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  • From a linguistic perspective, there is (still) no equivalent of all the usual abusive epithets for white people that's genuinely insulting (not that I'm suggesting there should be, as eliminating the others from usage would do just fine), so that someone being abused with the n-word or the P-word can't reply in kind. In the video, he tries 'wasteman' (and obviously may not intend to reply in kind), but that's a much weaker insult. Basically, if a racist uses the above words, or others of the same kind, they can assert a position of 'power'/feel powerful just because verbally, they're not going to get the same back (you can see this as the racist tries to pretend that everything is perfectly 'normal' after the insult, daintily playing with his phone).

    Needless to say, also, no-one is going to succeed in arguing the case against in a situation like that. While there are laws against hate speech, and people can, in theory and sometimes in practice, be hauled before a court, that's indirect, work-intensive, and will never cover all the actual instances of verbal racist abuse (when there is also more serious physical violence to be dealt with in this way, or issues like discrimination in the workplace).

  • One can be pretty damn insulting without bringing race into it though.

    "Mummy hating dog rapist" usually hits the nail on the head.

  • Yes, but so what? Even if any of the components of such an insult are true or truish, you have to know the person you're insulting to make them cut. If you don't know the person, they don't cut in the same way because they don't revolve around something so obvious, and therefore knowingly insultable, as superficial aspects of a person's relatively recent ancestry and heritage, which the racist insult implies are somehow bad or something to be ashamed of. Something non-obvious or untrue that you don't actually know of a person can always be denied or shrugged off, or, as in the present example, simply returned--'no, you're the wasteman'. The racist insult will still be there and unanswered.

    An equivalent kind of insult to racist insults for the majority group, which in most contexts where racist insults are made, simply doesn't exist, as they are historically connected to victimisation of minority groups, making them doubly hurtful.

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