My word game had some weird archaic racist word as one of the answers.
My word game had some weird archaic racist word as one of the answers.
The game is Word Cookies by Bitmango. I contacted them but haven’t heard back. I’m guessing it was just an oversight, but it still pissed me off.
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I mean, it's a word isn't it?
The N-word is a word too. Should it be in a list of words you are supposed to figure out to pass a level in a word game?
I'm taking a turn here, off the original topic a little, but not a true subject change or tangent.
There's a ton of history behind all the terminology around terms like this. And they're all inherently racist. They aren't, however slurs (currently, one could debate the past) in the few places they are used. They're too archaic to be slurs in English, they just aren't used.
Griffe, in specific was more of a French colonies thing, with other terms being used elsewhere.
Now, the point of all this is to get back to why the term is racist in the first place.
All the terms, mulatto, quateron (or quadroon), octoroon, metis, mamelouk, whatever; they are all about how much black is in the person, how much African heritage they have. Kinda obvious, but it's never about how much white they have. The French colonies has specific terminology for someone that's 1/64 black. Think about that. Out of all their ancestors, one is black, and that makes them black, with some white blood, separate from people that looked exactly the same.
That whole "one drop" mentality is why they're all racist, horrible terminology, even though they aren't used as insults in English. They weren't really used as insults back in the slave era either, just as yet another way to keep the boot on necks. The terms were used among free people of color too, which shows just how effective that boot of language really was.
Now, the terminology varied a lot because it came from multiple languages. Spanish, French, Portuguese and English. Where you were determined what terms were in use, originally, but as colonies shifted hands, slavers intermingled,and borders moved, things got mixed around some. Here in the American southeast, you see even more mingling of the terms, with the dominant ones shifting over time in various locations.
But, and this is actually relevant, the U.S. isn't the only place this kind of thinking existed, and some of the terms are slurs in other places and languages.
Griffe isn't a slur anywhere I'm aware of, but "sambo" is, and it was another word for the same 3/4 African ancestry. Afaik, it isn't a common slur, big there are places in South and Central America where it's used as one.
However, there are also places in South and Central America where mulatto, or mulatta are used with pride.
Now, why am I writing this? It's not just a historical curiosity, some vestigial words lingering in dictionaries. There was an entire set of jargon used as a tool of dominance and oppression. The thinking behind it still lingers everywhere that European imperialism existed (so, essentially everywhere across the world). Australia even had the same or similar terms for people with aboriginal ancestry.
The stain of slavery, specifically the African slave trade, is embedded across the world. We forget sometimes, because the terminology of oppression changed, that we still think that way. It takes effort for some of us to first realize that we default to thinking of anyone with mixed African heritage as black first, as the black being mixed into the other "race". And eliminating that way of thinking is even more work.
But it's work we need to do. As individuals, as nations, as a species, we need to understand that the systemic racism isn't just about laws and official biases. It's about the lingering, pernicious taint in how people think about race as a whole.
Solid write up! You've changed my opinion. I had thought terms like "octoroon" were merely archaic descriptors, had never thought of the "one drop" angle and what that implied.
Holy shit! There's even a word for all this!
such terminology is a characteristic of hypodescent, which is the practice within a society of assigning children of mixed unions to the ethnic group which the dominant group perceives as being subordinate
1/64th: Sang-mêlé. My god, that's a laugh-out-loud racist word if I ever heard one. How far back did they want to go?!
For anyone else finding this interesting, this might be the opening of a rabbit hole:
Takes a bold man to play that word. Would be funny seeing people sweat to play it.
There's letters n i g g r on the table
*looks at the letter on his hand*
E
"uhh, mmmm, I... I got nothing"
"My turn! I'll play E. NIGG..!"
"BOBBY NO!"
Like in this classic South Park episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xc39s7_Iwo8
Ginger
What did you call me?!?
Your Wordle puzzle of the day, presented by Truth Social.
You can't fit it in Wordle with a hard R
But you CAN fit it without it
Yes, I know nobody agrees with me, but I think you should just use that word. I can't think of any "natursl" way it could pop up in conversation, unless maybe if it's some hiphop musical context.
If you're trying to avoid this word like the plague, you're just giving it more power for the racists who do use that word. If it's just an archaic word with a weird meaning, like the word "griffe" it looses all power. The racists will probably still keep using it, but it will have as much power as "griffe" has.
I think we are somewhat on the same page here. What matters isn't the word you use, it's the intention behind, which is hopefully obvious from context.
When I get called a nerd, my response goes anywhere between being proud and being insulted depending on context. The word itself has no emotion by itself.
Shouldn't it be the same with many of these words that some people consider racist?