Negro is pretty gosh darn close, but I guess it’s just not quite as derogatory.
Comment on obesity
JoeBigelow@lemmy.ca 7 months agoIs one of the other words associated with 200 years of chattel slavery?
PlantDadManGuy@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Lemminary@lemmy.world 7 months ago
It’s weird being told that a regular color in your native language could get you beat up to a pulp in another country.
TheEntity@lemmy.world 7 months ago
To my non-American ears “negro” sounds far worse actually. Probably because of how rare it is in comparison.
BackOnMyBS@lemmy.autism.place 7 months ago
To my Hispanic ears, “n—o” sounds like an Anglophone saying “black”. Even when used derogatorily, my immediate first thought is that they pronounced it incorrectly, then the rest of the associated matters kick in and I realize what they are really saying.
Imagine if in the Hispanosphere , the word “black” was almost synonymous with the n-word.
But yeah, don’t use n—o in English to refer to or describe anyone.
lemonmelon@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Call up the UNCF and let them know immediately!
(Yes, I know they mostly brand themselves as the United Fund now.)
bdonvr@thelemmy.club 7 months ago
It was used in place of black for a longer period, and wasn’t necessarily considered a slur in and of itself. But of course if you say it with a sneer, even “black” can be used as an insult.
For example a lot of books (even written by people of color) used “negro” and “coloured” etc. interchangeably up to the mid-late 20th century. But in modern context very few people use it in a manner that isn’t derogatory.
milicent_bystandr@lemm.ee 7 months ago
I still have trouble referring to a person as ‘black’. It feels like a slur, or at least an inappropriate racial caricature (they’re not really black!) and it still surprises me that it’s become the acceptable and inoffensive term.
The n word almost seemed more mild, being about the same thing (an inappropriate way to describe race from skin colour), but linguistically removed (I’m not a native Latin speaker*) so I can feel it’s just a word, no need to be intrinsically good or bad.
- Or Spanish, whatever
MutilationWave@lemmy.world 7 months ago
How about when people they don’t think they’re racist whisper it? I hate and love that.
PlantDadManGuy@lemmy.world 7 months ago
I agree with you. But after studying Spanish I understand the origin of the word, so I’m somewhere in the middle on it.
orphiebaby@lemm.ee 7 months ago
And things worse than slavery towards them. And that a lot of racists who would likely shoot black people still use it. And there’s a lot of those people.
TheEntity@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Probably no, not in this specific form, that being said I don’t want to compare one tragedy to another. There are lots of disgusting parts of the human history, and that’s certainly one of them.
JoeBigelow@lemmy.ca 7 months ago
The only equivalent I can think of starts with k and is a slur for Jewish people, and it’s much less commonly heard.
ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Ironically enough, that word was coined by Jewish people who had been in the US for generations to describe newly-arrived Jews from Eastern Europe. Still offensive but somewhat different from the n-word.
BackOnMyBS@lemmy.autism.place 7 months ago
What about something related to the indigenous peoples of the Americas?
Nutteman@lemmy.world 7 months ago
We killed them so fast and displaced the rest that we forgot all the major slurs
june@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 months ago
“Savages”, "Redskins”, “Squaw”, and so on.
Some news headlines even refer to the second one as “the R-word”:
CNN: The terrible R-word that football needed to lose
Politico: The R-Word Is Even Worse Than You Think
These are extremely harmful words with hundreds of years of genocide behind them. I imagine the only reason they aren’t censored like the N-word is is because Native Americans make up a proportionally smaller population due to the effectiveness of the genocide, and because the reservation system is in contrast to racial integration as with American black people in so much as it limits interactions between them and racist whites who would overuse a dehumanizing phrase to the same extent.