How is the word spooky racist ?
@zleap @manarock @TheAncestor Apparently "spook" was once, long ago and far away, used as slang for "black man"; and therefore it's now forbidden regardless of context and regardless of whether the speaker knew about that historical usage. There was a professor in the USA who got in big trouble for asking "Are they spooks?" about two absent students.
@mattskala @manarock @TheAncestor
Out of interest, are the people who deemed this to be racist, black and find it offensive. Or are we looking at a bunch of woke people deciding it is racist in which case they clearly thing that people who are black are somehow incapable of saying something like "sorry please don't use that term. "
It seems to me a lot of this is one group of people deciding for everyone else it is a term that is racist / ;offensive.
Doing so is in fact perhaps offensive as I am perfectly capable of telling YOU that the term you have used is something i would prefer not to hear myself.
@mattskala @manarock @TheAncestor
I am sure there are 1000's of words in the English language alone that have multiple meaning. Some meanings can be offensive, sometimes depends on context, era etc.
@mattskala @manarock @TheAncestor
To add there are a few users on here that seem to use a certain N word a lot, I just block them.
@zleap @manarock @TheAncestor I don't know the answer to your question, but here's an article about the incident I had in mind - which, it turns out, was apparently in 1985, a fair bit earlier than I thought. https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/an-open-letter-to-wikipedia