I’m taking a turn here, off the original topic a little, but not a true subject change or tangent.
There’s a ton of history behind all the terminology around terms like this. And they’re all inherently racist. They aren’t, however slurs (currently, one could debate the past) in the few places they are used. They’re too archaic to be slurs in English, they just aren’t used.
Griffe, in specific was more of a French colonies thing, with other terms being used elsewhere.
Now, the point of all this is to get back to why the term is racist in the first place.
All the terms, mulatto, quateron (or quadroon), octoroon, metis, mamelouk, whatever; they are all about how much black is in the person, how much African heritage they have. Kinda obvious, but it’s never about how much white they have. The French colonies has specific terminology for someone that’s 1/64 black. Think about that. Out of all their ancestors, one is black, and that makes them black, with some white blood, separate from people that looked exactly the same.
That whole “one drop” mentality is why they’re all racist, horrible terminology, even though they aren’t used as insults in English. They weren’t really used as insults back in the slave era either, just as yet another way to keep the boot on necks. The terms were used among free people of color too, which shows just how effective that boot of language really was.
Now, the terminology varied a lot because it came from multiple languages. Spanish, French, Portuguese and English. Where you were determined what terms were in use, originally, but as colonies shifted hands, slavers intermingled,and borders moved, things got mixed around some. Here in the American southeast, you see even more mingling of the terms, with the dominant ones shifting over time in various locations.
But, and this is actually relevant, the U.S. isn’t the only place this kind of thinking existed, and some of the terms are slurs in other places and languages.
Griffe isn’t a slur anywhere I’m aware of, but “sambo” is, and it was another word for the same 3/4 African ancestry. Afaik, it isn’t a common slur, big there are places in South and Central America where it’s used as one.
However, there are also places in South and Central America where mulatto, or mulatta are used with pride.
Now, why am I writing this? It’s not just a historical curiosity, some vestigial words lingering in dictionaries. There was an entire set of jargon used as a tool of dominance and oppression. The thinking behind it still lingers everywhere that European imperialism existed (so, essentially everywhere across the world). Australia even had the same or similar terms for people with aboriginal ancestry.
The stain of slavery, specifically the African slave trade, is embedded across the world. We forget sometimes, because the terminology of oppression changed, that we still think that way. It takes effort for some of us to first realize that we default to thinking of anyone with mixed African heritage as black first, as the black being mixed into the other “race”. And eliminating that way of thinking is even more work.
But it’s work we need to do. As individuals, as nations, as a species, we need to understand that the systemic racism isn’t just about laws and official biases. It’s about the lingering, pernicious taint in how people think about race as a whole.
Solid write up! You’ve changed my opinion. I had thought terms like “octoroon” were merely archaic descriptors, had never thought of the “one drop” angle and what that implied.
Holy shit! There’s even a word for all this!
such terminology is a characteristic of hypodescent, which is the practice within a society of assigning children of mixed unions to the ethnic group which the dominant group perceives as being subordinate
1/64th: Sang-mêlé. My god, that’s a laugh-out-loud racist word if I ever heard one. How far back did they want to go?!
For anyone else finding this interesting, this might be the opening of a rabbit hole:
Yes, I know nobody agrees with me, but I think you should just use that word. I can’t think of any “natursl” way it could pop up in conversation, unless maybe if it’s some hiphop musical context.
If you’re trying to avoid this word like the plague, you’re just giving it more power for the racists who do use that word. If it’s just an archaic word with a weird meaning, like the word “griffe” it looses all power. The racists will probably still keep using it, but it will have as much power as “griffe” has.
I think we are somewhat on the same page here. What matters isn’t the word you use, it’s the intention behind, which is hopefully obvious from context.
When I get called a nerd, my response goes anywhere between being proud and being insulted depending on context. The word itself has no emotion by itself.
Shouldn’t it be the same with many of these words that some people consider racist?
Thor, a fluffy grey and white bicycle lot half-Ragdoll cat, with his tongue out and his left paw up near his tongue. He’s taking a bath on a cream blanket on a grey sofa, lounging against a turquoise pillow. He would throw up devil horns if he could.
Watched that company. They make cheap ad filled copycat games. They can’t be bothered to spend one day on filtering the words from the free dictionary that they used. Same for the support email, they are too busy counting the ad money, there’s nobody reading them
I think you’re thinking of a different company. This game lets you pay a single fee (I think it was $10 but it was literally years ago) and you get to play ad-free. They still annoy you about in-game purchases of “coins” but you can just X out of those.
And to their credit, they got back to me within a few hours and said they would remove the word.
Anarchists: Are we a joke to you? Yes? Fair enough. We’ll be over listening to folk punk and reminiscing about Dr. King being right in his Letter from Birmingham Jail.
Big up to the Anarchists. I’d love to be one but the best I could do is some evenings and every other weekend. I’ve become a decadent westerner in the last couple of decades. Sad face.
To me, the most important role of anarchism is as a “North Star”. My ideal society (something like anarcho-syndicalism) is not going to happen in my life. Easier to accept as a full adult. However, that doesn’t mean abandoning the ideals. It means examining them and the pre-conditions necessary to achieve them. Things like cultivating community and encouraging pro-social behaviors that are necessary to change culture for the better over time.
Maybe when xers, millennials, zoomers, and alphas are and to finally take the reins and have some semblance of control over their own lives we will be able to see more change but for now, building and support is needed so that we don’t repeat things like the failed revolution in Iran that led to a theocracy.
Thank you for your inspirational pep talk. I hear what you say. I especially like that you have hope in the coming generations. I’m gonna go away and reflect on my cynicism now.
The extremists in the anarchist movement are the ones who pretend everyone would just work together fine and self-organize if there was no government at all, aren’t they? Or am I thinking of a different group.
Those aren’t extremists, they’re children. I’m not saying that as an insult, I mean it literally.
Actual, practicing anarchists are extremely bureaucratic. Ironically, anarchy in practice produces large, democratic governments that change slowly. Hilariously, a small republican government is best suited for making rapid progress. Note the lower case (d) and (r) - I’m referring to ideology, and not political parties.
Anarchists create institutions that reflect democratic values, and when everyone must be given a chance to have a say, meetings are huge and take for-fucking-ever (speaking from lived commune experience here). Cliques and factions form and work together to shut down proposals they don’t like. Its actually a very conservative ideology - nothing changes quickly.
Very fair points and thanks for the acknowledgement that those who think that abolishing political structures will solve everything are not really ideological extremists but, at best, extremely naïve and in need of personal growth.
There are so many flavors but, without some form of non-democratic structure (or, I don’t know, high-speed telepathy?), rapid change is indeed not readily possible in most anarchic systems, without a unifying external force like a disaster. I don’t think that that’s necessarily a bad thing though. In current social structures, the populace has been forced to go faster and be more productive so that the ultra-wealthy and others high in the socioeconomic hierarchy can enjoy their leisure. A lot of people suffering from mental health problems rooted in stress and anxiety would be greatly benefited by this changing.
I’d say that those “extremists” are more likely people who are young (either biologically or in exposure to anarchic philosophy) and a bit naïve. They may have their heart in the right place from the perspective of those of us who have been about for a while but, likely are lacking in real-world experience with anarchic social circles and challenges that they have (wreckers, narcissists, cliques, etc).
What you’re mentioning is more of the shallow view of anarchism that’s most frequently portrayed as the alternative to the other popular Mad Max view that right-of-center groups like to use to portray “anarchy”. Neither are great at showing the full gamut of anarchic philosophy nor particularly accurate portrayals of extant or historical approaches to non-hierarchical societies.
Hey, as a non-authoritarian leftist, I can assure that MLs are just a subset that really wants to pretend they’re spearheading the Left to fulfill their bloodbath fantasies. There’s lots of us that don’t like them and aren’t like them at all.
Like, MLs are doing literally what Marx saw in 1848 and spent the rest of his life firmly against - you can’t just will a revolution into existence. Even if the world would be better if you could. You can make a good go of it, you can die nobly in the attempt, you can even maybe overthrow the current elite - but what comes next is not going to be socialist, it’s not going to be a worker’s state, and very likely it’s not going to last. No matter how hard you believe in the virtue and intellect of your vanguard party.
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