When someone uses a slur and a person from the marginalized group that the slur disparages calls that shit out, there are is a common reaction that piss me the fuck off and is downright abusive in how it twists why the call out is happening and how it should go down.
- “Well, it’s up to you get offended or not”
- “It only has power if you give it power”.
- “You can’t let every little thing bother you!”
Posing it like that makes the marginalized person accountable for the slur, and just them. It’s up to the MP to fix their perspective, to “choose” whether or not the slur will “hurt” them! It is used to undermine by positing the MP is simply weak, overly-sensitive, or, my favorite bullshit derailing, “playing PC police”. It takes away their right to call out the person using the slur and hold that person accountable. It shifts focus and takes away all culpability from the person responsible for its abusive usage and the supremacist culture responsible for giving it power by abusing the MP in the first place.
The problem isn’t whether or not the MP found it offensive, and that they just simply shouldn’t. It’s that the slur is shitty because it has a history of harm and abuse towards the MP since it was used to harm and abuse them by the dominant group, a history the MP has lived experience with. The MP can’t simply “choose” to ignore history and to ignore the context that gives the term power. Neither should the person using the slur.
- “If you have confidence in yourself it won’t hurt you.” (the sicker, more bigoted variation of that is “*slur* only hurts you if you’re a *slur*!”)
- “You should have pride in yourself!” (*insert ridiculous quotes about having pride and how if you have that nothing could take you downhere*)
Posing it like that makes it a question of how confident, happy, or prideful the marginalized person is with their identity. The problem will be easilysolved if they’re totally at peace with themselves (as if it’s a question of that in the first place)! It undermines the MP once again by saying they must lack confidence in their identity, otherwise why would they be bothered?!! (people with confidence and pride can ignore history and OK with slurs, apparently).
It once again ignores history, context, and lived experiences. It polices the MP’s identity and the power they have to determine what words they are OK with being used to address them or what slurs they’re not OK with. Again, instead of the point being “You can’t use that word, it has a history of harm and it is harmful/derogatory/offensive”, it is derailed in favor of some petty “O u must not have pride in yrself qurrl don’t be down you should be ok with who u r” bullshit.
Part of it is totally intentional derail, another part of it comes from a subconscious fear of wanting to call out the dominant culture or the very conscious belief that there just isn’t a point, it’s too big, you’re bound to get hurt by it, so you might as well take your lumps. Those are are relative points. The harm is still there, and we shouldn’t in our daily lives be OK with engaging in problematic language and supremacist culture, nor should we be derailed in this fashion when we call it out.