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Well, t, you make a good point.
I would suggest that response to someone doing another "voice" textually does depend on how the speaker's cultural position is perceived, in relation to the "voice": that is, as I suggested above, someone whom I know or believe is white, putting on a jokey British Asian accent, has associations for me with a racist way of doing the same thing.
So, indeed, there is an analogy there with the hypothetical British Asian accent and PW's actual (insert description here) accent. You have stated:
a) That whenever you do an accent it is to celebrate rather than mock.
b) This (a) is OK, as there is a big difference between an accent done in mockery and one done with love.
c) This (a) is what Paranoidwriter is doing.
d) Therefore, his post does not bear anything more than a superficial resemblance to the words of a racist.
My point was that (d), here, is not entirely relevant, inasmuch as nobody is saying "Paranoidwriter's post contains the words of a racist (to wit, because PW is a racist)". They were being highlighted as words the use of which caused confusion and discomfort, in part because of the association of that rather stylised accent with a rather stylised version of a particular part of the greater African dispora (Jamaican and then Black British). Flyboy has questioned (a) and (b) already, and (c) appears to me to be also not entirely relevant, as Paranoidwriter is not facing accusations of being a racist.
Having said which, I'm afraid that I have to refer back to Persephone's comment, in a broader discussion around, among other things, "padywhack", where she noteed that in her discussions with advantaged people about acceptable usage of terms that applied to her but not to them, it seemed to her that the arguments frequently seemed to be why it was OK for those white people to carry on behaving with complete freedom. Short of actually installing a loveometer in the posting screen, where people can state with how much love they were doing something, I'm not sure to what extent one can be confident about controlling how people react to what you say in online environments.
And I think that's part of the problem here. We've already agreed fairly comprehensively that is was unfortunate that this went in a thread called "racism", if only because it discouraged discussion of the actual action and the feelings it engendered and encouraged the much more nuclear question "are you calling me a racist?", which actually never needed to be asked, IMHO. As a result, a post which started off as simply inexplicable has become a locus of what seems to me to be unfortunate and ungrounded personal conflict. However, I think that the whole "putting this in a thread called 'racism' was a mistake" discussion has now happened enough times that to continue to talk as if PW is or was being called a racist is, I think, to indulge in threadrot.
Personally, I'd probably change the title of this thread and then possibly boot it into Conversation, since we may need a proper thread on racism in the Policy at some point and this probably isn't it any longer. |
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