In which Jo reserves the right to be condescending as hell.

There is some....person I've never met on my Facebook feed.

(Yes, I'm on Facebook. At least it's not MySpace, okay?)

He argued today, in response to an article posted that talked about healthcare reform protesters shouting what's called "The N Word" at members of Congress, that calling somebody a mouth-breather and calling somebody a N-asterisk were exactly equivalent.

Even if the person doing the shouting in the second case, the perp if I can call him that, was a white male.

And he defended that position. Twice.

(No, no, don't do that! You'll get a nasty, nasty bruise on your forehead if you bang it on the desk that way. Stop.)

Here's what I wrote in reponse:

Robert, I just got up from a nap and am feeling fairly rested, so I'll try to 'splain this to you:

The word "Nigger" has historical connotations not unlike those carried by the word "Juden". It harks back to a time of the enslavement of a group of people, and the later marginalization and murder of members of that group by the dominant members of society, white men. For a white person to call a black person a "Nigger" is to knowingly invoke that context, thus adding a level of threat to the insult.

One white person calling another a mouth-breather is, while fairly silly, not at all comparable. For one thing, there is an equal historical power balance assumed in the relationship. For another, there has never been a wholesale enslavement, degredation, or slaughter of mouth-breathers by other members of society.

I would invite you to test my statements by calling members of whatever ethnicity you like mouth-breathers, then trying the experiment with the other word.

Post-racial society my *ass*. It may be just me, but it seems like the bigots and their defenders are coming out of the woodwork, especially with the healthcare debate going on. (See Penny's comment on "The Morning After The Nights Before", below, for an example.) Something has made these folks feel safe, and I'm not sure what it is.

Whatever it is, the same people weren't yelling about government-subsidized highway construction or the heavy government subsidies of gasoline, or even the billions of dollars spent on the war in Iraq--when a white guy was in office. In fact, when I heard a story on lifting government subsidies on gasoline a couple of summers ago on NPR, I heard exactly the same sort of panicked rhetoric from the same sorts of people, about how it would DESTROY THE UNIVERSE OMG WE'RE ALL GONNA DIIIIIIEEEEE!

*sigh*

I guess there'll always be ignorant people in the world, like those folks on Medicare interviewed on NPR who didn't want the government involved in their healthcare, by gum. I guess there'll always be people who are bigoted and mean-spirited. I just wonder what force of nature lifted their rocks so they could crawl out, blinking, into the sunlight.