You've got to be kidding .... Racist ?

[bennylaird]

Have you seen the Richard Pryor comedy sketches deling with Gibbo's dog usage?

[silentC]

No. I can just imagine though...

[Iain]

ABC radio don't have to blank out anything, only commercial stations.
Isn't equality wonderful

[Termite]

Was helping a friend set up a website recently and whenever I wrote teaspoon or tablespoon it was coming out in the post as teasthingy or tablesthingy. Had me scratching my head for a while until I checked the inbuilt banned words list. Apparently poon in the US is a slang word for part of the female anatomy, and so it was being banned. Had to use the whole word over ride function to get it to appear right.
Could you imagine a cooking website that mangled anything with spoon in it.

[Driver]

There are two problems with the schoolteacher’s frankly silly PC insistence on labelling ‘racist’ an entirely accurate and inoffensive use of the word black:

1. He/she is attempting to influence an impressionable young mind with a narrow political agenda that certainly runs counter to the student’s parents’ opinion and probably runs counter to the majority view within the community.

But, much more important:

2. By insisting on this silly, nit-picking PC terminology he/she is trivialising racism.

Racism – that is, real racism - is an ugly and evil thing. When allowed to prosper unchecked it led to the vile crimes of the Nazis, the institutionalised criminal policies of apartheid and the foul activities of the Ku Klux Klan (see the other thread about the song ‘Strange Fruit’).

Invoking racism as a reason to re-label a blackboard is teaching young students that racism is just a naming convention and probably something it is safe to ignore. The eventual likely outcome of the daft PC behaviour of this teacher and others is a generation of students who don’t understand what racism is and who may therefore struggle to grasp its harmful nature. If they don’t fully understand it, they may just fall into the trap of becoming racist themselves.

Teachers like this one need to be challenged. Not because their political correctness is annoying and silly but because it is actually quite dangerous and may lead to consequences that they profess to seek to avoid.

[ozwinner]

Well said Lord Legover.

Al

[meerkat]

I gotta admit I have never thought of it that way Lord Legover.

Thanks for another perspective.

The school is being advised of the situation.

Andrew

[ernknot]

This whole political correctness in all spheres of our lives is getting out of hand. I guess the worlds English dictionaries wiil soon be banned because they contain all that is politically incorrect. As we know the public service is full of nitwits pushing their own stupid agenda. I belive this intrusion on our way of thinking needs to be an election issue. We should not have to put up with this verbal excrement from narrow minded twits wherever they lurk. Lord Legover is quite correct in his analogy. Promote him to High Lord Legover I say!

[Auld Bassoon]

funny, the word "robot" is even painted on the roads when approaching the traffic lights).

Hi Les,

I remember my first or second day in Johannesburg and, when asking for some directions, was told to "turn left at the second robot". I think that the look of utter bemusement persuaded the direction-giver to explain what a robot is...

[Auld Bassoon]

If they make a new movie on the Dambusters raid you will probably see a different code word used to the one that signaled to breeching of the Mohne dam. ie the name of Gibsons dog.......

if you don't know sorry cant write it here.

Ah! that would be Scott's uncles' dish - Beef in N****R-bean sauce :eek:

[Auld Bassoon]

Lord (of the?) Legover has it absolutely spot-on. Well said!

[havenoideaatall]

The Dambusters situation is quite interesting.

Have to admit, I'd like to retain the original word in the film, but realise it would be appropriate to change it for a modern audience in certain markets. It doesn't harm history to change a Dog's name and so I don't object to PC in this example.
But blackboards - honestly.

Black is a noun and has never been offensive for most people.
N*gg*r is offensive.

What about C**n cheese. You could argue that c**n is only racist in an American context so it's OK in a Australian one.

[silentC]

I recently built a system that creates a random password by selecting two four letter words and placing them either side of a random number. For example, you might get a password like legs84boat. Nothing wrong with that, is there? Well, after the first test run, I had to eliminate so many seemingly innocent words from the dictionary in case they should ever come up in the wrong combination. Some of the words (apart from the obvious ones) that I had to delete were lick, lump, suck, kiss, bang because in initial testing, these words came up in what could be viewed as offensive combinations. It's a minefield trying to look after other people's sensibilities and you can be gauranteed that if a dodgey password went out, it would go to some stuck up prissy idiot and we would wind up in court.

[silentC]

Black is a noun

Actually, it's an adjective in most senses. It's the noun form of the word that some find offensive.

[havenoideaatall]

My wife tells me that a black student questioned a teachers' use of Blackboard a while ago at Uni. I laughed and said 'what are they going to do' - 'ban black paint'. My wife mentioned that there must be a reason behind the decision.

The thing is, the board was actually green....

But we have lots of words in usage that celebrate historical naming convention and many of us do remember boards that were black. People talk about a pint of beer long after say, modern parlance has us preferring metric..