Religion This is getting out of hand

Heard this slur often after I moved from Portland to Iowa as a teenager. Small farm town of less than 1000 people, 3 of which were black, our neighbors. Family members who always lived there and friends and their families used this term along with others. Blew me away as a young kid. It was the first time I realized racism was a real thing. I hung out at the Columbia rec center (Charles Jordan Community Center?) a few times a week while my dad lifted weights there and I was often the only white kid there but didn't realize that fact until I moved to Iowa.

Iowa is a great place, but a lot of racism in the hearts of the people.

 

Since the name of the thread suggests, what do you think should be done about it?

 

Jesus... I'll use language y'all understand...

Context matters....

If you're docking at Coon Island you're simply visiting a place with a name.

If you call a black man coon, you might be racist. How hard is it?

 

I am the Beetle.

I once replied to a Black man I worked with and liked very much, "I know what you mean, boy." or something like that. He flashed anger at me even though hes a very warm and caring person who worked in his off hours as a well known minister. I realized what I said and fell all over myself that I didn't mean it that way. I meant it the was White people say something like boy oh boy, I see where you're coming from. I was young and made frequent mistakes but this one was most certainly not intended either consciously or unconsciously.
People goof.

 

The key word is might.

 

I goofed all those years ago by following the crowd and making gay jokes and thinking gay was gross. I never really thought about it much, just followed along.

My wife becoming a hairdresser made me stop and think about it because I was exposed to tons of gay guys and I had to be around them often.

I realized I was wrong and haven't looked back. Good thing too because my sister hooked up with a girl not too long after that. I still said some shitty things when she got mad about my family not talking about her yet unborn children as their own..it isn't easy to just reverse years of programming and be different just because you want to.

Good news recently though. Was scrolling through Amazon Prime movies recently and saw The Birdcage. Remembered people liking it but at the time I was like "ewwww, GAY!!!"

22 years later I watched it and laughed my ass off.

 

Can't argue with that.
By the way, that man and I became good friends. He spends a lot of his time helping ex convicts learn an occupational trade and he has a heart of gold. I tried to use my influence to get him a job as engineer at Tektronix but he said he could make more money working overtime as a technician.
By the way, his brother was a high draft pick of the Kansas City Chiefs. He claimed he was a better athlete than his brother but had to work to help support his mother and younger siblings.
My gaff still bothers me but in all honesty good people have a conscience. I'll cling to that.

 

When I was 16 I enrolled in this summer intro to science two week course at OSU. I had a roommate whom I thought was gay and reacted to him in a negative way. Near the end of the two weeks I learned he wasn't gay and felt terrible about branding him as something not to be liked. I've always regretted that and feel even worse about looking down on gay men. But, that was the culture at that time and it was so easy to go with the flow and so difficult to think for myself.
Now, I'm like you, I couldn't care less about someone's sexual orientation. All I care about is my wife, my family and my friends no matter what their color or sexual orientation may be.

 

My mother had a bar of soap, and consequently profanity, crude language or racist slurs were never heard in our household.

Probably illegal nowadays, but a time-tested method for child-rearing.

 

My mom did that exactly once in my life to me. My father swore so much that it kind of made it ludicrous to try to teach me that cussing was wrong. Of course, nearly everyone in the South swears up a storm.

 

That would be mean. I've been hit on by a few guys in my day. They want me and they can't have me.

Well, they wouldn't pay me as much as I'd want.