Elephant

One more question Elephant. Are you the person who was rude and nasty to me in the 40s room a few minutes later, under the name of Sophie? It would explain a lot if you were.

No Jigsy, I don’t even expect answers to my questions.

@tommy-toxen wrote:

What is up with everybody using the racist card on JC lately?

It’s such an emotive word that I’m assuming is used just for shock value and to try and “disarm” anyone.

If it was just being used for shock value then it wouldn’t actually be very effective in that sense Tommy. It might shock if it was used rarely, but as you say, it isn’t.

As for disarming people, in one way or another we all try to disarm someone who attacks us Tommy. Elephant made a presumption on my race based on my user name, and whilst that is not a racist remark in itself, the remark I felt was used as a put-down, so in that sense it smacked of racism.

Rather than accuse Elephant of being racist, or suggest they were racist, I choose to ask them a question to establish what they meant by their remark, however, I accept that some people may think my question was a suggestion that they are racist, to them I would say they are choosing to infer from it what they want .

James, I only made that post about Neil and Olly’s antics the day after ugo changed his name to riot and before Elephant appeared but I take yer point. I probably have given ugo ideas now.

I also take Tommy’s point about the racist card, if what he means is to isolate someone by calling them a racist, something that’s easily done in these days of political correctness.

RACE CARD is an interesting metaphor. It seems to have developed from the old expression ACE CARD or ACE UP THE SLEEVE. When someone was losing an argument, and they made some last minute point or counter-argument that no-one could beat, we’d say they played the ACE UP THEiR SLEEVE, cos no-one knew they had it. RACE CARD came to be used by white people in response to ethnic groups when the latter cried RACIST or RACISM as a last resort, i.e. whites would say………….”ah, here we go again, the ethnic groups always make out we must be racist if we don’t agree with them or we criticise them” etc, so the expression RACE CARD was born. Sometimes though thesedays, ethnic groups are accussed of using the RACE CARD when the argument/issue begins, which is a bit daft as the principle here is to save yer best card till last, as you would in a card game, the latter being the origin of the metaphor.

Tommy’s expression though was RACIST CARD, this is a further development of RACE CARD. The idea here is that if you want to discredit someone you imply they are playing the RACIST CARD. This categorises and stereotypes them as someone who obsessively anti-racist, or as someone who is trying to exploit comments about racism, or someone trying to use the emotive subject of racism for their own ends.