Quote:
Originally Posted by EatingPie
Why is it okay for American Indians to call themselves "Indians" but for me not to? ...
To say that's somehow inherently wrong -- when no malice or judgement is involved -- bothers me.
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Because "Indians" was the label assigned to them by the people who enslaved and murdered them, and was used for hundreds of years to oppress them and ignore their culture and deny them agency.
Why can't you use the label if you don't mean any harm by it? Because they are still being denied agency, still being oppressed and discriminated against, and by casually using the same language to discuss them, you allow that discrimination to continue unchallenged. Because "what to call them" is not, should not be, your choice.
What you call your friend, in private, is between you & your friend. (I can call my kids "demon brats" in private, and it can be a term of affection.) But what you call your friend in public, and how you refer to your friends' heritage, becomes part of the public consensus of how their culture is perceived.
The issue isn't "what should they be called?" It's *
who gets to decide* what they should be called. And it's not you. Not me. If they want to say, "we will call ourselves X, and people of other cultures should call us Y," that's not some exotic unreasonable demand; that's not some horrific burden they're asking other people to carry. I call my kid "daughter" sometimes. You don't get to call her that, and I don't suspect you'd want to. Having different rules for who-uses-what-labels is no hardship.
Refusing to allow non-white cultures to define and label themselves is one of the first and longest-lasting forms of oppression.
Continuing to use the label they've rejected feeds into bigotry, allows the ones who are participating in *active* oppression to feel validated and correct about it. They take the small violations of other cultures' preferences as confirmation that they're acceptable.