It's a racist slur, it's a racist slur, it's a racist slur!

IT IS A RACIAL SLUR!

Invisible God please help me explain to my father why he can't deem the word "ying yang" unoffensive.

There's a few answers I've thought out myself already:

1) It is actually offensive
2) You can't tell a minority group what is and what isn't offensive
3) You aren't even 1/18th Asian
4) You're no better than the white men you claim to hate

So me and dad got into it about his liberal usage of the word "ying yang". He's said this all my life. My dad's 52 and ex-Navy, and by his own admission has traveled quite a bit so he's encountered many groups of folks. He's also black. Just something to keep in mind.

In any case, I've had to put up with my dad using all sorts of racial epithets--yes including nigger--all my life and every now and then I just snap on that ass. Last night I snapped on that ass.

There's a discount tobaccy & beer store up the street from us of extremely ill repute. The store's changed hands several times but for a few years it's effectively been in the grip of, well, you could technically call them Asians. They're mostly people from the Middle East as far as I can gather but I've never asked them about their nationality. The latest owners I'm pretty sure are Indian though.

In any case, the people working the store get pelted with insults all day & all night long thanks to their mostly black patrons (think Do The Right Thing). They don't seem to get too irritated because, really, they own the store. Back to my dad's usage of the word "ying-yang"--well dad refers to one of the clerks as a ying yang when we get outside. I'm about to start my period at this point and I'd already told him I didn't feel like having anything from anyone, and he'd been annoying me the whole night anyway so finally I clicked and asked him why he thinks its okay to call the man a "ying yang".

Dad says it's because he doesn't know where the man is from. I say he calls all Asians ying yangs. Dad says he doesn't know where they're from and they all look the same to him.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you internalized racism. Only I didn't call it that, I just blurted out "racist bastard".

Now...I've learned that, above anything else, white folks can't stand to be called a racist. You can literally call them anything else BUT RACIST. Only my dad's black, and he too flips at being called a racist.

So I bring up the pointless argument of using the word "nigger", which he also is prone to using (okay me too sometimes), stating that he's basically using the same argument that white people use to call blacks niggers.

Well! As it turns out "nigger" doesn't actually mean black person, it means someone who is lazy & won't work. That's what it originally meant. Mom agrees with him as it turns out.

As a sidenote, and...do you know why blacks are called niggers? Since it doesn't have to do with our skin color, let's look at that definition again: lazy. Like slaves. I've heard this before...from white people. I lol'd then got mad.

Anyway so it's okay to use ying yang and apparently it's okay to be called a nigger now too, according to my father (and to some extent, my mother, and a portion of the black community). My parents got to see first hand the black civil rights movement of the 60s and on into the 70s so I guess I should take their word for it.

Haha! No.

IT'S A RACIST SLUR IT'S A RACIST SLUR IT'S A RACIST SLUR IT'S A RACIST SLUR.

I don't care how you define it or if you think it's okay. Your words have some meaning behind them, you can't just go back and scoop out racist history with a mellon baller then tell me a bold face assed lie.

*sets hair on fire*