"Way to miss the point Knut because you took it as a personal attack?.
Think of "you" as in adressing to a group and not a person."

I did.

And the phrase "If you still find some comfort using it to describe humans and want to argue about its legitimacy, ask yourself twice about such disposition." still means : "If you think it's OK to use the word 'Race', maybe you should consider the possibility that you're  racist."

Is there another way to read that? If so, please explain. Just because you make your language vague and circumspect doesn't mean that you don't have to defend what you're implying.

And seriously : what difference does it make whether you directed it at me or at a group? To use a common image on this board:

You said "Blue-shirts may ask themselves whether they're racist.". I'm not going "I have a red shirt, and I resent that."   I'm going "I have a Blue shirt and I think you're wrong in considering the actions that you infer as racism as racism."

Oh. Excuse me. "Group-classification-ism".

The problem with "PC" and "Anti-PC" is that they tend to go to far.

By all means, retire the "N-word". But shouldn't "Black" be as acceptable as "African American." ?

Using a word like "retard" as a casual pejorative is wrong and should be discouraged. But when the phrase "mentally retarded" - used as an accurate description of a group of people requiring similar types of assistance and care - is "retired" as a result, then we have a problem. Any word or phrase, however benign, used to describe these people will be "tainted" immediately and we'll have to reinvent terminology every 5-10 years.

There's a difference between saying not to abandon useful language hastily and saying that it's okay to be an asshole.

When you say someone is bald, fat, a dwarf, mentally retarded or black, there is nothing inaccurate or offensive in the words themselves. There are words that may be used about such groups of people that are inherently offensive, and their use should be discouraged.

But most of the time, if these accurate and inoffensive words are felt to be offensive it's because (for instance) a person says "you're bald" and it's understood as "You're bald, and I think bald guys are old, unattractive, unmanly or impotent etc." Or "you're fat" is understood as "You're fat and I think that means you're unattractive, lazy, greedy, lack self-control and you're generally soft etc."

That doesn't change with the words. If anything, new PC terminology just adds the impression that a person is in denial.

I know that there are Anti-PC guys out there who think that using "bald" or "fat" instead of "follicly challenged" or "metabolically disadvantaged"  is not enough and think it's okay to use phrases like "Dildo-head" or "lard-ass" to compensate for the excessive restraints PC sometimes places on language. But that's not okay, that's rude. That is not what I'm defending.

When talking about the word "Race", there is no problem in the word itself. It merely classifies physical differences. The problem is that there is racism. Changing the words won't make racism go away. And changing only the word, not what it describes certainly doesn't help.

If I substitute the word "Race" with the word "Group-classification", how do I define the word "Group-classification" ?

Just look at the problem with a word like "African American" used instead of "Black". People like Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela end up being referred to as "African American" becasuse the word is used as a simple substitution.

And then there's things like double-hyphen mixes. A person with an African-American and an Asian-American parent becomes Afro-Asian.

Funny, since Afro-Asian is the appropriate term being used to describe semittic peoples (Arabs and Jews) because they come from the border regions between Africa and Asia.

And the word "Eurasian" is used to describe people of mixed "Asian" and "European" heritage when "Eurasia" is really a word that describes the connected landmasses of Europe and Asia. So all Europeans and all Asians are technically Eurasian. And if you go for Afro-Eurasian you've described the entirety of the world's population, haven't you?

And 'black' was actually viewed as a pejorative by African-Americans during the time when 'Negro' was considered the correct term.

Cheers, Jon

The one thing worse than PC, is people who whine about Political Correctness because it means they cant be assholes anymore. Common sense means thinking before you open your mouth. Being grown up means chosing your words carefully and acting in a polite, respectful manner.

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Just let me be clear on this point, then. You're saying that when some people paint with a broad brush it's wrong, but when you do it, it's okay?

•••

When Roger Stern was reprint editor, this story turned up as one to use in one of Marvel's horror or supernatural books. Roger realized the sensibilities of the Nation had changed considerably since the original story was published, so he changed the character of "Doctor Droom" into Dr. Druid, and eliminated any references to him "turning Asian". So, his dialog in that particular panel -- in which the art and coloring were also changed -- became something like "My mind! It's as if I have been asleep all my life!"

At the time, Rog joked that the original dialog said "My skin! It's becoming Y instead of Y2R2!" This referred, of course, to the color coding using in comics at that time. Caucasian skin tones were a mixture of the white of the page with a fifty percent yellow and a fifty percent red overlaid.

(As I have mentioned before, the "blue" of Spider-Man's costume is actually Y2R2B2 -- ie, Caucasian flesh tones with a fifty percent blue added to the mix. Since the separations for the color plates were all done by hand back then, and since some areas sometimes did not get all the colors they were supposed to, this led to at least one startling instance of our Friendly Neighborhood Wallcrawler bursting into a room "widdout no pants on!")

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When I was a child in England, people routinely named their black cats and dogs "Nigger", while the pejorative word (which included people from India) was "Black".

To this day, "the N-word" has no power for me (it's a silly word if you think about it), while part of my brain still twitches nervously when I hear a person of sub-Saharan African descent referred to as "Black".

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Indeed it would be -- if that was what I said. But since it wasn't. . .