Until a couple of years ago, we had a brand of cheese called ‘Coon’, here in Australia.
The word isn’t used as a slur over here, and the brand was simply named after the founder about 150 years back.
But it was getting increasingly on the nose as cultural influences from the US and everywhere kept seeping in, and it reached a point where it pretty much needed an excuse or at least an explanation.
So they renamed it; now it’s ‘Cheer’.
And at the time, there was all kinds of pearl-clutching about the malicious / disingenuous / officious / vapidly-offended / white-knighting / attention-seeking / etc / etc ‘woke crowd’ stomping in and making them change everything when it was perfectly good and harmless and stuff.
Six months later, nobody gave a single shit any more. Nobody died as a result or was even mildly inconvenienced, no great cultural traditions were lost, and contrary to several predictionsm newly-empowered wokeocrats have not risen from the shadows to re-gender everyone or whatever. It’s that cheese with the blue white and green label, nobody reads it anyway.
My point is that small token changes cost virtually nothing, and even if they achieve little in and of themselves, the mere fact of people being willing to make them is of benefit. Small courtesies, you know? Returning your shopping cart. Smiling at passing dogs. It models kindness and consideration, and promotes the idea that those things have value.
Which is not to suggest that we must avoid giving offense at all consts; far from it. I’m one of those stereotypicallly abrasive genX types raised on ideals of free speech, punk rock, uncomfortable truths and loudly pointing out the elephant in the room no matter how many toes get stepped on. But when there isn’t some burning issue that needs to be addressed, niceties be damned… then yeah, small courtesies. Give people that extra bit of room even if they don’t strictly needed. It’s nice to be nice.
Look back a handful of decades at all those cultural relics that your grandparents considered harmless and invisible. Asking people to drop them may have attracted ridicule and suspicion at the time, but looking back at some of them… oh dear god, really?
Hell, I remember The Black And White Minstrel Show on TV, and if you don’t remember it yourself, it’s far worse than you’re imagining.
I like the world better without things like that, even the little seemingly-trivial ones, and even if it seems like empy virtue-signalling while you’re cleaning them up.
Lets_Eat_Grandma@lemm.ee 2 months ago
TheBananaKing is offensive. It is a reference to Banana Republics, you know the system where corporations marginalize an entire populace and make them produce their product for profit. You should really change your username. It’s trivial and nobody will care if you change it.
Obviously I do think this is as absurd as asking a company to change it’s name which was named after the founder, but you went there and presented the argument for it. I can at least understand moving away from master/slave in computing especially in future products and revisions but making someone change their business name which is named after the founder’s is ludicrous.
That being said, the only reason why the company changed the name was because it gave them good PR in the form of free advertising- just imagine all the headlines. Since you have no upside to changing yours, I know you won’t do it. Humanity is full of virtue signaling hypocrites who are just out for themselves.
lolcatnip@reddthat.com 2 months ago
Did you know there’s a chain of clothing stores in the US named Banana Republic? Every time I think about it, it blows my mind that they could have chosen any name, and that’s what they went with.