Comment on How to secure your phone before attending a protest
18_24_61_b_17_17_4@lemmy.world 3 days agoJust an aside that Paddy wagons is pretty racist.
Every sourcing I have seen comes more from the UK as a way to shorten patrol and the argument that it is an ethnic slur against Irish people is similar to “cracker” in that… can you REALLY be that racist against the oppressors?
But tweaked anyway. Thanks.
Irish people were actually considered “non-white” throughout most of the history of race as a concept. They were only recently recategorized by racists when they felt their numbers dwindling and decided to expand the tent a little.
Irish people have suffered from a history of explicitly racist oppression; calling them “the oppressors” flies directly in the face of history. Their skin colour may be white, but the history of their relationship with race as a power structure is far more complex.
This does not mean that it’s impossible for Irish people to be racist themselves, or for Irish people to embrace “white” as an identity. Race is complicated; that’s exactly why trying to adopt simplistic attitudes to it never works.
Yes, the Irish were (and kind of still are) looked down upon by “Whites”.
They historically chose to address that by becoming cops. Oppressors. The idea being that if they were useful they would at least be better than the brown and yellow people. And irish cops have caused untold horrors amongst labor and minorities.
So while I disagree that “paddy wagon” is an Irish slur so much as MAYBE it is a cop slur, it is close enough that I’ll refrain from using it. But it is still the same issue as with “cracker” where… you are gonna have to try a whole hell of a lot harder for me to care if people’s feelings are hurt that folk don’t appreciate how many skulls they cracked in the name of impressing the crackers.
Like, you do see how you’re very much engaging in stereotyping by saying that “They historically chose to address that by becoming cops” as if somehow a) all Irish people in America became cops, and b) the experiences of the Irish diaspora in America are somehow representative of all Irish people.
Like, seriously, go ask some Irish people in Northern Ireland how they feel about cops some time. Depending on who you ask you’re guaranteed to get some wildly different answers.
Yeah racism doesn’t apply to whypepo
shalafi@lemmy.world 3 days ago
That’s so old-school racist it doesn’t count anymore, like Irish_Americans give a shit in 2025. You’re diluting the word, making it worth less.
This is what people mean when they say, “You can’t say anything anymore!” They’re not mad they can’t say n*****, they’re mad because of silly shit like this. If everything is racist, language becomes a minefield, impossible to keep up with and navigate.