Rep. Eli Crane used the derogatory phrase in describing his proposed amendment to a military bill. Democratic Rep. Joyce Beatty asked that his words be stricken from the record.

    • SulaymanF@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      That’s like saying there’s not a lot of difference between saying “me beat” or “beat me.”

      Simple words aside, there’s a big difference in meaning between the two.

      • Pat12@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        That’s like saying there’s not a lot of difference between saying “me beat” or “beat me.”

        no, that’s not the same thing. the difference between “colored people” and “people of color” is similar to the difference between “a red apple” and “an apple that is red”. In English, an adjective can be placed before a noun or after a noun, with the latter formatted with a preposition such as “of”.

        Edit: not sure why i’m being downvoted here - do you all not speak English? If you give a comparison it should be apples to apples, not apples to pineapples.

        • Kleinbonum@feddit.de
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          1 year ago

          Linguistically? Sure.

          Historically? Well, “colored people” is the term used in Apartheid South Africa and in Jim Crow America by racists and white supremacists and people longing for the slavery era in order to refer to people that were regarded and treated as inferior, while “People of Color” is the term that a large majority seems to prefer as the term to refer to themselves.

          • snaggen@programming.dev
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            1 year ago

            Not even Linguistically. Colored people implies, that people are originally without color, and then some people have been painted. Hence, implying that no color is the norm.

            • Kleinbonum@feddit.de
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              1 year ago

              Well, it implies “whiteness” as the norm - i.e. that it’s not even necessary to mention that somebody is “white” (as in “a man was seen at the station”) because the default assumption is that a certain ethnicity that a society was built for is the “norm,” and it’s only worth mentioning race as a qualifier (as in “a colored man was seen at the station”) when referring to a member of the outside group.

              However, I’d still argue that this, too, is a sociological rather than a linguistical concept.