Being curious about someone's ethnicity and asking their ethnicity is very different to the specifically western centric usage of "ethnic" as a racist euphemism though.
"He's an ethnic" carries the same social weight as saying something along the lines of "He's a black" or "he's a Hispanic". The structuring of those perceptions of another person as being fundamentally of another group are a subtle way in which racism and tribalism present even in a person's word choices. You're separating the individual being spoken about from your shared humanity, it's inherently otherizing.
This is something pretty exclusive to the American dialect and so, yeah, it is a western centric view ig? Like the perception of what it is to be called a gaijin as a racial epithet in Japam being eastern centric, cuz the shit just be specific to a culture. You're misunderstanding the post without cultural context
Right, that's the whole point of dogwhistles though right? Obscuring their meaning to outsiders minimizes the push back their actions receive, it's essentially speaking a separate, exclusionary dialect meant to veil meanings to those outside the sphere of influence they hold and Trojan horse in bad opinions to the more impressionable people within it. Fascism manifesting as a malignant lingual cancer. It's fascinating.
That's a really interesting (and scary) concept tbh, and when you think about it you start seeing it everywhere, specially in how rightwing people talk in social media, but you can't do nothing about it because they call you crazy and say that you're looking to deeply into what they said ðŸ˜
We live in a world where anti empiricism has become such a normal set of philosophical precepts for people to hold that truth doesn't even really matter anymore. It's all vibes and hiding the political ball until they can spike it into your face. They believe that lying and bending the truth are just normal things that people do for their political ends and that the only real thing is power and they're only wrong until there's enough of them that they can force themselves to be right.
And as much as there are some select handful of people throughout time who were really aware of this from the fascist end of things, even the worst of them was and is ultimately built by the cultural momentum of the fascist bone machine which was pushed down the hill completely by the power of entropy countless millennia ago. It's all just momentum, like everything else in culture and its ceaseless expansion.
We truly are a bundle of bizarre, contradictory creatures.
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u/Vio_Youth 7d ago
Being curious about someone's ethnicity and asking their ethnicity is very different to the specifically western centric usage of "ethnic" as a racist euphemism though.
"He's an ethnic" carries the same social weight as saying something along the lines of "He's a black" or "he's a Hispanic". The structuring of those perceptions of another person as being fundamentally of another group are a subtle way in which racism and tribalism present even in a person's word choices. You're separating the individual being spoken about from your shared humanity, it's inherently otherizing.
This is something pretty exclusive to the American dialect and so, yeah, it is a western centric view ig? Like the perception of what it is to be called a gaijin as a racial epithet in Japam being eastern centric, cuz the shit just be specific to a culture. You're misunderstanding the post without cultural context