Brian,
For the record, I am in pretty much total agreement with you.
I do not use those slurs and I cringe when I hear them,
regardless of their source, as an insult or as in-group
joking. And I am well aware of the heated debate within some
of those groups, particularly African Americans over gangsta
rap, about the in-group use of those slurs. I find them
reprehensible even when the usage is clearly intended to
devalue the power of the word through overuse -- I don't
think that strategy works because negative intent will always
turn them back into fighting words.
I find the use of the N word (can't even type it out), for
instance, hard to hear in rap. Sometimes, as in Public Enemy
or Ice T, hard to hear may make me confront some of my
unexamined values, but all too often it is used unthinkingly
as a signifier of hardness that ends up embracing and
pandering to many of the most negative racial stereotypes.
When 50 Cent, for instance, embraces the pimp gangbanger role
as his image (why do we care how many times he's been shot?),
is it any wonder when racists take his raps as proof positive
that all of their racial biases are fact?
Within context, like most of Pelecanos's uses of those words,
I am fine with it. It still makes me cringe, but I do see it
as part of the characters' vocabulary and it would be false
not to use them. Tarantino sometimes does this well, but
other times oversteps. I'm certainly not ready to agree with
Spike Lee that QT should be barred from using the word, but
it is sometimes gratuitous in his films, particularly in the
coffee scene in Pulp Fiction.
I have much the same reaction to the use of those words in
Iceberg Slim and Dennis Cooper, since I referred to them in
my earlier post. It does not matter to me that Pelecanos is a
straight white male, while Iceberg Slim is black and Dennis
Cooper is gay. It matters to me whether or not I find their
characters believable. (It's just as possible for a member of
a group to present a poor image as it is for an outsider.) I
find many characters in all of these authors' books
reprehensible and sometimes the characters' language is part
of that reaction, but I still find them fascinating and worth
reading about, sometimes more so because of their scurrilous
nature.
So in my earlier post, I was just trying to note a
sociological tendency in US culture. I didn't mean to imply
it was a bad thing, even if it is sometimes overdone. In my
own awkward way, I was trying to defuse the situation. I
certainly did not mean to imply that refraining from using
the slurs is patronizing (hell, I find it far more
patronizing when I hear various white youth use the N word,
often to other whites, not that that matters, it's just
odd).
I do not see you as PC. I applaud you for calling your
students on the casual use of gay for stupid. I teach a
college level Mass Media & Society class and I include
sections about how common slurs against women, gays and
blacks are in our culture. As with your experience, many of
the students have never thought about the basis of these
words as insults, are surprised when it is pointed out. A few
of them have told me it's made them drop certain words from
their vocabulary.
I was also taken aback by the post that started this. You
were right to point out it might have been due to a
language/culture barrier. And it should have been dropped
there.
And now I will drop it.
Mark
-- # Plain ASCII text only, please. Anything else won't show up. # To unsubscribe from the regular list, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to # majordomo@icomm.ca. This will not work for the digest version. # The web pages for the list are at http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/ .
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 22 Feb 2004 EST