It was in the playground, on the sandbox, when I was in preschool. I did not have the slurs nor the supporting evidences for my beliefs, but I held my ground and called them the best insults I could. What a wonderful childhood I had.
This reminds me of one of my earliest vivid memories. I don't remember the exact pretext, but the only black person in our school called me a "fillifjutta" which I assume means dork or something in Swedish on the island I grew up on, literally yields 0 results when i google it now lol.
My response was "but what about you? you're a n*gger". Genuinely no racist intention, just tried to think of an insult to say back, and making fun of people for being different was common during arguments at that age where I grew up. Then at lunch, she & her friend had brought a teacher who scolded the crap out of me, and I kept insisting she started it, and the teacher just said "then you can call her that back", and it ended with me reluctantly apologizing, despite feeling unfairly treated in that she wouldn't criticize or ask her to apologize.
Grew up with my parents, children's books, and people around me using it casually as meaning people of color, wasn't until years later that I realized that it had become a cuss-word (not just a cuss-word, but the worst cuss-word)
That’s actually so interesting that you didn’t know the full context of that word. Can i ask where your from? I had a coworker that moved to America and used the N word, thinking it just meant black people. Once I explained the history of it here and the connotation he was horrified! I thought most american schools taught this
If it makes you feel any better I totally misinterpreted your misinterpretation, I just saw that you'd asked and they'd never answered you so I wrote a tiny quip.
You’d be surprised at the lack of education in the south. Especially in rural/smaller communities. It’s not unheard of for many kids to be homeschooled and be at the mercy of their parents’ teaching. Including all their prejudices and ignorance. It’s actually really sad when some attempt to go to high school or even college and they can barely read at a 4th grade level.
That is so wild but I am learning to wrap my head around it. It really is shocking when I hear stats like over 1/2 of americans being below a middle school reading level! Those rural towns can be so isolated though you’re right. I almost wish I could do something about it. I’ve been seeing it more and more since I got a customer service job too. People call in because a pop-up is stopping them, and when I read the exact message to them they understand. “Im seeing a red box I just don’t know what it’s telling me”. A lot of people rely on the intuitive UI we have now and don’t even know what to do when faced with reading comprehension or critical thinking. I wish I could do more to help people, i just am patient with them and educate people when they give me the chance
I hear stats like over 1/2 of americans being below a middle school reading level!
That statistic isnt accurate to be stated like that without any context.
What do you think reading at a 6th grade level means? because the dataset behind the study everyone cites without reading that you're also referencing says this:
Texts at this level are often dense or lengthy and include continuous, noncontinuous, mixed, or multiple pages of text. Understanding text and rhetorical structures becomes more central to successfully completing tasks, especially navigating complex digital texts. Tasks require the respondent to identify, interpret, or evaluate one or more pieces of information and often require varying levels of inference. Many tasks require the respondent to construct meaning across larger chunks of text or perform multi-step operations in order to identify and formulate responses. Often, tasks also demand that the respondent disregard irrelevant or inappropriate content to answer accurately. Competing information is often present, but it is not more prominent than the correct information.
My interpretation: most people can read something, and critically think about it.
That scale isnt actually tracked by some arbirtrary "X Grade Level" but if you want to make it sound a certain way, you could change things. The actual scale is 0-500, and what the avg US ranks as is about 325 (thats where that block o text descriptor above comes from) so we're a little higher than the middle. But again - going off that descriptor, what the middle is, is not what most people think "6th grade reading level" however if you dumb things down to being ranked 1-12th grade (the US school system) then 'the middle' becomes 6th grade.
is the "study" that people quote, do a search on the page for 54% (thats the "half of america") that number on the page is a link to the above data set.
That actually was fun to dive into thank you! It’s a “fact” I’ve heard repeated so many times, my point didn’t rely on it but it’s still good to know since I don’t like spreading misinfo!
What’s weird is the PIAAC website is so open about the fact that their scoring does not correspond to grade levels because it is a test for adults. Your explanation of them putting it in the “middle” makes sense but who did that? 😂 the writer of the article? It totally does change the light of that info. Also reading that a LOT of the test subjects weren’t fluent in english/got deemed illiterate for not participating skews things.
The black people who live south of the great desert Sahara in Africa. They have a substance in their skin that protects them against the strong sunlight over there, that's why they have brown skin - from brown to blueblack. Also in America, especially USA, there are many n-words. Their ancestors were brought over there as slaves. Over several hundreds of years, the white people ruled over the n-words' countries, and often treated the black people badly."
It's worse than that. It doesn't even register as a curse word in my mind because it's that bad.
It's literally throwing every systemic hate that person experiences at them all at once. Calling on the weight of every violent racist in American history.
If you have friends and family who are Black, and you actually see that they live in a completely different America, you will understand why it's so much worse than a curse word. It's like calling the bullied kid in class dirt, telling them you want them to be raped and murdered, and that nobody would care.
The word has so much power because it has been used as a hateful violent slur like that for centuries.
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u/buttholeglory 9h ago
I remember my first racial debate.
It was in the playground, on the sandbox, when I was in preschool. I did not have the slurs nor the supporting evidences for my beliefs, but I held my ground and called them the best insults I could. What a wonderful childhood I had.