Tuesday morning rant

[dazzababe]

Note to self:

Do not argue with Saint (username deleted) about anything. Because when you're a single mother raising your child in the ghetto after your babydaddy has abandoned you, your opinion on stupid_free (aka Everyone Is Entitled To My Opinion) is automatically the right one, and since I'm childfree, I'm obviously a moron

Comments

[sunhawk]

The flouncing remark seemed to be a mistake on their part, I think they were aiming for a different word, since in order to flounce you would have left the comm or announced to all and sundry you were leaving the comm, which you didn't do. I dunno what word they meant to use, fuss maybe?

Look, I gotta say, you bringing up her skin colour and calling her a ghetto queen makes me uncomfortable, because those look like pretty racist remarks, and I know you aren't a racist person. I know that the term ghetto originated with Jews and the Holocaust, but these days it's usually used to be derogatory to people of colour. So I think it would be better for you, if you would stick to the fact you think she's opinionated and thinks she's always right. Leave the skin colour thing.

Arguing with that community does indeed look difficult, because it's a mix of people and some of them are intelligent and merciless enough to make it a waste of time.

IMHO, it didn't look like a you vs. Karnythia issue, just from the way people's comments played out before you joined in. I do honestly empathize with your desire to defend your group, you know I've done the same with my own groups. Karnythia's original reply to you seemed fine, it was just the other girl going off the handle that sent them all snickering. But such seems to be the nature of such mocking communities. They are very fond of eating their own.

Clearing and clarifying

[dazzababe]

I apologize for my remarks sounding racist; that was not my intention. These days the word "ghetto" is more used to describe behaviour than skin colour, and IMO is just as generic a term as "white trash"--a term I have used in this blog several times. I do understand where you are coming from and acknowledge that perhaps I did push the issue slightly further than I should have.

However, Karnythia has also been known to press the race button fairly often in her postings. Does that make what I said in my posting above justified? Absolutely not. But it pisses me off just the same whenever I see someone pressing the race button just because they can. This isn't the first time she's PO'd me either. Nine times out of ten I can catch what I write and stop myself before I hit that submit button. This just happened to be the tenth.

Also, just to clarify, my term was only used here, in my own blog, and not on SF.

ETA: Original post was edited.

Re: Clearing and clarifying

[sunhawk]

I think there's a substantial difference between using the term "white trash" to refer to white people and using the term "ghetto queen" to refer to a person of colour, but I get where you are coming from.

Well, it's very different for a POC to bring up race in their discussions because of the historical and ongoing hegemonic situation our society exists in, where POC are the minority and their race isn't something they can ignore or not think about, whereas we have the option to do so as white people. As annoying as her bringing it up so often might be, consider what her life must be like for it to be on her mind so often. You and I, we have to be really careful to not let our priviledge influence how we deal with others and think about the more subtle, "normalized" ways that racism can creep into the things we do and think, eh? :)