Reciprocation. Politeness goes both ways. Giving your peer the respect in understanding that clearly s/he was not invoking a term for its racial connotations is part of that.
> Perhaps the heart of the issue here is that when the sensitivities of certain people are not deemed to be worthy of polite respect, we are implicitly deciding that those people are not worthy of being our peers.
Yep. That's the "woke" movement in a nutshell.
The rest of us will just treat each other like adults capable of understanding nuance.
Is some behavior only rude if the person knows that it will be offensive? I think if a 16 year old picks his nose in a job interview, you’d still think he was rude, even if you knew his parents didn’t raise him right.
When I was growing up, we used the word “gyp” as a synonym for “cheat”. As in “Don’t g** me out of what you owe me!” Earlier generations would use the word “jew” as a verb in a similar way.
As kids, we were ignorant of the origin of these words. Does that fact make our use of them them less offensive and rude? What would you tell your kid if you heard him say to a friend, “You better not j** me out of what you owe me!” Personally, I would be mortified, even if I knew it came from a place of ignorance.
What’s the difference here?
If this were a peer you knew and respected personally, calling them out in front of other peers and suggesting others might think he meant it in a racist way when it doesn't relate to the issue at hand would be impolite. It implies you might think the speaker intended to invoke racist connotations, which derails the conversation and raises questions about the potential racism of the speaker in the minds of other participants.
> As kids, were ignorant of the origin of these words. Does that fact make our use of them them less offensive and rude?
The issue here isn't ignorance. Your examples are racial slurs. "Lynch" is not a racial term, nor is "firehose" or "bus". There are potentially offensive connotations to all of those words based on prior history, yet somehow we are able to grasp the nuance when used in a different context. At least today.
> What’s the difference here?
The meanings of the words.
Being able to make a theoretical case as to how something could be offensive (if framed in a way it was not framed) is not the same as usage of a racial slur. Dropping the n-word casually is not equivalent to using a branch named "master" in your git repo. We're way past "politeness" and well into viewpoint enforcement, and I think you know this.
Can some be ignored or do all have to be taken equally serious?
Because otherwise I'm sure you'll agree there's no end in sight. You're offended by my insensitivities, I am by yours, people start making things up just to silence people they don't like etc
In this context the word lynching clearly has nothing to do with hanging people from trees. Taking those words literally and then screaming intolerance will only lead to more misery.
Do you really think that's what's going on here? I see it differently.
Being polite is often about self-imposed constraints. We constrain our actions and our language as a sign of respect. Do we do it for everyone? No. But we do it for people we care to show respect to.
In the United States, after the Civil War, lynching primarily existed as a tool by which white mobs terrorized non-white communities into social and political subservience, by murdering people. By one measure, three-quarters of lynching victims were black, when only 12% of the population was black. In parts of the old south-west, lynching was part of a successful ethnic-cleansing effort to expel Mexican landowners from lands that white settlers wanted for themselves. Take a look at some of the pictures, read some of the history:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynching_in_the_United_States
This violent history hits hard when you identify with the victims, when those victims resemble your grandparents and great-grandparents, when you know that your grandparents and great-grandparents were also subject to painful repression within the same cultural and historical context. The word has a different energy.
I didn't take your use of thee word literally. I used the word "non-metaphorical" in my original comment because I wanted to flag that I understood you used the term metaphorically. There are some words, in some contexts that are offensive when used metaphorically.
Just to be clear, I'm not offended by you, nor do I think you are intolerant. I just thought that the word you used in the way you used it was offensive enough given the context to say something about it.
If you didn't have a sense before of how the word might be taken as offensive in the way that you used it, now you do. Do what you will with that information.
Good luck.
How do you deal with bad actors? How do companies like ebay deal with bad actors in this realm?
Perhaps the heart of the issue here is that when the sensitivities of certain people are not deemed to be worthy of polite respect, we are implicitly deciding that those people are not worthy of being our peers.