I am crazy busy. but here is bullet points on why this whole thing is bad.
1. We already covered the long history of erasure and co-optation of the
struggles and terminology of POC by white feminism, and the fight that POC
women have had to participate in, on-going to this day, to carve out space
for them and their issues.
2. Rachel, I believe, already covered the fact that even as we struggle to
reinvent language, there is still an often very recent usage, or still
on-going usage of those words that the oppressed group referred to is still
subjected to.
3. Why does every fight about language reclamation come back to letting
some white guy reuse the n word?
4. Why do white people always want so very badly to use that word, or
qualify use by others, as if there is some universal group of oppressed
minorities that meets and all agrees to not be offended by certain usages?
5. which brings me to: not everyone is going to feel the same about every
word. of course one person might see a use of a word in a certain context
as not offensive, particularly if that person had never been seriously
subjected to that word as applied to them.
6. why does "reclamation" of the n word by white people always have to be
negative? the problem with that song isn't just that black women are
erased, it is also that that word is STILL A NEGATIVE TERM. he just
broadened the definition. How is this reclamation at all? Why does some
white guy think THIS is the issue and the way he should address it? Why is
it always like this? Why do we need to use the n word or other common black
deragatory tropes to make a shocking statement about race in this country,
without understanding that there is a good portion of the population who is
still directly affected by those terms/actions/stereotypes to whom it isn't
going to be a shocking statement at all, just another cliched co-optation
of minority struggle for the attention of white audiences.
-hep