Like if I was jewish and I made a joke about how cheap I am and someone at work didnt get the joke because they had never heard the “covetous jew” stereotype.
Oof, I accidentally used the phase “gyped” at work because sadly that word is still stuck in my lexicon and I immediately caught myself as soon as the word left my lips and backtracked to fix my sentence to “ripped off”. My co-worker, who’s father is Romani, looked confused and told me “I know what gyped means” to which I said “I know, I’m sorry” and after a bit of back and forward - me thinking I had offended my co-worker with a racial slur, my co-worker feeling mostly confused and condescended to, as to why I backtracked on my sentence to replace it with a synonym… Turns out my co-worker had no idea that the term “gyped” comes from gypsy and is rooted in racial stereotypes.
She’s always openly and proudly self identifed as a gypsy, and the whole time I was thinking “fuck yeah, reclaim that phrase!” the same way I proudly identify as queer despite it being used as a slurr against me when I was younger.
But no, turns out she genuinely had no idea that in our country, gypsy is a slur, because her experience within her community and the places she’s lived were totally different, it was an innocent term to her.
It blew my mind that an almost 80 year old Romani woman had been hearing people throw racial slurs at her for 40 years in this country, and she was fine with it because that word had no weight as a slurr for her… But now it does, because I told her that most of the time, here, it’s a slur.
Not dissimilar from when my British partner met my friends and they’re all joking about who’s the woggiest wog and the fobbiest fob, and my partner is sitting there horrified because in the UK wog and fob are slurs, but in Australia they’re self used labels of pride, and I had to make a mental note to remove that from my vocabulary if I’m outside Aus because otherwise I would have found myself walking around England offending people by complete accident.
Oof, I accidentally used the phase “gyped” at work because sadly that word is still stuck in my lexicon and I immediately caught myself as soon as the word left my lips and backtracked to fix my sentence to “ripped off”. My co-worker, who’s father is Romani, looked confused and told me “I know what gyped means” to which I said “I know, I’m sorry” and after a bit of back and forward - me thinking I had offended my co-worker with a racial slur, my co-worker feeling mostly confused and condescended to, as to why I backtracked on my sentence to replace it with a synonym… Turns out my co-worker had no idea that the term “gyped” comes from gypsy and is rooted in racial stereotypes.
She’s always openly and proudly self identifed as a gypsy, and the whole time I was thinking “fuck yeah, reclaim that phrase!” the same way I proudly identify as queer despite it being used as a slurr against me when I was younger.
But no, turns out she genuinely had no idea that in our country, gypsy is a slur, because her experience within her community and the places she’s lived were totally different, it was an innocent term to her.
It blew my mind that an almost 80 year old Romani woman had been hearing people throw racial slurs at her for 40 years in this country, and she was fine with it because that word had no weight as a slurr for her… But now it does, because I told her that most of the time, here, it’s a slur.
Not dissimilar from when my British partner met my friends and they’re all joking about who’s the woggiest wog and the fobbiest fob, and my partner is sitting there horrified because in the UK wog and fob are slurs, but in Australia they’re self used labels of pride, and I had to make a mental note to remove that from my vocabulary if I’m outside Aus because otherwise I would have found myself walking around England offending people by complete accident.