Ask Hexbear is the place to ask and answer ~~thought-provoking~~ questions.
Rules:
Posts must ask a question.
If the question asked is serious, answer seriously.
Questions where you want to learn more about socialism are allowed, but questions in bad faith are not.
Try !feedback@hexbear.net if you're having questions about regarding moderation, site policy, the site itself, development, volunteering or the mod team.
88
I'm Chinese and we fucking love 8 since it rhymes with fortune in Mandarin. I'm also born roughly around 1988 so a lot of people in my generational cohort have 88 in their screen names.
Every time I see username_88 I gotta try to figure out if they're Chinese, my age, or a Nazi.
Expatriate/expat
Maybe it is not a popular opinion. And perhaps calling it "bigotry" is too far. But I work in a different country from where I was born, and I consider myself an immigrant. I have however seen this trend of referring to educated professionals as "expats" to distinguish us from people who immigrate to escape conflicts and/or poverty. I don't agree that this distinction is necessary or valuable, and I feel uncomfortable when I am described with that term. If I am called that, I usually chuckle and let people know that I'm an immigrant!!
yeah I feel like the use of expat borders on 
Expat emphasises where they came from (wealthy, 'first world') rather than where they've moved to. It's a way of keeping themselves seperate and unsullied with oblique reference to where they previously lived.
To me am "expat" is a person who's dispatched by their company or organization to work overseas and often has all their housing and expenses paid for. Almost always they'll be PMCs or PMC adjacent. The term used to imply a certain degree of prestige and wealth (imagine a PMC salary but you didn't have to pay for housing or transportation) so other people also latched onto it.
In Asia, where I'm from and live, it's mostly white western English "teacher" types who insist on being called Expats. For that reason, I make it a point to call them "migrant workers". Though if anything that's an insult to migrant workers since they work hard and perform socially valuable tasks, unlike most English "teachers" I know.
this for sure! this kind of bigotry doesn't apply to me as a 
but this does always bother me
I always just thought that "expat" meant a person dispatched by a company or organization to do work in another country and with an expectation that the worker in question moves back to their country of origin when their contract is over. Whereas an immigrant tends to be a person who moves permanently / with an idea to settle in another country. Though i will agree with the other commenters here that my definition of "expat" is essentially a whites-only word for "migrant worker".
Spook, because it's actually a slur.
It used to be an innocent word when I was a kid or a phrase for people working in intelligence, now I can't say or see it without racism coming to mind thanks to chuds.
I still don't think this one is used enough as a slur to retire. Using it as a slur would make me think you're literally a boomer, it's not common. Using it to refer to feds is more common, and using it to mean "scare" is even more common than that, so it's basically just a normal word
Using it as a slur would make me think you're literally a boomer
I am old and I've heard it used as a slur in person, but I have seen it used innocently enough by most normal people that it's been like reclaimed.
less reclaimed and more "the non-slur use is and maybe always has been primary"
I am fairly old but I've never heard it used anywhere outside of Back to the Future. I'm also not from the south, though.
The British tv series Spooks is called MI-5 in the US.
POC. Idk if this counts exactly since it started with bigotry then was reclaimed/euphemized
The part that bothers me is that it feels a little like I'm still being called a "colored person" just in a different phrasing, and later on, in abbreviation. I still call myself brown, white people as white, etc. without issue.
So I think it's more that brown people have always known ourselves to be brown, but not "colored" — that is a slur used by white people against us. Like in our native languages we have a concept of skin shade. But not "coloredness"
Also "POC" sounds a little weird to me, like how saying "people of brownness" or POB feels artificial and awkward.
Not really against "POC" though since people use it broadly already.
irl I usually see POC or BIPOC used in three ways:
Someone is pissed and wants to weaponize their or someone else's identity and not think any deeper than "you just did a racism becauss that person you criticized? Yeah they're BIPOC". That someone is almost always a liberal and the person in question is usually being validly criticized.
HR types talking about their DEI program.
The nicest and most empathetic lefty on the planet is trying their very best to be inclusive while organizing.
I also try to just say brown or black etc it's just so much less awkward.
yeah, when POC started becoming more mainstream i did feel a little weird saying it.
I'm back to saying black and brown folx. If there's a group that refers to themselves as BIPoC I use that, but not really as a means to describe people. It's very vague as an acronym.
Speaking of, it's always been odd to me that race is a totally made up construct and yet black and brown are okay and yellow and red are racist.
"Shoving down our throats" just makes me think about foie gras. 🤷♀️
"Piece of cake!" "Wow this is a cake walk!" or just the term "Cake Walk".
"Cake Walk".
TIL this has a racist af history, whew
Surprised I haven't seen "Gamer" yet. There was a time when I'd call myself that, now I actively avoid the label at all costs and if someone asks what I do for fun I list every hobby I have except gaming unless they bring it up first.
Goober. Not even joking.
I really enjoy language. Doesn't matter which one, doesn't matter what aspect of it. I just thoroughly enjoy learning about language. So it's not uncommon for me to encounter a word and ponder its etymology or whether it's related to another word, that sort of thing, and I'll be preoccupied with figuring out this little linguistic riddle that I have happened to encounter somewhere in my life. And of course this is exactly happens when I encounter the word "goober" one time.
I mean, wtf kind of a word is goober anyway? Seems like there's nothing like it in English. So I look up the etymology of the word.
Turns out that goober likely comes from the central & south African word for peanut - nguba. So immediately "goober" is associated with slavery. Very cool. What a start!
The word nguba makes it over to the US and then it develops racist and classist undertones because "goober" begins to refer to people, specifically backwards, uncultured, and largely black people. It's the uncultured and uncivilised people who call peanuts nguba, thus they themselves become goobers.
For such a seemingly benign word that's about as mild an insult as you could imagine, it carries the weight of slavery, the white man's burden, and largely institutionalised classism on its shoulders.
I think this one has gotten so far from its roots as to be unrecognizable - people call their own kids goober. language is wild
Just recently I learned square dancing has roots in slavery. Not that I ever really enjoyed square dancing,
Don't forget that square dancing had a major revival when Henry Ford started a campaign to promote it in order to counter the growing popularity of Jazz, which of course he saw as a Jewish plot to corrupt the youth with Black culture
Ch*g when used to describe finishing a drink quickly
I'm not sure if it's a slur everywhere but here it's a slur for indigenous people
i didn't even know this was a slur! definitely not gonna use that again
I remember 4 years ago when lefty sorta people would use "woke" unironically as a compliment.
I do whenever my annoying coworker begins complaining about "the woke", just as my way of fucking with him.
the potato variety, because i heard about the racist football team more often than i shopped for non-local potatoes
