RotMG: "Oktoberfest" event popped. Unlocked a new character slot.
* * *
As I've mentioned before, I grew up in a de-facto segregated elementary school district. My white trash classmates, grandfather, father's friends and their kids etc. parroted racist stereotypes as if that was instant comedy. The only hint it wasn't universally acceptable even in exclusively white company was that my mother forbade racist slurs the same as non-racial cusses. So, by kindergarten, even if we didn't have any Black classmates to pin The N Word on, we knew it wasn't the time or place for it. The flip side is the reality that there evidently were times and places.
I almost said "the only hint it wasn't normal" ... but when it comes to racism, "normal" is a matter of context. On the playground at recess, or the back of the schoolbus, with adults out of earshot, racial slurs circulated freely alongside all the other fascinating-because-adult-and-forbidden words. Where did we learn these words in the first place? When we went home after school and overheard our parents and older siblings chatting with their friends, using those same words.
Racist language held the same kind of "grown-up" cachet as cigarettes and alcohol. But while it made some vague kind of sense that cigarettes and beer might stunt our growth, we knew words can't stunt your growth, so of course the racist language taboo was even more confusing and seductive. The company of polite adults on good behavior had its own rules of normalcy, and other contexts had other norms.
So, "the N word" was unacceptable at school, but nobody sat us down and said "here's the acceptable words we use to talk about race and ethnicity". Just listening to our parents and grandparents we also figured out that "acceptable" was a moving goalpost. "Negro" was a noncontroversial term until the mid-60s. "Colored" peaked around 1970. "African American" only works in America, and what if your cosmetically Black ancestry is by way of Melanesia (Vanuatu, Fiji, New Guinea) or pre-colonial Australia? Those are not Africa.
* * *
Even more confusing, at some point I realized that Black people in exclusively Black company call each other the N word. This entered mainstream consicousness with the rise of rap - if you're Black, you're allowed to form a band called "N.W.A." (N-wordz Wit' Attitudes). Not all Black people are on board with this, many feel they lose more than they gain by claiming and recontextualizing The N Word. In a similar vein, Jewish people often bandy traditional anti-Jewish slurs and stereotypes in Jewish company.
What we don't find nearly as much is White people claiming and recontextualizing anti-White slurs like "cracker" ... for the same reason that "White Pride Day" would be a mistake: White culture isn't endangered. We haven't been systemically oppressed, silenced, othered, excluded, and culturally erased for the color of our skin. Many white people are barely aware that White stereotypes even exist to caricature. Even where we're aware of them, they don't matter to us as much as minority stereotypes matter to minorities, because White stereotypes are not a punitive weight we have to overcome just to break even.
So, minority comedians (Black, Jewish, Latinx, whatever) get a pass for leveraging stereotypes in their humor. Jeff Dunham's "Walter" and "Bubba" puppet characters prove that White stereotypes exist and White comedians can work them successfully. Dunham is still a problematic example though; do his White caricatures earn him a pass to work racist/xenophobic non-White caricatures ala "Sweet Daddy Dee", "Jose Jalapeno" and "Achmed the Dead Terrorist"?