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this post was submitted on 14 Mar 2024
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United States | News & Politics
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I don't understand how illegal is a slur...
You don't see why calling people "illegals" is a slur? The fuck?
Okay fascist
Being somewhere illegally is not remotely the same as being illegal. It only makes sense to you because you didn't actually think about it.
Because humans aren't legal or illegal? Because it's exclusively applied in a
way to people who resemble a certain ethnicity? Because it's dehumanizing language that works to subconsciously justify treating them as criminals even if they didn't do anything wrong?
It's language used to criticize an entire group of people out of hand.
^ This fascist would've called slaves killing their owners "criminals" for breaking the law, and Mandela for "illegally" sabotaging the apartheid government
Words become slurs as soon as assholes start using it in a derogatory fashion. It doesn't need to make sense, it's just how it is.
Retard used to be a medical term. Then assholes used it as an insult so it became a slur. Then it needed to change to mentally ill. Now mentally ill is started to go out of fashion.
The n word used to just be a term to refer to black people, then assholes used it as an insult. Then assholes started to just use the word "black" as an insult so we needed to switch to African-american.
Language evolves, and assholes ruin things all the time so we have to continuously evolve and change so we don't use the same words as assholes.
I don't think this is the same for something that is:
and
and, in part,
We can keep words to say that people have made a choice without needing to change the language every 3 years. Felons are people that have committed felonies. Criminals are people that have committed crimes. Terrorists are people that have committed terrorism.
Your other examples are slurs because they're used to insult people over something that's out of their control and isn't actually a bad thing. Racial slurs are slurs not because they identify someone as a particular race but because using it indicates the speaker (incorrectly) believes there's something "bad" about that particular race. And, race/sexuality/age/etc... aren't even a choice, so the slur user is insulting the person about something that they can't even control.
Of course, there's a debate to be made that illegal immigration was the "right" choice for that person at the time to escape their situation or that some undocumented immigrants didn't have a choice (children or trafficking victims), but at a basic level we're talking about people who have immigrated illegally, by choice.
Which leads to ignorant shit like calling people in other countries "African American". That was a dumb choice.
As a rule of thumb, any time you use an adjective about someone as a noun for them it can be dehumanizing.
The baggage with the word illegal is on top of that.