White people don't want to talk about it

[Waiting For Everyman]

458. It's already been said that our silence means we don't care.

I've read it here numerous times already bemoaning the thin response to certain threads, so you're right about that. But I don't care what's said about how we don't care. That's all a lot of excuse-making spin to protect a fiction. It's worthless.

I get your point above, and that's fine, but it still strikes me as: 1) similar to what ISIS and the religious right, and numerous other cults do -- they take some obscure point of analysis and build a programming tool out of it; 2) irrelevant, that squabbling over words needs to end. As you noted, in real life who the hell cares about the history of nuances in the connotations of words? For those in academia who care, fine, but I agree that the problem comes when it's popularized (or heavily promoted) out into the real world, it becomes a dangerous strain of HAIRSPLITTING. It's a method to avoid the point via toxic trivia.

Words are fascinating, I get that, I'm with you on that one (to that end I studied Ancient Greek with one of the best university profs left on the planet for two years in the 1980s), but in a political context what's wanted is clarity. It's more appropriate to use words by their broadly understood meanings today. The conversation is today.

Anyway, your post above is a thoughtful one, on points well taken, and very illuminating nadin, and I'm very glad you took the time to reply.

(p.s. That hooha that went on in those other subthreads above was ridiculous. We all can see what's really going on.)