2016 has been a year full of surprises. As we come to a close on the year that will be immortalized in history books for such shocks as the controversial election of Donald Trump, the unexpected Brexit decision, and the consecutive deaths of icons such as Prince, David Bowie, George Michael, and Carrie Fisher, it is hard not to focus on the bleakness of this year.
But, while this year was chock full of political and cultural bombshells, one of the things that still surprises me the most is ignorance. While there have been loads and loads of articles posted on the different forms of ignorance that have shown their ugly faces in 2016, the one thing that seems to irk me the most is the casual use of derogatory terms.
As I’ve gotten older, I have come to understand that there will be things that we think we’ve eradicated, but that will always exist. I constantly hear my parents’ generation saying “nobody smokes anymore,” due to the huge decrease in smokers that has occurred over the past 50 years. However, if they could witness the high number of teenagers I know who still carry packs of cigarettes around to this day, they’d be stunned.
Just as we believe that certain habits are “things of the past,” offhand discrimination is something that we love to brush off as a stale issue. “We exist in a post-racial society,” “nobody is homophobic these days,” and “I don’t see color” are statements that I hear thrown around far more often than you would expect from a nation where the president-elect was notorious for his offensive campaign jargon.
Yet, while many people of privilege, and even many people who consider themselves to be socially liberal, will try to act as though these issues do not persist, they are unfortunately very wrong.
Just yesterday, as I was scrolling past images on Instagram, I stopped on one cute image of a couple, wrapped tightly in each other's’ arms, smiling widely. As I was about to move past it, I couldn’t help but notice one glaring comment right beneath it: “fags.”
It is quite often that I find peers or acquaintances of mine saying the word faggot, abbreviated fags, on social media in a joking way. While the girl who said it immediately commented underneath “jk I love ya’ll,” I couldn’t help but still feel uneasy when I saw it.
While this year’s presidential election has opened many people’s eyes to the issues in this country, I think that it has also perfectly paralleled the issue of accepted prejudice. It was an anomaly seeing Donald Trump getting away with saying bigoted statements about practically every minority group in the book, when in the past, just one wrong word could be detrimental to a presidential election.
The argument that I kept hearing over and over from Trump supporters was “I don’t agree when he says those terrible things, but I just overlook them.”
And, a part of me could understand where they were coming from. There are plenty of celebrities who I support even though they’ve done things I find disrespectful or wrong. I am an avid Ariana Grande fan, even though she infamously licked those donuts. I find Kanye West to consistently be one of modern music’s geniuses, even though he’s embarrassed his musical counterparts and even himself, such as with the Taylor Swift VMA incident. There have been so many celebrities who have made mistakes, but we still support them, maybe because we realize they’re human, and we all do it, or maybe simply because we don’t care.
But, the reason I cannot align myself with those Trump supporters is because his mistakes were not just human slip-ups. Donald Trump steadily repeated insults, inflicted fear, spread hatred, and tried to be as divisive as possible, because he knew it would get him attention, and in the end, it didn’t prevent him from winning.
Trump made it acceptable for him to be saying those things, because he used them so frequently, that they weren’t noteworthy anymore. When he was calling a woman ugly, it didn’t become news because he had done it so many times before. He understood that, when you hear something used over and over, it becomes ignored because it is seen as the norm. It’s the simple process of habituation - when a stimulus is frequently repeated, our emotional and physiological response decreases because we become numb to it.
This is what has occurred with derogatory terms. Habituation has been built up enough that when a heterosexual says “that’s gay” or when a white person says the n-word, people barely even notice it happens unless they’re the minority that the term traces back to.
All slurs have pain that comes with them. The n-word had an injurious meaning to black people for centuries, up until the past couple decades, when the meaning of the word was reinvented into a more positive form by black people themselves.
As a white man, I was lucky enough to never have racial slurs thrown at me throughout my life, but being a gay man came with its own share of insults, and the implication that racial slurs have always sent a wave of discomfort throughout me because I know they hurt just as badly as homophobic ones do.
In the past five years, I have practically become desensitized to hearing “gay” used as a synonym for “bad.” Hearing someone shout “gaaaaaay” was prevalent throughout my high school years, and it felt like an uphill battle each time I tried to halt its use. I questioned myself because I didn’t want to seem like I was being too touchy, and I felt as if I was ruining the fun whenever I told someone it upset me when they said it.
I soon learned, however, that I should not feel bad for trying to convince people to not use what I am as a derogatory term. The use of it had become so common that I felt like I was trying to prevent someone from using an article of vocabulary, but that was not the case.
The fact of the matter is that, hearing these things hurts for those of us who have been affected by it. And even if someone may not have been directly insulted with these terms, the meaning they hold draws back to the history of their origin, and what it means for certain groups of people.
All through my life, I cannot say that I have been called a faggot more than ten times. But, each time I hear that word, it sends a twinging shiver down my spine. Whenever someone says it, they may be thinking that they’re just being funny. They are most likely not even trying to be hurtful or offensive. But, every time I hear that word, I picture the millions of queer people who were hurt by it. I picture the teens who were taunted by it in their schools. I picture the people who struggled with their sexuality and desperately wanted to change who they were, just so they could avoid hearing that word thrown at them every day of their lives. As an adolescent, I cried and often prayed to God, asking him to make me a heterosexual. But, if I had been bullied with these discriminatory terms daily, that would have made it all the worse.
As we enter a new year, I hope that we will continually progress into a society where these words are not used so apathetically. I hope that before a white boy tries to be “cool” and call his friends his n****s, he will consider what this word might mean to the black people whose ancestors were accosted with this word for hundreds of years. I hope that before someone captions their photo on Instagram with “my fags,” they will consider the millions of gay people who have wanted this insult to disappear for as long as it’s existed.
Although the recent election has made this hope seem even further away for so many people, I am optimistic that it will be a wake-up call. Hearing these awful words should not be swallowed by our society so easily, and we need to make it so that their use is not common slang for new generations.
I ended up revisiting that Instagram photo later that day, and I noticed that the comment saying “fags” had been deleted, and all that was left was the second comment. Unaware whether it was the commenter who had deleted it, or whether it was the original person who posted the photo, I felt a small glimmer of hope. Although people are still saying these things, maybe they’re beginning to realize their implications. I look forward to a day where I never have to hear “that’s gay” ever again.
