TV censorship brings to mind Carlin’s seven dirty words bit. The words “piss” and “tits” were on the list but I’m pretty sure they can be said on TV before the watershed hour now. They’ve become mild and tame and are no longer shocking in their crudeness. They’ve become normalized.
Making light of hate speech helps soften it by deflating it and robbing it of its power to provoke. Normalizing hate speech like this we sort of forget why it’s so terrible and eventually shrug it off as nothing because it means nothing to us. The targets of that hate speech? It still has meaning to them and continues to hurt them.
I’ve tried to stop using the word “gyp” after I learned it stemmed from the connotation of gypsies being swindlers and that gypsy itself was considered a slur.
