Fox news is the single biggest contributor to the decline, fueling the push towards fascism by indoctrinating the angry white guys who find it much easier to blame someone else for their shitty lives rather than taking a hard look at themselves. After getting a taste of the hate, they get sucked down the Breitbart>Infowars>Stormfront rabbit hole.
The so called liberal media are corporate mouthpieces for the ruling elite, apologists for the worst behaviors of the right all while giving it some sense of normalcy. It took two massacres within a 24 hour time span for the conversation to address what should have been brought up the day tRUmp came down the escalator calling all Mexicans rapists.
Stuff like what you mention isn’t in the press, though. This is normalization of a bad term (nothing you mention would ever be normalized), and anything that gets normalized is something that makes Stephen Miller happy. That’s my argument.
Also ‘migrant’ v ‘immigrant’ is a hyper-rarefied discussion that 99% of people neither understand nor care about. Literally nothing hinges on which term is used.
I maintain the best thing that could happen to these people like Kellyanne Conway is constant, unrelenting, brutally hurtful shame. Shove pictures of dead kids in her face, refuse to serve her at restaurants/hotels/anywhere, stand outside whatever nauseating social events she attends with signs and megaphones. That these people get to essentially be murderers while living delightful upper class lives is an indictment of this shithole country.
Yeah and most people don’t care about the distinction between ‘Indian’ vs. Native American vs. Indigenous vs. Tribe, or Latino vs. Hispanic, but that doesn’t mean you’re right to ignore the implications of the words.
If you don’t have a problem with those words, you’re free to use them, but you can’t act like you’re ignorant of why they’re being used the way they are. They’re markers, sorry.
Yeah, come live in America and tell me you’re right about this. GMAFB. People will fight you to the death on their ability to use those words when you correct them and tell them why it’s wrong to use. And those people are almost all a-holes.
Just the word ‘Indian’ is an example. Would you want people to call you Scottish if you’re Irish? And when you correct them, they’re like ‘whatever Scotsman’. It’s blatantly incorrect terminology and sloppy use of language when the stuff seeps into common media vernacular. It’s often used to perpetuate the racism of ‘I don’t care’ or ‘I’m indifferent to it’, when there are a whole lot of people who are not indifferent and do care.
In case you’re unaware (and I doubt you are), Latino describes people from Central and South America, and Hispanic describes people from the Caribbean.
But I’m glad you want to normalize racist or casually racist language because people don’t know any better. That’s a great take, and one that needs be educated against.
When I go this strong, I’m incredibly confident. I don’t usually go this strong unless I am. As an FYI, I’ve been waging this particular battle for nearly 30 years, so this is not me just chiming in.
I’m only taking your word for it that most people don’t care about those distinctions. If, as you assure me, most people don’t care about those distinctions, then those distinctions are simply an idiosyncrasy of whatever group cares about them. There are very good reasons to accept and amplify that minority position when it’s eg the gay community and ‘f****t’ and so on, since that word is and has been consciously used in ordinary speech to degrade and dehumanise members of that community.
There may well exist some group of Stephen Millers who delight in using and seeing used ‘migrant’ as opposed to ‘immigrant’, but if there is, their delight is masturbatory and impotent. Doesn’t make any difference to anything. The meaning of a word is its use in language - if ‘migrant’ and 'immigrant are used interchangeably in ordinary speech, then their meanings are identical in ordinary speech. The abstracted implications perceived by some tiny group of politics sports-fans just don’t move the semantic and connotative needles. Fretting about it is a complete waste of time.
Google is telling me Hispanic is from any Spanish speaking country, including Spain, and Latino is from Latin America. Brazilians are Latino, but not Hispanic. Here’s a cartoon
It’s not being used interchangeably. This is their new word. Immigrant almost never appears in the press anymore.
I’m just saying to be conscious about this. If you don’t care, that’s you. But when you know what could be going on here, it seems like a conscious choice if you continue to use it. In other words, it’s normalization. This is literally the most time I’ve wasted talking about the word.