Next week: Irish like a motherfucker.
Mrenda
3862
I thought a variety of cheeses to go with our glass of port was the birthright of the affluent heterosexual white man.
We are the niggers of Europe.
Raife
3865
You guys might want to lay off of this shit before Tom throws up his hands and locks the thread again as a failed experiment.
Mrenda
3866
I didn’t think you were Irish. But yes, according to a character in Roddy Doyle’s Barrytown Trilogy the Irish are “the niggers of Europe”. It was written during the 80’s when Ireland was in even bigger shit than now, with the difference that no-one then could remember a time when it was any way better at all. Emmigration was massive. The British saw us as terrorists. Europe saw us as a drain. Nobody wanted us and wherever we were people wished we’d fuck off back to our own country. The person in the book who says it is obviously a down and out, welfare scrounger, but the point remains. For a lot of people being black and in America, the land of opportunity could be seen as better than Irish, from the perspective of either ignorance or the relationship Roddy Doyle was trying to build between soul music and an Irish band.
Either way, Roddy Doyle is both a comic and literary genius. And that phrase bluntly sums up a lot of Irish history, and how some Irish perceive our history.
He refuses to read it unless shitheads complain about it enough.
So don’t be a shithead.
Raife
3868
Shut the fuck up you needlebeained imp.
The adults are trying to talk.
Buceph, stop using that fucking word. Seriously. There’s no good reason for it.
Raife, Warren does it so much better than you. Go read up on him, and then come back and play.
Raife
3871
Let me break this down for you since you are apparently far too stupid to understand it on your own. This thread isn’t a place where mommy and daddy can’t look and you can hide your crayon drawings of Transformers.
This thread is a place where we can freely discuss forum drama. If people shit it up with racially offensive drivel, even if they are trying to be funny, the thread is probably going to go away because Tom isn’t going to want to be associated with it.
Mrenda
3872
Tell that to the Booker Prize winner I took it from, who summed up an entire generation’s dissillusionment with their place in the world, who have a history of oppression, and who suffered from sectarianism long after American blacks had achieved legal integration. Note where the Irish are placed in this famous, far more sensitive quote, “No blacks, no jews, no dogs, no Irish.” I was answering someone who obviously understood a little about the history of racism (and yes, I do use the word racism, because for a long time the Irish were thought of as a completely different race to the white race) and I thought they might have read the books of an internationally prestigious award winning author who addressed the issue. So you can snap at me when you learn a bit of cultural sensitivity instead of this totalitarian blanking of history you seem to want to engage in.
But you’re not a Booker Prize winner. You’re just some dude on an Internet forum who thinks it’s okay for you to use the N-word because you’re all down and shit with racism. If cultural sensitivity entered into the discussion at all, you wouldn’t be repeating the word so freely. And I’ve been a fair housing attorney for 15 years, so I don’t really need you lecturing me about the long and shameful history of treatment of African-Americans, the Irish, etc.
And the rest of you can spare me the whining that I’m just being politically correct or trying to censor or being a prude or, most ridiculously of all, engaging in “totalitarian blanking of history.” There’s NO good reason, none at all, to use that word on an Internet forum like this one, and a lot of good reasons not to.
Honestly, if the C-word can end in an insta-ban, I don’t understand why the N-word gets a pass. Running a Google search for it on this site returns a shockingly high number of results.
RepoMan
3875
Holy shit, the nuts are really going bananas in here.
JM1
3876
I don’t even know where to begin with that.
Mrenda
3877
Are you saying that I’m not smart enough to talk about a book, or that I’m stupid to reference a book on QT3?
(And, by the way, the film of the book was nominated for an Oscar, a Writers Guild of America Award, a Golden Globe and won a number of BAFTAs including Best Film, so to say I’m shoehorning in an obscure reference to shock would be ridiculous.)
You’re not even talking about a book. You’re picking one word out of a book and posting it here to try to be edgy.
JM1
3879
No, he really isn’t. He’s picking a world famous phrase that succintly nails how the Irish were treated over here to make his point.
It was a quote from The Commitments.
There’s such a thing as context and I’m pretty sure that quoted even the C-word would have been ok to use here (at least before it developed its own very special history here). There’s a vast different between calling somebody a nigger, talking about those traditionally branded with that pejorative and then quoting a famous line from a famous novel/movie.
I’d guess that two of the above usages would be fine around here and I don’t remember anybody here ever trying the first - and if they did, I’m pretty sure they’d be gone very fast.
