MagiStream

Introduction -
I was surfing around on Yahoo News for interesting things to read and ran across this article regarding a student’s homework. Unfortunately, I can’t seem to re-locate it. It was written by PopSugar (not the most reputable, I admit), but this isn’t about reputability; it’s really more of a discussion on the meaning of words and if they should be used in certain ways.

The Article -
Again, let me re-iterate. I cannot seem to locate the original article that made me start thinking about this. It was an article about a student’s homework. On it was a question that read something along the lines of “how is a masterpiece different?” and one of the options (it was multi-choice) was “It’s better than a slave piece.”

The article (probably obviously) focused on it being racist, with the usual upsets, parental statements, and the school/teachers promising to remove it, if you’re curious. However, this isn’t the point of this thread, so it’s just extra information.

My thinking -
I’d remember hearing the term “slave piece” before when I was younger, and it was used without a negative connotation to it. I couldn’t remember the details though, so I decided to do a touch of digging. Admittedly, again, I didn’t find too many resources. However, I did find a few places that suggested another, more colloquial definition for the meaning. Some linked below.
https://www.reddit.com/r/furry/comments ... art_slave/
https://forum.deviantart.com/art/general/2072738/

Kneejerk reaction -
Once I’d verified this, my immediate reaction was to think people were being childish and looking for any reason to cry racism. (Something I frequently believe is absolutely true.) I do think this article was just digging for attention (it being by PopSugar and all), but it did get me thinking about the idea, at least.

The debate -
My kneejerk reaction slowly progressed to an internal debate. While I absolutely discredit the article in its entirety, it does strike something that I do find somewhat important: when and how is it OK to use terms that have a negative connotation to them in most use cases?


Re-iteration –
Please note that this is NOT about the article from PopSugar itself, nor is it inherently about racism.

Everybody has it's own universe, a funny thing that is frequently described as solipsism although solipsism itself is far more difficult philosophical subject to actually explain.
I digress though, the thing is that people all have their own experiences, morals and values that they pick up throughout their lives. You say orange and I might think about the national color of the Netherlands, another person of orange juice.

In the example you gave it was probably just a reaction to turn a given word the other way around so master automatically becomes slave. I do not even think that the student had racism on his or her mind but that is because I wasn't raised to see racism in every corner.
If I would have such knee-jerks reactions my life would become impossible as I have a lot of half-blooded relatives, am Jewish myself and basically have friends and family of every skin-color under the sun. None of us see racism everywhere like some people do.
Obviously racism does exist, we all get confronted by it, but in my opinion everybody gets a little too offended nowadays. Victims are a dime a dozen these days it seems.

But every person using thee racism-word as a beatstick there are actual people out there that feel hurt. Words do hurt and that is all due to how they live inside their own universes. Living inside your own universe is usually a negative connotation too as it is seen as being "not fully there" but I'm talking about personal values/morals/experiences here. It might seem stupid to me tot get upset about a certain word but not so ridiculous to others.

As for the actual debate itself...we cannot refrain from using words just because of negative connotations UNLESS they are clearly used to hurt or upset others.
It is one thing to use the term slave in a certain context or associate a person or group of people with the word. What words actually have negative connotations? Some are quite obvious, others not so much. Are we going to ban words?

Funny thing I just remembered; my sister (who is my half-sister and has a a fairly dark skin-tone) always wears silver broad bracelets which are known as "slave-bracelets". We never had any negative connotations with the word. We knew the historic context but it just didn't bother us at all.