Hacker News Reader

Comment by yucky | Hacker News Reader

FYI, although the article wants you to make the jump that n----- = "the hard R", it's actually referring to a less offensive albeit very dated term - negros (as in the United Negro College Fund). Negro is a word that annoys me as well, but it's no different than People of Color/Colored People in that it's just a cringey old-timey descriptor.

From what I can tell the only reference with "the hard R" is not in reference to anybody in particular but rather as a chapter title that is in reference to Harlem and is a direct call back to the famous Harlem Renaissance writer Carl Van Vechten.

View on HN

“Negro” is an offensive term. The US government does not use “negro”.

https://www.archives.gov/research/catalog/lcdrg/appendix/bla...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNCF

That's a lazy counterargument, and I assume you're just trolling. Please don't do that here. I'm not sure why you're trying to justify the use of an outdated term that is problematic if not immediately hurtful.

If you had read the article you linked, you'd have known that the United Negro College Fund emphasizes its initials rather than its full name. "In 2008, reflecting shifting attitudes toward the word Negro in its name, the UNCF shifted from using its full name to using only its initials, releasing a new logo with the initials alone and featuring their slogan more prominently."

Look on their website. Their official history does not mention the term "negro" once.

https://uncf.org/the-latest/75-years-strong-highlights-from-...

You will be unable to find in at least the last 30 years, any publications from the UNCF that use the word "negro" to refer to black people.

  > That's a lazy counterargument

I'm not even counterarguing anything. Your comment in reply to mine wasn't even relevant. I never said it's not offensive, in fact my comment calls simply points out that it's less offensive than the word with the Hard R that shall not be spoken. Which clearly is accurate is it not?

So the real question is, what made you make your initial comment in response to mine? Did you misread it?

Martin Luther King preferred it to "black" for like the first 2/3 of things he wrote and said. Contemporaneous with when these books were written.

Can you think of any other offensive terms that might have been used commonly in the past but are now considered offensive? I’m sure if you sit down and really cook your noodle you might be able to come up with one.

I'm just lending some flavor. "Negro" is kind of like "oriental" in that it was never offensive but seems kind of old-fashioned now, which makes people assume it was.

Oriental is offensive if you use it to refer to people. If you use oriental to refer to things, it's OK.

> is offensive

You mean someone decided to take offense. It's literally equivalent to "Asian" in that it describes a geographic origin. And negro, as pointed out, was preferred by MLK himself, yet we're just supposed to believe it's offensive because that's what we're told.

What this is is a show of power, picking random words and deciding they're offensive, and making an example of anyone that doesn't dance to this tune.

Never attribute to malice and all that, most people are probably just confusing fashion with offensiveness.

The term oriental is offensive because it's been used to reinforce the idea that those from the exotic orient are forever foreign and could not become American. This justifies exclusive policies, segregation, etc.

That's not the only reason the US Federal government decided to stop its use in official documents. It's also a terribly inaccurate term - exactly WHERE in the East are you talking about? India, which is in the East, is far different from South Korea, which is also in the East. I'm sure that people in those disparate regions would much rather not be lumped together in a single category.

It's a lazy, outdated term used by lazy people.

That entire criticism applies equally to "asian".

I was alive in the 80s and 90s, nobody was mad about "oriental", especially and specifically immigrant communities that don't care about American culture war. It's just fashion.

  > It's also a terribly inaccurate term

Similar to the terms white and black then? So why does the government use those?

I won't be offended if you refer to me as an Occidental.

The best argument I've seen yet against such self censorship.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com