Aaron Boyd
1 min readSep 28, 2020

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I would say it's ironic that it's usually white people who come up with the most convoluted "______ is secretly reinforcing white supremacy" pieces, but...it's not. It's really not.

In order for a word or idea to "subconsciously transfer" an idea unrelated to its current usage, there has to be a solid semantic through-line connecting its historical meaning to its present one. Calling a black person "boy," for example, or casually tossing around words like "rioter" or "thug", meets this criteria because there's a very clear value judgment attached to these words.

But there's no widespread cultural belief that people from the Caucases are famed for their beauty. I'm 34 years old, fairly educated, and read on this subject recreationally, and I'd never heard this stereotype until just now. The fact this belief was part of a long-debunked theory that nobody ever talks about becomes trivial if nobody but diehard history/anthropology buffs know about it.

It's like saying "Hip hip, hooray" is antisemitic. Yes, that is its original meaning, but over time it lost any tangible connection to antisemitism and its meaning warped into happy gibberish shouted at parties.

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Aaron Boyd
Aaron Boyd

Written by Aaron Boyd

So there's this thing called privacy

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