As an American yute in the 80s, ghetto blaster was always considered the more grotesque term and mostly used when people were trying to offend / push buttons. Most people referred to the radios as boom boxes. Ghetto blasters were never the primary phrase to describe them.
I don’t doubt the rest of the world picked up on the phrase ghetto blaster from tv and movies but it definitely always had racial undertones in its utilization, in the US.
Seems like a weird hill to die on.
The only people dying are those who still refuse to understand different cultures, despite other Brits agreeing with me.
Always happy to assert your moral superiority over the USA, even after your performance in this thread. Amazing.
Nobody is saying you are as racist/deplorable as wirelessbro, what we keep saying is that you’re using the exact same lines of reasoning to defend the racist word you’d like to keep in your vernacular as the American deplorables use to defend Confederate flags, the n-word, etc.
You’re literally playing all the hits, it’s an amazing coincidence!
Ok fine, my bad for conflating your specious argument with an adjacent specious argument. Repeating it doesn’t help.
And nobody started out calling you racist. they said a thing you said is racist. Not the same thing. I’m not even sure how racist that particular thing is, but the discussion of the broader point is interesting because we find out that some of us still find compelling arguments that others have learned to dismiss out of hand.
So why is “it’s not offensive here so nobody should take offense” a cogent argument for you to make but a specious argument for an actual racist to make? Or iyo is their reasoning also sound?
You are literally every racist person I know
Your refusal to acknowledge the phrase was cribbed from a place where it was racist is weird.
I fail to see why people in other countries wouldn’t stop using it when they learned its origins. Ghetto blaster hasn’t been flippantly used by non racists for decades in America.
We were told we had to but in light of this new information I guess it is time to reload.
I guess cultural sensitivity ends at the lines on a map.
You’re an idiot and you haven’t worked out yet that the problem with your country is people like you, whether centrists or rightists, who want to wave your pathetic flag and sing the sad anthem you were forced to from a young age, because underneath it all you think your xenophobic shithole of a country is the greatest blah blah blaha, and that somehow gives you the right to piss all over other countries with your military and your shitty cultural values.
This thread is lol. My thoughts are that the UK sucks and I hope its citizens enjoy learning to speak American over the next century.
I recently had a similar discussion with someone from the UK who defended to the death the specific use by Trump, in a tweet, of “THUG”, was not a racist dog whistle because they could cite examples of it being used to refer to whites people in Irish newspapers.
That person was an idiot, and unfortunately there are too many here like him.
The more you think about it, the more this should not be all that surprising.
A lot of jalfrezi’s “anti-racism” really just consists of him holding intellectual positions and foreign policy views that are less racist than the official policy of the federal government of the United States. Then he points at all the racism here, decries it (as we all do obviously), and claims his moral superiority.
Meanwhile, he has far fewer opportunities to put his anti-racism into practice in real life, as there is much less diversity in the UK than the US. The UK is like 87% white. Of course, that’s not an indictment of his morals, he just doesn’t have the same opportunities.
The indictment is that he’s so arrogant about it, and has such a need to feel superior to us, that he cannot admit he has some work to do. Instead, he has to die on this hill. It’s tragic, really.
He’s walking around in his everyday life thinking he’s this anti-racist superstar, and his heart is probably in the right place, but he’s almost certainly saying some cringe-inducing things in front of others without realizing it. He can’t let his ego go so that he can work on that. It’s a shame.
Let me expand on my earlier post.
When I grew up having a portable radio/cassette player was kind of a big thing. The huge ones with giant ass speakers were called “ghetto blasters”. It sounded cool to us and owning one was a status symbol, maybe comparable to owning the latest iPhone today. Nobody ever heard of the term “boom box”. If there was a technical term for one of these it was probably something unwieldy like “portable radio/cassette player combination” (in German) which is a mouthful and doesn’t have the cool word “blaster” in it.
As for the “ghetto” part, there were probably some racial but not necessarily racist undertones in there. It was certainly associated with black people living in poor neighborhoods with high crime rates. The next step like “most black people are criminals” instead it was “many African-Americans are poor and live in shitty neighborhoods”.
Having hardly any (like close to zero) people of African descent around racism was mostly directed at first and second generation guest workers (eg. Turks, Italians, Poles).
The terms “ghetto” or “ghetto blaster” didn’t have the same connotations it had in the US. I think Americans sometimes project their own experiences and word uses on other countries. Take for example “blackface”. In countries that didn’t have a history of slavery and minstrel shows it simply isn’t as offensive as it is in the US because we do not make those same connections.
I have read sometimes people in the US reporting having heard some say or confessing to ignorantly having said themselves “he jewed me”. I can guarantee you in Germany that is a DEFCON 1 “WTF did you just say?” alarm. That is not thrown around casually because we are much more sensitized to this, just as Americans are much more sensitized to “blackface”.
While I am certainly biased, I think jalfrezi is getting a lot of undeserved flack here.
Imagine attacking Unstuckers for flag worship, anthem worship, xenophobia, American exceptionalism, military worship, and shitty cultural values.
LOL motherfucker are you new here?
London is only 45% white British. Try harder.
Posted without a hint of irony!
Right so based on the few posts of yours that I bothered to read (you seem a bit pumped up) your line seems to have shifted overnight from “You used a racist trope” to “You’re an actual racist”. Is that right?
Correct!
A racial slur in British English (P***) is what Catalonians call convenience stores that happen to be owned by Pakistanis. We in America look at negro as a racial slur but it’s common for black women in Spain to be called negra or negrita. I was dating a black girl at the time and nearly snapped on the spot when I heard that. Thankfully, she quickly explained it to me and I sat down.
It’s actually 60% white, I looked it up before I posted, because I knew you were going to go there. Feel free to compare that to the demographics of major American cities. My point stands. I find it interesting that you felt the need to draw a distinction between white British, white Irish, and white Other, but I digress.