Hey … I’m a big brown long haired red skinned Indigenous person … you can see me coming from a mile away.
I’ve had people scream, yell, say, suggest, comment, off the cuff, passive-aggressively, overtly, covertly, obviously, secretly and blatantly be racist to me behind my back and to my face many many times … more often passively but a few times openly and blatantly. I’ve had some pretty ugly things said to me either directly or indirectly because of the colour of my skin and what I look like.
I think some old white guy with a good station in life can handle being called a ‘boomer’ online.
How is this helpful? Either using slurs is wrong or its not. Take a guess what happens when you give the majority a reason to dismiss your objections to their behaviour.
You are making it more difficult to fix the problems that exist because these 2 comments only tell bad actors that they dont want equality they want superiority. Why would a group that has privilege give up that privilege just to be treated as badly as they treat others?
Sure its ducking rediculous that this is the thing that gets a reaction, and not the endless horrors that have been done to people over history, but as long as we are willing to say, “fuck YOUR problems because you have the wrong colour of skin” you arent going to fix a damn thing, merely exchange one wrong position with another.
Man, these snowflakes and their checks notes avocado toast (Jim, is that still relevant? Okay, whatever.) are just full of themselves and don’t understand how hurtful it is for the generation that fucked around and left others to find out to hear a word. A word! (Seriously, who wrote this?) So, lets all be a bit kinder to the elders and stop calling people out on their bullshit. (Ok, a boomer had to write this copy. I quit.)
I mean “hate crime”, I don’t know, but it is ageism. Not to mention this whole boomer vs millennial thing is such an obvious ploy by the corporate media to throw up another distracting infight to prevent us from fighting the real enemy, billionaires CEOs.
I don’t know about you but I have no special hate in my heart for my parents. Yeah their generation messed some things up but trust me our kids will find things to blame us for 20-30 years from now.
I can’t speak for others but the reason I’ve used boomer as a slur, if you can even call it that, in the past is because they don’t see the fight you mentioned as necessary. You can’t be allies with someone who doesn’t think there’s a problem to be fixed. It would be one thing if we were fighting the same battle in different ways but that’s not what’s happening. They’re actively helping the other side win.
And this is why it’s, in my opinion, correct to call it a slur. When you refer to a certain part of the population, in the context of calling them the enemy, not based on their beliefs or actions but their age, that sounds questionable. Just as it would be if you said the same thing about a racial group, a sexual preference, a religious group, etc.
I would take issue with you saying the word only refers to a specific age group. In my experience it is describing people with a specific set of beliefs about the world. It just so happens the most common factor in whether or not you have those beliefs is how old you are. Not all boomers are “boomers” just as not all Gen Z are progressive or whatever else the stereotype is, but in order to talk about large groups of people you have to make generalized statements. We’re talking about trends not absolute definitions.
This feels a lot like saying “when I say the n-word I don’t mean all black people, just the bad ones” (and yes that word is of course a different level of bad but the principle is the same)
You can make those arguments without the blatant generalization and denigrating language.
Language is like that. You can read into it what you want to in many cases. If you don’t want to accept what I’m telling you I mean when I say something then that’s fine. Just know at that point you’re giving more weight to your own assumptions than you are to what the speaker intended to convey and that’s the opposite of how listening is supposed to work.
Language is like that, careless use makes your point unclear and may lead people to think you’re a bigot when that’s not your intention. You can blame others for not understanding your inner thinking when you’re make sweeping generalizations but in the end it’s not their responsibility to dig into your psyche.
It’s not careless use you’re just trying to be the gatekeeper of which uses are acceptable and which aren’t. Your interpretation isn’t automatically right just because it’s yours.
Besides, you’re trying to cast boomers as some marginalized group of people when they’re the wealthiest generation in the richest nation in the history of the world. That’s objectively a dumb position to take.
In summary, and in the clearest language I can muster, there is no award for being offended on behalf of the most people so quit being such a whiny little bitch about everything.
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