What ethnic slurs (against you) do NOT bother you?

In general I'm a bit of tight ass when it comes to alternate handles being given to racial groups. But it seems like some name calling stings and some just kinda gets a shrug from the offended party. I was talking to a friend last night and he said the term "raghead" didn't bother him. But he just hates the term "camel jock" (even tho that's the brand of cigarrettes he smokes!).
"How rare," I thought.

But that got me thinking. Frinstance, I hate it when a student calls me "white" even when it's not said with contempt, but the terms "honky" and "white trash" and "gringo" just don't bother me.

What race-baiting terms targeting you personally get under your... um, skin, and which ones don't really bother you?

but names will NEVER hurt me.

We think it's funny.:D

THe fact that Swedish women have a reputation of being cute and oversexed doesn't bother me.
In fact, it's easier counteracted by my prim and proper ancestry of British decent that's on the other side.

"Jew" has become some kind of dirty word, to be replaced by "Jewish people" or, even worse, "Jewish-Americans". I don't mind Jew at all (although other Jews seem to). I am not a "Jewish-American", just an American who happens to be Jewish.

I also believe that perhaps we should revive the word "Yid" in Jewish circles. Of course this has become a slur in general society, no doubt about that. However, the history of the word until the 20th century has been anything by anti-Semitic. The old language of eastern-European Jews was Yiddish, and Yid was just the Yiddish word for Jew. It's part of our Jewish heritage and I have no problem hearing it from my fellow Jews, but I probably wouldn't like it if someone else used it.

When I was a kid, Swede jokes were the poular form of humor in my town, so guess that stuff never really got to me.

Swede jokes, WASP jokes, honky, white trash....none of it particularly bothers me.

av8rdave

What do you get when you cross a WASP and an gorilla?

Beats me, but whatever you get, he won't let you in HIS cage!

I'm white, but I have a big interest in Hispanic/Latino culture. At my grad school I was good friends with the Hispanic Student Services Coordinator, and I would pop into his office to chat every now and then. One time, I walked in while he was talking with a student - a bleach blonde white guy, who eyed me suspiciously then switched from speaking English to Spanish with my friend. He spoke about all the gangbanging and trouble with cops he used to get into back where he used to live (when he switched to Spanish, my friend smiled at me). When he finally got up to leave, my friend introduced us saying, "And this is TlalocW. He's active in all the groups, and he's fluent in Spanish." The guy turned a shade paler when he heard that.

Had to tell that story to tell this one. So the Hispanic Student Association had a large cubicle in the basement of the student union along with a lot of other student groups. I was in it with my back to the entrance one day, reading the paper when I felt a presence. I turned around, and there was Mister Gangbanger standing there just staring at me. I asked if I could help him, and he went into what I can only describe as "insulted tough guy/homey mode" and put up both his hands, exclaiming, "I don't need nothin', man." He left, and I turned back to my paper, and I heard him say in Spanish, "Like I need help from some GRINGO." It took me a few seconds to process that he was talking about me and then sort through why he would say that. Anyway, I stood up and yelled over the cubicle wall that my fellow gringo needed to go look in a mirror (in Spanish) at his rapidly receding back.

He had some sort of chip on his shoulder, and there were rumors that he was abusive with women, and none of the girls in the Hispanic Student Association would have anything to do with him and would have me sit down next to them at functions (since I'm a big guy) to keep him away. He was eventually banned from campus for stalking some woman.

He gave us Latin-culture loving gringos a bad name. :)

A few days later I was in a computer lab next to a black girl I knew. She was very active in the African-American Student Association, and we were discussing something about races, and I jokingly said something along the lines of, "As a honky..." and she told me, "Oh, TlalocW, you're not white." So I was just so confused about my racial identity. :)

TlalocW

However, "pinche gabacho" is problematic.

Unless you put a snide tone in your voice like he did.

TlalocW

My surname is English, though, and I get VERY offended when people call me "Limey."



Actually, nobody has ever called me any of those things. I have been called "cracker," but that doesn't bother me, as I am indeed a cracker.

there'd be big trouble. But what do we care? We're better than you plebian commoners. We invented road asphalt!

...drunken sheep-fuckers.


NOTE TO MODS: I am only joking with my drunken sheep-fucking/Canuck friend.

and, of course, the wee dram!

The black girls will call us Cracker, and we'll go, "WE're honkeys and don't you forget it!" Or vice versa. It's all in good fun and making fun of shit.
Duckie

Half Italian - Half Jewish. That nickname cracked me up more than anything.

I have some Irish blood, but not enough to be offended by 'mick'. Some French blood, but not enough to be offended by 'frog' (although cheese-eating surrender-monkey really pisses me off! Anyone saying that to a Legionnaire would be squashed to a greasy stain on the floor!) I'm Celtic, so WASP doesn't apply. So just call me a Celt, with the hard 'c', thank you. :-)

I'm pretty much a WASP, so there aren't that many slurs I know of.

But it's not much used this side of the Atlantic.

Hey, some of my best friends are Sassenach!

I could care less, although it would upset me to hear it directed at one of my friends. I did get upset when a coworker wrongly accused me of being a "two-faced bitch". As a white woman, that's usually the worst I have to deal with.

There really is no derogatory term for WASP's. I tried to think of a single one, and couldn't.


I remember when I was in the service, I had a black roommate, one of his friends was visiting, and commented on a poster I had on display, he didn't know I was in the room, and made a comment about "whiteboy" stuff. When He realized I heard him, he apologized profusely. I shrugged, it didn't bother me in the least.

Even when I taught in a majority-minority school, I didn't hear a lot about it. (One of my students decided I was a lint ball, because I was small and white, but we actually got along famously.)

I did get the occasional religious name thrown at me. I spent the first 11 years of my life in a community with very few Jewish people. In 4th grade, our music teacher was a minister's wife, who didn't understand why songs she wrote that included "kneel we before Jesus, for he is our Savior" were inappropriate for public schools. I complained and, after my dad threatened to bring the ADL and the ACLU and all sorts of fun agencies down, a Hanukkah song got added, and I became the narrator.

My fellow students called me "Miss Hanukkah," which got turned into "Miss Chaka Khan" and finally just song lyrics from "I Feel For You." Since it meant they weren't calling me The Nerd anymore (a nickname I have since embraced), I was OK with it.

I'm a Ukrainian and there just don't seem to be any popular ethnic slur terms for us (at least not that I've heard.)

Ukie, maybe? Can't recall the others.

Ukrainians are a bunch of...

• wheat-whackers
  
• yak nosed beet-suckers
  
• 'rainos
  

Sorry, best I could do...

But I think there needs to be something about cabbage

But that's for Eastern Europeans in general. It's supposed to insinuate stupidity (we're Polish and Ukranian in my family...and anytime somebody does something stupid that's the name they're tagged with).

in South Eastern New England:

Greenhorn
Portagee

Neither of them bug me when applied to me, but it REALLY bugs me when applied to someone else.

either...unlike some people here at DU...

they freakin crack me up! Every time one of my friends calls me it's always "What's up honky" or "How you doin' Cracker?" They just make me laugh. I really can't think of any offensive racial slur that could be aimed at me.

It WOULD however, bother me if someone referred to me in a derogatory voice tone as "white girl" Why? I have no idea. Maybe it's because I think race really should play no role in who I am. But I guess it does...

anyways...just my rant.

doesn't bother me at all. Of course, I'm a white male, so I can shrug most of it off.

...because of my Hungarian ancestry. It's all right coming from her, because A) it was said in a friendly manner and B) she's Polish-American and we Central European/Eastern European types stick together. :-)

I refer to myself as a Yankee (birthplace, not baseball affiliation), but there have been times when Southern friends and European friends have thrown that moniker at me in a rather cross way. I don't care. I love being a "damn Yankee" or, in some cases, "a bloody Yank."

doesn't bother me a bit...I'm happy to be one:)

like many who've posted on this thread, I'm mostly of white Anglo-Saxon Protestant ancestry, so I'm hard-pressed to think of any that DO bother me. Except, perhaps, for a few Asian ones..."gaijin" (Japanese) and "quai loh" (one of the Chinese dialects) which both translate roughly as "foreign barbarian devil". None of the other weak insults in English for WASPs carry the same breadth and depth of contempt and dehumanisation.

Words themselves don't piss me off. It's the intention of the speaker, and the context.

Mick, white trash, white boy, gringo... meh. Only words.