Difficult as it may be to believe, the cesspool is home to some rather interesting conversations. From time to time.
Then why do they have to be in the Cesspool? We keep changing the directory structure around so there's a place for every discussion that we would like to host, and even a few that we don't really like but feel obligated to host like Pseudoscience. We've got Free Thoughts, for the goddess's sake. Are you telling me that there's an interesting topic of discussion that somehow doesn't qualify for inclusion in "Free Thoughts"??? Why don't these people simply post there???
And the offensive jokes thread has some pretty funny jokes.
We've even had joke threads in Free Thoughts. If somebody wants to start a list of offensive jokes, it sounds like a textbook example of a "free thought."
Norsefire's inanity is not representative.
Okay, I'll take your word for it. But in addition to "inanity," Norsefire has violated the website's rule against racism. As far as I'm concerned, that's one of the rules that trumps everything because hosting racism uncritically can get us on a lot of people's shit lists. "Free speech" be damned (and this isn't even an American website so our rules don't matter), I don't want parents blocking us on their kids' computers because we appear to welcome uncritical expressions of racism. (As I said, if the Cesspool is blocked from view except to members, that worry may not be as important, but so far nobody has told me that it is.) I can't in good conscience recommend banning Norsy for dumping some shit in the cesspool, but as an elder of this community with the welfare of SciForums in mind, I strongly recommend deleting his posts without prejudice toward him.
Sciforums has room for more than 'scholarship'. Plus, I don't own a lab coat. You should let your hair down a bit.
I understand, and I get silly often enough for people to realize that I'm not a curmudgeon. There is absolutely nothing wrong with posting a thread consisting of nothing but jokes in Free Thoughts. And there's absolutely nothing wrong with
analyzing and discussing racist humor on my board or several others, and if people can't help laughing at them it will help them understand why these jokes are still around. But I repeat, I'm very uncomfortable with the uncritical hosting of something with so much potential to harm us and so little reason to defend it as racist humor.
I've comtimplating the origin's of the word and (if i'm wrong please say) feel that it must come from the day's of slave trading and as most slaves were from west africa, was it used to describe people/slaves from the country of 'Niger'?
No.
Negro is the Spanish word for "black," pronounced NAY-groh. Adjectives can stand alone as nouns in Spanish, so
un negro is "a black person." The Spanish, being close to Africa, were active in the slave trade, so Americans got used to talking about a shipment of
negros. The word was assimilated and the pronunciation was anglicized to match the spelling to our phonetics: NEE-grow.
NIH-ger was just Southern dialect pronunciation, and in all probability was not originally meant as an insult, it was just the way they said, "negro." I remember listening to Southern people trying to pronounce the word back in the 1950s when "negro" became the politically correct term for the people who a generation earlier were known as "colored." (The venerable NAACP stands as a monument to the political correctness of the term "colored people" in those times.) It was a really difficult word for them to say. Sometimes it came out like NEE-gruh.
But after Emancipation, when "negro" was originally established as the polite word for people of African ancestry, because of the enduring hostility of the Civil War, the Southern pronunciation NIH-ger, obviously uttered mostly by people who did not respect African-Americans, came to be identified as an ethnic insult. It has endured to this day.
Spanish
negro is the Latin word
niger, "black," after many centuries of phonetic drift. The names of the modern countries Nigeria and Niger were derived from that same Latin word because of the obvious connection with dark-skinned people. "Niger" is a French-speaking country and the name is pronounced nee-ZHAIR. In any context not referring specifically to the name of the country, the word has been re-spelled "Nyjer" to avoid any association with the N-word. For example, garden shops now have stocks of Nyjer birdseed. The similarity of the N-word to the name of that hapless country is no coincidence, but neither is is causative.
Where and how, i'm in the UK not US please bear in mind we outlaed slavery in 1817 you still had sgregation in 1960?
I have pontificated on this on SciForums to the point that some members are doubtless tired of hearing it. Every other country in the Americas (except Haiti) let slavery disappear through attrition with a little legal and economic incentive. German immigrants to the US before the Civil War proved that slavery is not economically viable, that freemen working for their own benefit produce more cotton than slaves forced to work for someone else. This fact became incontrovertible as the 19th century wore on and every other country (except Haiti) freed its slaves peacefully. Brazil's slaveholders were legendary for their irrational cruelty and even they gave up in 1896.
My thesis is that because there was no violence or rancor involved in this emancipation, the light-skinned and dark-skinned populations made peace with each other rather quickly. Today there are no "black" and "white" people in Brazil or any of the other countries. They all come in various shades of brown.
In America we went to war to free the slaves. (We didn't really, but Lincoln tossed that in when it looked like the North was going to lose, to motivate Northerners into supporting his war effort.) The Civil War was one of the bloodiest in human history, killing off 3% of America's population. (WWII only killed about 2% of the population of the combatant countries.) Everyone knew someone who lost a loved one in that conflict. It was a wound on our national soul that would not heal quickly. The Southerners, of course, had an easy target for their grief and hatred: the African-Americans for whom the North had made war and humiliated them. Northerners felt that their brothers, husbands and fathers had died to free the slaves, so they had conflicted feelings about the free African-Americans who began slowly moving north, a migration that reached a peak two generations later when that wound was still deep. There was a certain resentment.
So to this day, we have separate "white" and "black" populations, with their own dialects, music, and social customs, and there is still entrenched discrimination by the one against the other (and even some in the other direction) despite decades of legislation. The rate of intermarriage between African- and Euro-Americans is only about 2%, whereas for even the notoriously conservative Chinese-Americans it is about 25% and for Latinos, a group with their own long history of discrimination, it is more like 30%. The only other country in the Western Hemisphere where you can find this odd situation is Haiti, which also ended slavery through warfare.
I put it all on Lincoln. If the Confederacy had been allowed to go its own way, its fairytale pre-industrial feudal economy would have collapsed in a decade. Queen Victoria would have made them "an offer they couldn't refuse," and the South would have become a British colony where, incidentally, slavery was already illegal. It would have become a free nation at the same pace as Canada and Australia, and today the border between Maryland and Virginia would be as easy to miss as the one between Minnesota and Manitoba. And Americans would come in various shades of brown just like everybody else.
I take this is american slang? as I have no idea who these names refer to at all..........?
I'll just explain "Greaser." It refers to Latin Americans, who once styled their hair with pomade and other "greasy" products. I have also heard it used by Australians, who must surely have picked it up from us.
