There have been several recent incidents involving remarks that were judged racist, homophobic, insulting, inflammatory, or insensitive. I remember having long debates in college in the 90s about what was acceptable speech and what crossed the line into offensive and sort of thought those debates were over.
But it's clear, the argument continues on.
Yesterday I blogged about whether Game of Thrones was homophobic.
But here are some other examples and I am asking people to weigh in on how offensive or inappropriate the remarks are. Where do you draw the line?
Duke political science professor Jerry Hough wrote these comments on the New York Times website. He is refusing to apologize:
Every Asian student has a very simple old American first name that symbolizes their desire for integration. Virtually every black has a strange new name that symbolizes their lack of desire for integration.
The amount of Asian-white dating is enormous and so surely will be the intermarriage. Black-white dating is almost non-existent because of the ostracism by blacks of anyone who dates a white.
The Japanese and other Asians did not obsess with the concentration camps and the fact they were linked with blacks as ‘colored.’ They pushed ahead and achieved.
Comedian Louis CK got in trouble for his opening monologue on Saturday Night Live this weekend.
There`s no worse life available to a human than being a caught child molester, and yet they still do it. Which from you can only surmise that it must be really good!
Finally, U.S. Rep. Loretta Sanchez, a Democrat, for a gesture that was caught on cell phone video:
CNN reports:
she let out a stereotypical Native American "war cry"
Raising her hand to her lips, she let out about two seconds of it.
"I'm going to his office, thinkin' that I'm gonna go meet with woo-woo-woo-woo, right? 'Cause he said 'Indian American,'" she said, using the gesture to try to discern between Indian Americans -- with ancestry from India's subcontinent -- and Native Americans.
Sanchez later apologized:
Native Americans know she's watching out for them, she said at a Democratic Party convention in Anaheim, as reported by the Los Angeles Times. "And they know what many of you don't know — that like so many Mexican Americans, I am proudly Native American on my mother's side.