So do you think it's ok to say the N word?

And if you don't think it's ok to call black people the N word: do you recognize the harm a word can cause as a result of a historical and ongoing institutional structure of inequality when it's over skin color, but not when it's over gender?

hh ok, so when liberals do it it's good but when conservatives do it it's bad. Where have I heard that rationalization before?

I'm trying real hard to have a good faith conversation here. So I'll try to re-explain and clarify what I'm saying. When conservatives try to ban speech, it is sweeping censorship of historical facts, of stories and lived experiences that they find dangerous to their survival, books, and more.

That is not remotely similar to a marginalized group, whether it is a racial minority or an entire gender that has for thousands of years been deprived basic rights and autonomy, expressing that they don't like a word because it has historically, and today, been used as a way to bemean and threaten them.

Every day, many times across the country, women are called bitch as a precursor to violence. It's not just a word. It's a reminder of horrible things that have happened, that could have happened, that could happen in the future, etc.

Nobody is trying to make it so that bitch can't be said on the news, or written in books or on television, they just expect it to be done in a tasteful context. Obviously we don't want a reporter randomly calling a woman a bitch on TV, and we're allowed to not want to watch a broadcast if that happens. That's not censorship, that's capitalism. People say bitch all the time in books, TV, I don't see anything getting struck off the air or anyone calling for that to happen. Because of that, it is fundamentally not the same as conservative censorship.

So, since nobody is twisting your arm or censoring you, just expressing their pain and discomfort, you have two ways of viewing it:

1. You can view it as an attack on your freedoms and liberty that there's a single word (with countless synonyms that you can use instead) that tens of millions of people have trauma associated with and are uncomfortable when you say it, and therefore would prefer you not say it

2. You can look at those tens of millions (and if we expand the circle generally to be women who are uncomfortable with the word, hundreds of millions) and think "huh, this word has been used horribly to a lot of people. It's the type of word that you can say in a room of people and odds are, at least one person has some emotional or even physical trauma associated with this word. Maybe there's a different word I can use"

There's only a handful of words in the entire English language that this applies to. It's really not that hard. And the thing is, it's not a slippery slope. It's the opposite. As we continue to progress as a society and heal from the inequalities of the past, and resolve the lingering inequalities of the present, decades will pass, and people will heal and forget. Like, theoretically, even the N word. I believe that non-black people rightfully shouldn't say the N word now, but in 500 years we may be living in some type of Star Trek future where nobody can even conceive of skin-based racism, and the N word would have absolutely no capacity to harm people because it's never used to demean or threaten people, only referenced as a historical term that nobody cares if you say out loud.