Irritated rant #1

As the title of this post goes, this is the first irritated rant I'm putting on this blog.

First off, I'm addressing white people's annoyance at the so-called double standard regarding the n-word. Here's the truth: THERE IS NO DOUBLE STANDARD. When a white person uses the n-word in America, it carries nearly 400 years of systemic oppression of blacks by whites; when a black person uses it, (in my opinion) they are trying to use a previously derogatory term in order to neutralize it. Honestly, it's like something you'd see out of any group of people that bands together because a bunch of people don't like them -- the group members try to turn the hateful labels the larger group applies to the smaller group in order to pretty much tell the bullies to go to hell. Maybe it's not quite that simple, but that's how it is.

So remember: 400 years of getting your lives ruthlessly controlled kind of entitles a racial group to be sensitive about the oppressors using derogatory terms about them, and they do what they can to start seizing control of the language for themselves.

And on that part, please don't start with the shit about black people being gangsta thug criminals. Criminology is one of my majors, and one of the biggest myths out there is that of minorities being evil criminals who threaten white people. Overwhelmingly, the dominant factor in criminal tendencies is socioeconomic status. Poor people commit crimes because they are desperate. Or something like that. Moreover, with regard to violent crime (the gangsta thug criminal stereotype), most of the time, white people kill white people and black people kill black people. Period. It's only due to sensationalistic crap like the O.J. Simpson trial and every other example of a black man killing a white woman do we get this ridiculous stereotype of the dangerous black gangsta trying to do a drive-by shooting of all our promising young white men and a drive-by rape of all our precious young white women.

Which nicely segues me into rape: it's criminally negligent as to how blithely our society blames the victim for rape and it stems from the almost universal sexism in society. If you want to talk about a real double standard, try this one on for size: when a woman is raped, she "had it coming" because she was "sexually promiscuous" and a "total slut" some ridiculous nonsense like that; when a man is sexually promiscuous, he's considered the awesomest manly man, out-manlied by only Chuck Norris.

The last thing I have the sanity to type before I start wanting to hit my head against the giant wall of society's stupidity is a broad statement about equality, covering issues like immigration, gay marriage (and other "social issues") and practically every -ism out there.

Please, please, PLEASE stop with the ridiculous hating. Particularly in America, we have this irrational hatred of the minority. We have hated practically every single wave of immigrant in this country, legal or otherwise and we still ended up eventually integrating them into society. We go on and on about gay marriages and abortions without stopping to think that we don't really give a damn about 99.99999% of the people who get married, nor do we spend hours wondering if any of the tens of millions of women in America are pregnant and if the fetus they may carry is actually a person. We go on about where women belong, what races are dangerous and what religions are hellbent on destroying America without realizing that our men are doing stupid things in the places they allegedly belong, our "law-abiding" races are out committing the same crimes the "dangerous" races are doing and the "good" religions are engaging in extremism that rivals that of the "evil" religions.

I've gotten past a good part of hating the intolerant idiots who support all these irrational positions and have almost gotten to the point of pity -- life is tough enough as it is, so all these people are doing is adding unnecessary crap to deal with everyday. And for what hate there is left in me, I mostly store it up and use it as an excuse to plop down with a bunch of beer and stare at a TV for a while.

There. I feel better already.


Posted by pdmccaul [Op-Ed] ( July 31, 2008 08:11 PM ) Permalink | Comments[0]