zvi | Some additional comments from TNH's post (Reply)

In response to womzilla's assertion that flounce is intrinsically homophobic, while draggletailed loudmouth is not intrinsically racist

I am ... not so sanguine about the necessary homophobic reading of flounce. I have only seen it used within media fandom, a subculture widely acknowledged to be made up mostly of women. It seems to me that insulting women by calling them excessively girly, while possibly misogynistic, is not homophobic. I'm not one hundred percent sure of this, but I'll have to think about it some more. I'm much more convinced about the homophobia of butthurt.

On the other hand, you are dead wrong that using loudmouth or a term meaning slut against black women does not have a racial subtext. The brazenness of black women, the fact that we are not quiet and reserved and willing to take direction from our men, our supposedly irresistible sexual allure and aggression are totally stereotypes that have been used against us for centuries.

Seriously, your statement parses the same way as, "I have never heard that there is a stereotype of Asians having small penises, so when I call a Korean man a limpdick, there is nothing racist going on, and you are imagining things."

Womzilla also asserted in the above comment that some specific people in this debate really are stupid, so it's okay to call them that. I missed that paragraph in my first time through, so made an additional comment to address it.

I missed your last paragraph entirely, but I will say this. Do you honestly consider that the 'sides' in this imbroglio do not have a race assigned to their partisans as groups, regardless of an individual speaker's actual racial background?

If tnh had directed her comments at specific statements by specific people, we could have a disagreement about what they actually said. Since tnh is expressing rage at everyone who disagreed with Patrick, some of whom, I will hope you agree, are not sloppy thinkers and shouting buffoons, we cannot absolve her racism by insisting that she was speaking about actual facts on the ground, as in the "I'm speaking of a specific Native American who is alcoholic" example I gave nellorat.

(The Native American exchange I reference is not one I feel the need to reproduce in my LJ.)

In response to nellorat insisting that if she didn't mean it as gendered and racist, the insult is not gendered and racist the bit quoted below is not the entirety of nellorat's comment.

"If nothing else, don't I have some insight into what mental connections between insults and color I do and don't make?"

NO. That's what unintentionally racist means. It means you are replicating and propagating common racist patterns of thought, whether or not you are aware that they exist and are common.

It's like, okay, suppose that there was some kid out there who had been ruthlessly homeschooled and sheltered and prevented from watching TV and genuinely did not know anything about dragons. But they live in a desert so they know about lizards. And one day, they write a story about a really, really big dangerous lizard who eats pretty girls. When they submit it to Tor Fantasy as a brilliant and original work, and it gets rejected as a cliche, their ignorance of the trope doesn't make it any less like the ten million and one princess gets menaced by a dragon stories already in existence.