter white spaces by making black spaces or do you think it is better to tear down all race-based spaces?
Black people don’t need to go out of our way to create spaces - as soon as too many of us move into a neighborhood it will be done for us. (Is gentrification still a thing after the real estate crash in 2008?)
Could you explain how this is fair and effective? I would be interested in reading something other than bald assertions and cyclic argument ("it's bad because it's bad").
I mean, that's it. It's a rule of our society. That word means "black people that are weak, ignorant, servile and subhuman". We as a society have elected to make it a word that is forbidden in polite conversation unless you think the definition is accurate. Using it casually, even if you think you are not racist, is a signal that you don't care about other people's feelings.
> We as a society have elected to make it a word that is forbidden in polite conversation unless you think the definition is accurate.
We have done no such thing. Your statement is about as inaccurate and misleading as it could possibly be. The word you are talking about can be heard throughout TV shows, movies, and music. The vast majority of the time, it is not being used in the way you suggest. Your assertion that it is a "rule of our society" is as absurd as claiming the earth is flat.
You're being deliberately obtuse. It is used casually among African-Americans because they want to own it. It is used in works of fiction to portray exactly the type of negative image I used earlier. It is almost never used by non-Blacks with sincerity and when it is, it's considered deliberately racist. You can engage in some more nonsensical hair-splitting or you can choose to live by the rules of polite society.
If I can turn the tables on you, how about the fact that I can find pictures of naked people all over the internet and even some public places, yet if I walked into a meeting at work with no clothes on, I'd be fired? What an unbelievable conundrum!
Thanks for your assumption that I am an American, I am not.
Since you read about it, just imagine all those atrocities if it happened to you, your family, your community for hundreds of years maybe that might help you make that connection emotionally.
Do I understand that all those atrocities happened? For sure. It is an horrible thing and it should be recognized as such.
What I don't get is the way this is dealt with. Forbidding a set of words don't really makes sense to me. Don't get me wrong, I still think it would be extremmely insensitive to use those words as it would be to use any other insult.
What I really don't get is the crazy different treatment those words get. It seems that even if you would be the least racist person in the world, if you mistakenly used one of those words (for example you tried to do a failed joke as Bill Maher did [1]), you will immediately be fired//terminated etc etc, even though everyone knows you are not racist at all. That doesn't make a lot of sense to me.
One can recognize that the treatment of Black people in this country (in the past and today) is definitely horrible, and also think that this whole forbidden word touchiness doesn't make sense.
Americans really do think they own not only the world, but the language too, don’t they? I’m not arguing for the wisdom of insulting people, it’s just that it’s so arrogant to assume that one group in one country can declare a word belongs to them. A word that same group has spread as a part of popular culture through tv, music and so on through the rest of the world.
Just amazing. And this from a country full of people who can’t even pick out most other countries on a map, even the ones they’ve bombed. A country that apparently thinks some Palestinian, East Indian, Russian, Japanese, etc kid rapping along to a popular song is using “forbidden” words. I think Americans should worry less about their empty words, and more about their actions which the rest of the world judges them by.
For what it’s worth, I don’t think a lot of Americans are racist or not because of some words. I do think it’s a racist country because of their prison system, shooting and strangling unarmed black men, the systemic racial poverty, the Birther conspiracy, and who they go to war for and against. No amount of careful wording will change that.
Do you see a lot of Americans complaining about the use of the N-word on the opposite side of the world? I don't think I have ever witnessed that subject come up.
Why would you presume that an American author talking to an audience in America is discussing worldwide social norms rather than American ones?
And I can assure you Ta-Nehisi Coates has spent plenty of time discussing most, if not all, of the alternate subjects you suggested. I'm sure it would dwarf the amount of time he has spent discussing the N-word by a huge margin.
Were having this discussion on an international forum, online. People are making blanket statements about language without a scrap of distinction as to background or locale, just “white” and “black” and little else. Further back in this thread appears the phrase, Thanks for your assumption that I am an American, I am not.
So yes, the context I’m examining was very much on the table.
We are discussing an event that happened in the US. Social norms in other countries are not pertinent to the discussion. Do you think every single statement needs an explicit geographical qualifier regardless of context?
This is extraordinarily stupid. I fear people in the US are living under some form of mass psychosis about this topic.
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?
> 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)
which makes sense. Because it's incredibly stupid.
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.
If you're the head of public relations at a multi-billion dollar company, and you don't know to say "n-word" instead of the actual word, that seems like grounds for firing with cause.
No, because he didn't use it in a press release. He used it in a meeting with (presumably) professional adults who should be able to understand intent.
He's the head of a department responsible for dealing with these sorts of fuck-ups. A PR professional should easily know "I probably shouldn't ever say n----r".
> It recounts an incident that occurred "several months ago" when Friedland used the N-word during a meeting with Netflix public relations staff during a discussion about "sensitive words." Several people told him they were offended by his use of the full word, according to Hastings's memo.
Just to be clear, you want to work in an environment where you can say racist things with impunity. Is that really how you want to present yourself on HN?
it seems somewhat expected that someone might say a "sensitive word" in a meeting intended to discuss "sensitive words." Firing the guy for saying a word they were talking about seems strange - must that meeting be full of ambiguous euphemisms? How do you discuss a thing without being allowed to say it?
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?