based on #12680 but some reductions: some cases were already changed by vim/vim (just according to keikaku) focus on direct mention of the user which was the major concern.
tldr: probably somewhat useful change, but I don’t agree with your rhetoric
Well… or the text was written by a male programmer and he was addressing himself as most people do when they write something, and in some languages this is much simpler. Thinking about about gender while writting technical documentation should be a second thought (as it is here too). Docs should contain good and precise information, that’s their first purpose.
Nothing in the world is obvious, especially in tech (unless some people did a really good job).
If someone thinks that they can’t do something, unless it isn’t clearly specified so, the fault is in education of such person.
I agree that refining is good, and these changes may make easier for someone to read the docs. I don’t understand why you are so into it. I’m really not sure if this promoted anything, or changed anything really useful. Vim isn’t better, just more correctly written (taking in consideration that author didn’t knew who would read the text, it is better to use neutral words).
In my country there is also that “stereotype” about nurses. But when 99% of nurses are female, and language forces me to use one or another I would shoot and ask “where is she” not where is he as I would only got 1% to hit. That’s why I don’t agree with your example.
Well… or the text was written by a male programmer and he was addressing himself as most people do when they write something
I disagree. When you write documentation, you necessarily address the reader, which can and will be any gender.
Thinking about about gender while writting technical documentation should be a second thought (as it is here too).
So just use “they”. It’s now the generally accepted English gender neutral pronoun, and for the younger generation especially, its use is already second nature. I don’t see why this is a problem.
Well reader maybe of any gender maybe not. It for sure is good practice to assume both possibilities. But I find it much more important for someone writting instructions to make them clear and correct, not necessarly think about it as an art piece with correct punctuation.
Because they is another word and as far as I … think I made a small mistake… They is plural form of he/she/it right? I got to correct myself in another comment I posted… Anyway I’m sure that reader of something is one person, and I don’t get how addressing this person in plural form is correct? Can you point me to some examples?
I watched one (I didn’t use your link though, sorry) and example with Facebook and picture update makes a lot of sense. Webpage doesn’t know if Tom Scott is an organisation, some group or one guy (well it knows much much more over all so maybe that’s not the case). But I can assume than my reader is one or another so s/he seems to me really fine. Unless you are addressing users of your software as a group? Or someone could rewrite sentence to avoid any words like she, they. This for me would be much prettier, more precise solution. But maybe “they” just needs to grow on me? I guess we will see :p
But I can assume than my reader is one or another so s/he seems to me really fine.
What about nonbinary people? Also, s/he sounds really awkward to me, much more than they. Like, how do you pronounce that? Shakespeare used they for gender neutral, it’s nothing new.
And, yeah, it sounded kind of weird to me when I first learned about it, but a while after using it and seeing other people use it, it’s second nature now.
I guess they are the slash? Hm, in my country it is quite often used form, except we usually add it at the end of the word as the difference in femine and masculine form happens there. Usually because of that I read the word two times. First time so I know it is there, second time in correct form for me. Maybe it isn’t super efficient but works fine in my language. So here if you are women you read she, if you are male you read he. I guess if you somehow don’t like any of the two options you can pick slash or just skip it as it isn’t applying to you.
I guess I got to read Shakespeare then :D Maybe I get accustom to this :)
Tom Scott makes nice films so I for sure will.
Btw. what is yewtu.be? Is it like invidio.us? :) (changing/mirroring yt links to remove tracking).
So it may mean one or few people. That doesn’t make language more precise. Language should be precises as much as possible to avoid confusion or misleading. Maybe in sentece (giving any context) it will be clear… and all people adopt it… Well I will go and watch what you recommended, there is high probability thay I already did but we will see.
(_I think I made here a ton of grammar mistakes for which I’m sorry, if you want you can point them out)
So it may mean one or few people. That doesn’t make language more precise. Language should be precises as much as possible to avoid confusion or misleading.
I’ve used they as a gender neutral for years now, and have heard a lot of other people use it. I’ve not experienced any issues with confusing it with referring to multiple people, there is always enough context to tell the difference.
I also speak Chinese, which has quite loose grammar rules, way more words that sound the same but have different meanings, and in general leaves much more to context than English, and Chinese people can still convey complex information just as well, so having a dual meaning word won’t be the language disaster that you’re making it out to be.
I guess it won’t :) Especially if it is in use for long time already. I guess then I have never noticed it. Maybe now because author pointed it out it sounded weird/alien to me? But if it is normal, then why post about it? Maybe it is not my jam. You found the changes easier/same to read?
I’m not really good with languages. I always wanted to learn Korean as the country as a whole seems nice, and their alphabet is based on matrix which is really cool :D Btw. so you are english native and learned chinese? I guess one way or another difficulty is similar. How long and with what amount of work you became able to do stuff like small talk?
Can I go off topic? I guess there is many explanations for my question, and it is off topic so if you don’t reply I won’t mind. But if you do there is a question:
If you were born and are living in Canada, I assume you were rised there also. I also assume that your parents first language is chinese so the language part for me is clear. But you consider yourself chinese. Why not canadian as it seems to be your home?
This question maybe pointless, but I’m always eager to hear about another person perspective/experiences and I find your statement here interesting ^^
Yewtube is an instance of Invidious. The “official” instance run by the creators shut down, and they’re redirecting everyone to independently run ones.
Thinking about about gender while writting technical documentation should be a second thought (as it is here too).
Yes, exactly!
If someone thinks that they can’t do something, unless it isn’t clearly specified so, the fault is in education of such person.
Yes, this is also exactly true.
In my country there is also that “stereotype” about nurses. But when 99% of nurses are female, and language forces me to use one or another I would shoot and ask “where is she” not where is he as I would only got 1% to hit. That’s why I don’t agree with your example.
but this is not what i meant. I was talking about more general cases, for instance when you talk about the general job a nurse does and not the concrete person. A general job has nothing to do with gender and therefore it makes logically no sense to use gendered pronouns.
Maybe some additional context is useful here. I noticed that originally in chess videos, where some person explains a theoretical position, some random imaginative position which never occured and is just made up to explain theory.
In this chess example gender should not matter becaue there are no players. And still this person who i watched used “he” pronouns when talking about for instance the attacking person in this theoretical position.
Yes i agree this person thinks probably of a male chess player and therefore usess male pronouns.
And at the same time, a recent chess study (lemmy post( has revealed that there are so few female chess players because of gender stereotypes. Women play much better when they think they play against women.
And using male pronouns by default when gender should not matter is a very subtle way of giving women the impression they don’t belong in chess.
So the gender stereotype is what you mean with education. Men are much more likely to play chess because society educates Men that brain work is for them. In many movies men solve difficult problems but very few women do solve difficult problems.
I wrote quite a bit, but I couldn’t put myself into making proper sentences so I deleted that. Maybe also because I don’t read such studies as I often found them very subjective, so I couldn’t really address what you were pointing to here… I’m still not convinced. Maybe some poeple try to imply by using male pronouns that women are not welcome, but I’m sure it also goes the other way around. I don’t care if for somone it is simpler to use he or she in sentence. I really dislike when people divide world by their categories… male, female… It is good practice to use neutral forms or address both genders when we don’t know who is going to read or hear what we are going to say. That’s all I find there is to it. Trying to censor or change text and speech is a bad way to go about it. I heard a lot about impact of vocabulary on how people think… there was also well known fiction book about society in which government changed dictionaries… was that “1984”? Anyway I find disturbing when one group of people tells rest of the world how they should talk, and by that how they should think.
I don’t find anything wrong in that there is less women playing chess than men (if that is true). If because of that someone explaining chess tactic will while giving example use “he”… I guess a lot depends on context… it would be better (more proper practice) to use neutal words like player where possible, but if not and someone uses “he” or “she” I don’t care. If I want to do something I won’t stop because someone would say “she”.
I don’t understand this movement to force people to do what some view as good or better etc… If there is few women playing chess… Why do you care? Will you force women to play more chess to make statistics look better? Maybe just majority of women and men, well people… just don’t like chess? Maybe more men play it… but why would that matter? Why so many people recently scream black people are this… white are this… women… man… etc. It looks for me that by fighting with stereotypes some are just putting others into boxes, divide people into groups and explain everything with statistics which when it comes to unit are almost always wrong.
Censoring books, speech, destroying monuments, destroying memory, hate… these are the worst offenses.
Someone somewhere here in comments wrote something about using form “they”… But isn’t it a plural form? Isn’t singular form… it? I’m not a thing, and you are not one either. Using s/he as it was in there already written is the best way in my opinion to address both possible options. I’m not english native so maybe there is something I’m missing.
I must admit that I don’t know much about chess, except how to move figures. Are you sure that he never before made any drama? He has 100% track record of gentelman behaviour towards males, and opposite towards females in situation of his defeat? But yes, I can imagine that some circles are still very traditional, but for sure with time it will change. But change usually takes and should take time. If you try to bend twig too rapidly it can crack. Salty losers maybe also will vanish some day.
Yeah… I don’t like these changes… If master drive was a very good metaphor then it should have stayed. Removing words from dictionary won’t change the world or history, but may make people less aware of some things. If times were dark and you didn’t knew word slave, then would you be able to recognise yourself as one?
One day when… Twitter? made such changes I was lauging with my friends about how close minded and uneducated are people in the west/usa. That everything that is black must be about some person skin colour, because people are black, white or asian, they are not units by themsleves. They are not humans, they are their skin colour. If talking about slavery it also must be about dark skinned person. Ah… USA is such a young country, with so short history, everything seems huge. Words you mentioned got whole other meaning in my country. I got really used to them, very wise books were written which use such words. Now people so often get aggressive thinking than someone would get offended so they get offended and create even more hate…
But back to these words. Black colour is associated with criminals and evil (well not really these days, but these days everything is much more fluid). If you have seen black BMW you usually prefered to go other side of street. I never thought about black list as of list of black people, because in this context it doesn’t make sense.
Slavery is as old as world. As a country geographically close to germany you can guess we didn’t had fun time during WWII, and many years before it and after it ;) Yet I view slavery of hard drive in another light than slavery of a man. I’m not sure how one can mix these two things. If this word perfectly describes relation of these mechanical/electrical parts, then why change it?
Yes awerness, but you should be aware of whole world not only yours. In my country there is a lot of women of power. I don’t view other as worse, so if I see them not doing something I assume they do something else they prefer. Not that they are weak and didn’t manage to do something so I have to fight for them especially if they didn’t ask for it.
I know that not everything is pink and we should always strive for improvement (like japanese kizen; about which I learned while reading about Scrum) but I don’t view these changes as right ones. I’m not sure if changing word for black list makes social media like Twitter less bad for society in anyway, or that people in USA will shoot each other less. For me it’s more like PR stunt than anything else.
before: I think I really have stretched my thoughts here. I’m sorry for that as you may feel obligated to read my reply. I’m not sure if I even pointed to any clear conclusion. Here is my reply:
Thanks :) I would have to read about that tradition as I think I never had heard of it before. <reading an article> So Pete is a fictional character going around the world with Santa Claus… I find people that fight with racism and homophobia often to be so extreme that they end up on the other end. Putting people in boxes saying that other do that and it hurts the other other people… “White kids dressing as a character from book and painting their faces black”. Ofcourse they god damn do that. Why it matters that they are white? This is racism. They want to dress as this character and are light skinned. They put their hearts in their costumes and some fanatic calls them nazi. Okay, not in these words, but I feel annoyed how world looks only at a surface of everything. Ofcourse some real nazi groups in Holland used that image but why let them spoil fun for everyone? “Yay Santa and Pete are coming, I hope I will get something nice.” Noooo but Pete has dark skin, so it is racist. I never before thought about that stuff. People are people. We look different, dress different, like different stuff in bed. Why look and stop at skin, or gender or something else thin?
Also why hate history and put fog over it? We should learn from it so we can do better. Except… there is nothing to learn from. This is a tradition where children dress as hero from a book. Just because he is of one skin colour or another doesn’t make that racist, maybe only a trendy headline for paper.
They dress as a character of a book. If they dressed as Kanye West that would be better, worse? Or would that be racist if a WHITE kid wanted to look like his favourite rapper? I guess painting face brown would be a bit much. But there are people that want to look like characters from comic books, for example there is a guy that attempted to make his skin red. Important is context, as always. There is difference in running around dressed as african native and shouting “I’m dumb removed”, and running around as Pete, Santa helper.
And what about asian, american (as in native) and every other little human living in Holland. If someone has more narrow eyes then he/she can be Pete?
Also you mentioned that people in USA are shocked… which people? Did all of USA citizens read about that tradition and found it bad? Why would that even matter? The point of this event isn’t to hurt anyone. No one is doing purge during this time. Shaming anyone. Why opinion of few people would matter if they don’t know the thing they are commenting on?
I’m sorry because this reply maybe was a bit chaotic…
If Pete was white and dressed as stereotypical european of that era should I scream that this is racist and i don’t dress and look like that?
And saying black person, white person… People mean whom? If I get it right Pete was from Spain, at least that’s where he sent naughty children. Whole Spain should I guess feel offended.
I could put probably ton of labels on myself, and others. But everyone is first and foremost themsleves. If people get grouped by something as far stretching as skin colour then ow boi… It’s like saying that “white man invaded some country”. No, not white man invaded some country, usually history tells us whom exactly and why went where and did what. It is easier to put label and throw everyone to one bag. As some do with muslims and terrorism, dark skinned americans and gangs, etc…
I think in some comment I rushed my thoughts and said that they is plural for of it… what I wanted to say is that it is plural form and not singular… gaaa but I don’t know how to find this message… I even don’t know how to find your oryginal post without having to scroll everything… I guess I should learn how to use lemmur app :p But it would be so usefull to be able to jump from “replies” to oryginal post ;-;…
tldr: probably somewhat useful change, but I don’t agree with your rhetoric
Well… or the text was written by a male programmer and he was addressing himself as most people do when they write something, and in some languages this is much simpler. Thinking about about gender while writting technical documentation should be a second thought (as it is here too). Docs should contain good and precise information, that’s their first purpose.
Nothing in the world is obvious, especially in tech (unless some people did a really good job).
If someone thinks that they can’t do something, unless it isn’t clearly specified so, the fault is in education of such person.
I agree that refining is good, and these changes may make easier for someone to read the docs. I don’t understand why you are so into it. I’m really not sure if this promoted anything, or changed anything really useful. Vim isn’t better, just more correctly written (taking in consideration that author didn’t knew who would read the text, it is better to use neutral words).
In my country there is also that “stereotype” about nurses. But when 99% of nurses are female, and language forces me to use one or another I would shoot and ask “where is she” not where is he as I would only got 1% to hit. That’s why I don’t agree with your example.
I disagree. When you write documentation, you necessarily address the reader, which can and will be any gender.
So just use “they”. It’s now the generally accepted English gender neutral pronoun, and for the younger generation especially, its use is already second nature. I don’t see why this is a problem.
Well reader maybe of any gender maybe not. It for sure is good practice to assume both possibilities. But I find it much more important for someone writting instructions to make them clear and correct, not necessarly think about it as an art piece with correct punctuation.
Because they is another word and as far as I … think I made a small mistake… They is plural form of he/she/it right? I got to correct myself in another comment I posted… Anyway I’m sure that reader of something is one person, and I don’t get how addressing this person in plural form is correct? Can you point me to some examples?
Yes, but it has also been generally accepted as a gender neutral singular, so it has two meanings.
Tom Scott video with more information: https://yewtu.be/watch?v=46ehrFk-gLk
I watched one (I didn’t use your link though, sorry) and example with Facebook and picture update makes a lot of sense. Webpage doesn’t know if Tom Scott is an organisation, some group or one guy (well it knows much much more over all so maybe that’s not the case). But I can assume than my reader is one or another so s/he seems to me really fine. Unless you are addressing users of your software as a group? Or someone could rewrite sentence to avoid any words like she, they. This for me would be much prettier, more precise solution. But maybe “they” just needs to grow on me? I guess we will see :p
What about nonbinary people? Also, s/he sounds really awkward to me, much more than they. Like, how do you pronounce that? Shakespeare used they for gender neutral, it’s nothing new.
And, yeah, it sounded kind of weird to me when I first learned about it, but a while after using it and seeing other people use it, it’s second nature now.
I guess they are the slash? Hm, in my country it is quite often used form, except we usually add it at the end of the word as the difference in femine and masculine form happens there. Usually because of that I read the word two times. First time so I know it is there, second time in correct form for me. Maybe it isn’t super efficient but works fine in my language. So here if you are women you read she, if you are male you read he. I guess if you somehow don’t like any of the two options you can pick slash or just skip it as it isn’t applying to you.
I guess I got to read Shakespeare then :D Maybe I get accustom to this :)
Tom Scott makes nice films so I for sure will. Btw. what is yewtu.be? Is it like invidio.us? :) (changing/mirroring yt links to remove tracking).
So it may mean one or few people. That doesn’t make language more precise. Language should be precises as much as possible to avoid confusion or misleading. Maybe in sentece (giving any context) it will be clear… and all people adopt it… Well I will go and watch what you recommended, there is high probability thay I already did but we will see.
(_I think I made here a ton of grammar mistakes for which I’m sorry, if you want you can point them out)
I’ve used they as a gender neutral for years now, and have heard a lot of other people use it. I’ve not experienced any issues with confusing it with referring to multiple people, there is always enough context to tell the difference.
I also speak Chinese, which has quite loose grammar rules, way more words that sound the same but have different meanings, and in general leaves much more to context than English, and Chinese people can still convey complex information just as well, so having a dual meaning word won’t be the language disaster that you’re making it out to be.
I guess it won’t :) Especially if it is in use for long time already. I guess then I have never noticed it. Maybe now because author pointed it out it sounded weird/alien to me? But if it is normal, then why post about it? Maybe it is not my jam. You found the changes easier/same to read?
I’m not really good with languages. I always wanted to learn Korean as the country as a whole seems nice, and their alphabet is based on matrix which is really cool :D Btw. so you are english native and learned chinese? I guess one way or another difficulty is similar. How long and with what amount of work you became able to do stuff like small talk?
No, I’m Chinese born living in Canada. Chinese is my first language.
Can I go off topic? I guess there is many explanations for my question, and it is off topic so if you don’t reply I won’t mind. But if you do there is a question:
If you were born and are living in Canada, I assume you were rised there also. I also assume that your parents first language is chinese so the language part for me is clear. But you consider yourself chinese. Why not canadian as it seems to be your home?
This question maybe pointless, but I’m always eager to hear about another person perspective/experiences and I find your statement here interesting ^^
Yewtube is an instance of Invidious. The “official” instance run by the creators shut down, and they’re redirecting everyone to independently run ones.
I heard of that when app I was using stopped working. Good to know :)
Yes, exactly!
Yes, this is also exactly true.
but this is not what i meant. I was talking about more general cases, for instance when you talk about the general job a nurse does and not the concrete person. A general job has nothing to do with gender and therefore it makes logically no sense to use gendered pronouns.
Maybe some additional context is useful here. I noticed that originally in chess videos, where some person explains a theoretical position, some random imaginative position which never occured and is just made up to explain theory.
In this chess example gender should not matter becaue there are no players. And still this person who i watched used “he” pronouns when talking about for instance the attacking person in this theoretical position.
Yes i agree this person thinks probably of a male chess player and therefore usess male pronouns.
And at the same time, a recent chess study (lemmy post( has revealed that there are so few female chess players because of gender stereotypes. Women play much better when they think they play against women.
And using male pronouns by default when gender should not matter is a very subtle way of giving women the impression they don’t belong in chess.
So the gender stereotype is what you mean with education. Men are much more likely to play chess because society educates Men that brain work is for them. In many movies men solve difficult problems but very few women do solve difficult problems.
I wrote quite a bit, but I couldn’t put myself into making proper sentences so I deleted that. Maybe also because I don’t read such studies as I often found them very subjective, so I couldn’t really address what you were pointing to here… I’m still not convinced. Maybe some poeple try to imply by using male pronouns that women are not welcome, but I’m sure it also goes the other way around. I don’t care if for somone it is simpler to use he or she in sentence. I really dislike when people divide world by their categories… male, female… It is good practice to use neutral forms or address both genders when we don’t know who is going to read or hear what we are going to say. That’s all I find there is to it. Trying to censor or change text and speech is a bad way to go about it. I heard a lot about impact of vocabulary on how people think… there was also well known fiction book about society in which government changed dictionaries… was that “1984”? Anyway I find disturbing when one group of people tells rest of the world how they should talk, and by that how they should think.
I don’t find anything wrong in that there is less women playing chess than men (if that is true). If because of that someone explaining chess tactic will while giving example use “he”… I guess a lot depends on context… it would be better (more proper practice) to use neutal words like player where possible, but if not and someone uses “he” or “she” I don’t care. If I want to do something I won’t stop because someone would say “she”.
I don’t understand this movement to force people to do what some view as good or better etc… If there is few women playing chess… Why do you care? Will you force women to play more chess to make statistics look better? Maybe just majority of women and men, well people… just don’t like chess? Maybe more men play it… but why would that matter? Why so many people recently scream black people are this… white are this… women… man… etc. It looks for me that by fighting with stereotypes some are just putting others into boxes, divide people into groups and explain everything with statistics which when it comes to unit are almost always wrong.
Censoring books, speech, destroying monuments, destroying memory, hate… these are the worst offenses.
Someone somewhere here in comments wrote something about using form “they”… But isn’t it a plural form? Isn’t singular form… it? I’m not a thing, and you are not one either. Using s/he as it was in there already written is the best way in my opinion to address both possible options. I’m not english native so maybe there is something I’m missing.
deleted by creator
I must admit that I don’t know much about chess, except how to move figures. Are you sure that he never before made any drama? He has 100% track record of gentelman behaviour towards males, and opposite towards females in situation of his defeat? But yes, I can imagine that some circles are still very traditional, but for sure with time it will change. But change usually takes and should take time. If you try to bend twig too rapidly it can crack. Salty losers maybe also will vanish some day.
Yeah… I don’t like these changes… If master drive was a very good metaphor then it should have stayed. Removing words from dictionary won’t change the world or history, but may make people less aware of some things. If times were dark and you didn’t knew word slave, then would you be able to recognise yourself as one?
One day when… Twitter? made such changes I was lauging with my friends about how close minded and uneducated are people in the west/usa. That everything that is black must be about some person skin colour, because people are black, white or asian, they are not units by themsleves. They are not humans, they are their skin colour. If talking about slavery it also must be about dark skinned person. Ah… USA is such a young country, with so short history, everything seems huge. Words you mentioned got whole other meaning in my country. I got really used to them, very wise books were written which use such words. Now people so often get aggressive thinking than someone would get offended so they get offended and create even more hate…
But back to these words. Black colour is associated with criminals and evil (well not really these days, but these days everything is much more fluid). If you have seen black BMW you usually prefered to go other side of street. I never thought about black list as of list of black people, because in this context it doesn’t make sense.
Slavery is as old as world. As a country geographically close to germany you can guess we didn’t had fun time during WWII, and many years before it and after it ;) Yet I view slavery of hard drive in another light than slavery of a man. I’m not sure how one can mix these two things. If this word perfectly describes relation of these mechanical/electrical parts, then why change it?
Yes awerness, but you should be aware of whole world not only yours. In my country there is a lot of women of power. I don’t view other as worse, so if I see them not doing something I assume they do something else they prefer. Not that they are weak and didn’t manage to do something so I have to fight for them especially if they didn’t ask for it.
I know that not everything is pink and we should always strive for improvement (like japanese kizen; about which I learned while reading about Scrum) but I don’t view these changes as right ones. I’m not sure if changing word for black list makes social media like Twitter less bad for society in anyway, or that people in USA will shoot each other less. For me it’s more like PR stunt than anything else.
deleted by creator
before: I think I really have stretched my thoughts here. I’m sorry for that as you may feel obligated to read my reply. I’m not sure if I even pointed to any clear conclusion. Here is my reply:
Thanks :) I would have to read about that tradition as I think I never had heard of it before. <reading an article> So Pete is a fictional character going around the world with Santa Claus… I find people that fight with racism and homophobia often to be so extreme that they end up on the other end. Putting people in boxes saying that other do that and it hurts the other other people… “White kids dressing as a character from book and painting their faces black”. Ofcourse they god damn do that. Why it matters that they are white? This is racism. They want to dress as this character and are light skinned. They put their hearts in their costumes and some fanatic calls them nazi. Okay, not in these words, but I feel annoyed how world looks only at a surface of everything. Ofcourse some real nazi groups in Holland used that image but why let them spoil fun for everyone? “Yay Santa and Pete are coming, I hope I will get something nice.” Noooo but Pete has dark skin, so it is racist. I never before thought about that stuff. People are people. We look different, dress different, like different stuff in bed. Why look and stop at skin, or gender or something else thin?
Also why hate history and put fog over it? We should learn from it so we can do better. Except… there is nothing to learn from. This is a tradition where children dress as hero from a book. Just because he is of one skin colour or another doesn’t make that racist, maybe only a trendy headline for paper.
They dress as a character of a book. If they dressed as Kanye West that would be better, worse? Or would that be racist if a WHITE kid wanted to look like his favourite rapper? I guess painting face brown would be a bit much. But there are people that want to look like characters from comic books, for example there is a guy that attempted to make his skin red. Important is context, as always. There is difference in running around dressed as african native and shouting “I’m dumb removed”, and running around as Pete, Santa helper.
And what about asian, american (as in native) and every other little human living in Holland. If someone has more narrow eyes then he/she can be Pete?
Also you mentioned that people in USA are shocked… which people? Did all of USA citizens read about that tradition and found it bad? Why would that even matter? The point of this event isn’t to hurt anyone. No one is doing purge during this time. Shaming anyone. Why opinion of few people would matter if they don’t know the thing they are commenting on?
I’m sorry because this reply maybe was a bit chaotic…
If Pete was white and dressed as stereotypical european of that era should I scream that this is racist and i don’t dress and look like that?
And saying black person, white person… People mean whom? If I get it right Pete was from Spain, at least that’s where he sent naughty children. Whole Spain should I guess feel offended.
I could put probably ton of labels on myself, and others. But everyone is first and foremost themsleves. If people get grouped by something as far stretching as skin colour then ow boi… It’s like saying that “white man invaded some country”. No, not white man invaded some country, usually history tells us whom exactly and why went where and did what. It is easier to put label and throw everyone to one bag. As some do with muslims and terrorism, dark skinned americans and gangs, etc…
Pete is first and foremost Santa helper.
I think in some comment I rushed my thoughts and said that they is plural for of it… what I wanted to say is that it is plural form and not singular… gaaa but I don’t know how to find this message… I even don’t know how to find your oryginal post without having to scroll everything… I guess I should learn how to use lemmur app :p But it would be so usefull to be able to jump from “replies” to oryginal post ;-;…