It’s about respecting other people and teaching your child respectful language.

1. It’s funny when kids talk like this not because the parents are latent racists (that is, they’re making fun of blacks) but because the kid sounds like a redneck, and that’s the group they’re making fun of – hence phrases like “get a job” – they’re mocking the racists, not blacks.

2. There’s another video somewhere on the intertubes, with a kid who mispronounces “truck” (guess as what), and his parents(?) egg him on to say “truck you” and “aw, truck!”. It’s EXACTLY like this video, only that the slurs are not racial but general. Looked at in this context, the actual meaning of the slurs is irrelevant – all that’s important is that the kid seems to be using improper language. That’s all that matters. If the kid was saying something improper about whites (are there racial slurs against whites? Honky? I’m not familiar enough), it would still be as funny. So it’s not casual racism, it’s casual non-PCness, non non-puritanism, or non-prudiness. Is all.

“thewhatifgirl” kind of captures my point exactly. Of course, using a racial slur and lynching people are not necessarily equally as horrible. Gwen makes a useful distinction when she cordons off what she calls “casual racism.” In fact, there are several contexts where racial slurs can take on entirely different meanings then the content normally attributed to it by bougie academics and PC liberals (just the dominant voices on this).* I’ve witnessed people literally bridge the same chasms that these slurs are supposed to create using them (not to say I would, nor am I saying that its as simple as that).

*I am a bougie academic and a PC liberal (Actually, I’m pretty radical, but for all intent and purpose this will do).

I totally agree with you. It’s not that I think this type of racism isn’t harmful–many sociologists actually argue that in our supposedly “color-blind” society, it’s more problematic, b/c we’ve come to associate racism with Southern nutjobs who scream about the Downfall of the White Race or something really explicit, so this type of racism goes unnoticed or seems benign–”it’s just a little joke! Don’t be so sensitive!”

I’m just saying that these types of comments are casually dropped into conversations in a way that isn’t necessarily centered around a specific hatred (though, as several commenters have pointed out, you have to have some level of disrespect for a group to speak in such a way), as opposed to some of my relatives, who get on long rants about Jews and the New World Order, etc. etc. I find it horrifying that people can just casually drop racist statements into a conversation and then move on, as though it was nothing–in a way I find it more startling than when people go on a racist rant, b/c it seems to come out of nowhere and they treat it as totally inconsequential.

Except that these are often the same people who believe that all black people need to “get a job,” as they told the little girl to say in the video. This kind of racism is based just as much in anger and resentfulness – anger and resentment over the belief that black people are essentially stealing white people’s hard-earned money through welfare and supposedly able to live far better lives than white people, full of unearned money and idleness. I don’t see this kind of racism as any less virulent or horrible than, say, that of the members of the KKK.

This is probably a lost cause, I’ve brought it up with many Americans (at least the class and breed of Americans I am liable to come across most often) in the past and they have seemed unwilling to budge on it. There is a lot of wrangling over the use of certain racialized words in America (and to some extent in Canada too), which tends to reduce racism to something like a speech impediment, vulgar dialect, or at least a poor choice of words. During my last fist a cuffs, I found myself having to argue that racism was about injustice, and it was a problem because of concrete cases of prejudice resulting in inequality. It is argued that making divisions among populations opens up the door to violence. This is absolutely true, and so lines need to be drawn cautiously, or done away with entirely. But drawing lines is not what’s at fault—we tend to distinguish between tall people and short people without much trouble. The problem of racism in America, and in Canada, is that those lines were drawn and for hundreds of years various systematic efforts were made to make these divisions felt. Racism is real because if you’re born black in today, you’re a lot more likely to end up worse off and have fewer opportunities in life than if you are born white; and, because there is a number of white people in positions of power today that are consciously trying to keep it that way. I would love it if this featured more prominently in public discussion.

This post is already to long, but to flesh it out I would try and post several examples where people use seriously racialized words in ways that might not necessarily result in inequality. A lot of people employ “casual racism” and I don’t deny that it is totally in bad taste (What’s taste? Ahem, Bourdieu). But having everyone not using certain words is not going to solve racism in America. Discussions of word choice have to feed directly into discussions of injustice.

So, how does the case cited above produce and reproduce objective inequality? ;) Let’s begin with “Get a job, sparkling wiggles!”… Black people are not any more lazy than white people, and you would have to be a moron to not hire a skilled black person because you’re worried about this…

(the text in the picture translates as “Watch the pendulum and repeat after me — everything is alright… everything is totally alright…”)