Not sure if it's just you, but we were at an event last night and the DJ was playing "Play that funky music" by Wild Cherry and it was censored during the chorus to remove "white boy" and "whitey"...
There is zero chance any white person has ever complained about that song, but I can see some kind of overzealous cenoring busybody treating anything that could possibly be misconstrued as racist censoring it.
I don’t know where you live, or what reality you’re choosing to live in, but that’s just such a bad take. I live in liberal ass California right in the thick of it. I have plenty of black and white (among others) friends, fat friends, and gay friends. The only thing I’ve ever had some things around word choice is when someone identifies as a different gender. Even then I’ve called people by their wrong gender and they’ve politely corrected me and I change it.
Same. The other day I mistakenly told a trans woman early in her transition “thank you sir” as a reflex and all that happened was she gently said “I’m not a sir” and we moved on.
Oh come on. Extremists gonna extreme. Some will try to make a bunch of words offensive, the others will keep fighting for their right to use these words. The vast majority of the rest of people will just keep living their lives and just use whatever’s the most appropriate word at a given time with the language evolving. It used not to be considered really offensive to insult people with gay slurs when I was in high school. Languages evolve with their times, and that’s perfectly fine.
My guess is it's probably not extremists per se, but rather corporations that are scared of offending anyone and being the focus of the internet's bad or uproar of the day. I will say though, at my last company, the younger generation was pushing all this stuff super hard. While I agree with plenty of the general purpose stuff, I'm like, can't we just do our jobs and not sit in meetings all day about what our job is supposed to be?
You don’t have to look too far, honestly. It’s advertising/marketing driven, most of the time. They have a brand and image to maintain, and anything that slightly deviates from it tends to get shut down really quickly. The extremists I was talking about are the ones driving that uproar you mentioned. Most people don’t give enough of a flying fuck to do anything about any of it past the Facebook argument they’ll get into anyway.
These changes do tend to be driven by younger generations, that’s just how it is... I remember Gen Xers complaining about us Millenials wanting to change the world and being very difficult to manage, when we were joining the workforce lol