My word game had some weird archaic racist word as one of the answers.

I dunno, man.

An Italian?

So many kids won't get this reference. Makes me sad. And feel old af.

Maybe the censor is recycled garbage too then. I know my word game's dictionary is absolute trash.

ah, good to know

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.

Your Wordle puzzle of the day, presented by Truth Social.

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

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.

Had to Google that, but wtaf

Reminds me of the Buggre alle this Bible from Good Omens. Absolute favorite scene from the books and it didn't make it into the show.

The fucking dictionary is a subscription now?

Black-ass mama . . . white-ass daddy . . .

I'm a native pt speaker and I had never thought of the word as slur. I remember it being commonly said on TV, music, and written on newspapers without this connotation. It was certainly more common than the preferred alternative "mestiço".

It's archaic enough that it's probably not a slur, or at least not a particularly bad one. Archer got away with using this as his ringtone.

I've only encountered the use of mulatto once in the wild. My girlfriend my freshman year at college had an adopted brother who was biracial. She used the word mulatto to describe him, but at the time everything she said about him seemed very loving.

Specifically half African-descended and half European (white).

As compared to Mestizo - being half white and half native American (incl. South American)

They went to stuff like Octaroon and Quadroon, having lower percentages of African ancestry.

It's all super racist obviously.

It's also German but it means grips

So like, it wasn't just hiding in the game's dictionary, but someone or some pre-coded algorithm selected it to feature?