Quote:
Originally Posted by pdurrant
But racial injustice isn't historical. It is an ongoing problem. As this kerfuffle in RWA shows.
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In the context I was speaking of LYNCHINGS....which, thank God, are NOT a current part of the racial problems in America.
Like killing people by crucifixion, lynchings existed long before a particular set of them came to by synonymous. Jesus was crucified and is pretty much what people are thinking of when the term is used today.
But...it's STILL quite common to use phrases like "he was being crucified on national television"....without it really being a reference to Jesus.
People are always borrowing from much more horrible events to paint a picture of "this is bad" to some other type of event.
The following is about "communication" not "politics".
An example are those who are calling the illegal immigrant detention centers "concentration camps". It's MEANT to be inflammatory. It's MEANT to harken back to the holocaust. It's COMPLETELY hyperbolic, but such is not unusual rhetoric.
And, there will always be pedants who complain about such uses. "How dare you use holocaust imagery for anything other than the holocaust." Put people do. All the time. In America, at least.
No one need fear they've made some unpardonable racial error by using they phrase "lynching" or "lynch mob". Clarence Thomas claimed he was suffering a public lynching during his Supreme Court confirmation hearing.
Rape is another horrible word that is used to describe things as being "really bad" that are actually nowhere near as really bad as actual rape.