South Africa's Tyla sparks culture war over racial identity

When people say they have a problem with white feminism, threads like these are part of the reason.

It is not.

It’s an archaic term - because ‘the orient’ was a colonial expression that encompassed Western ideas of the exotic.

I've just lost TWO attempts at typing a post, an unfortunate keystroke followed by an unscheduled reboot😠
To sum up:
I discovered Tyla yesterday, I saw the 'Water' video and crikey! Sexualised or what! Available at any time to any child of any age. Anyone else concerned about the images of women in music videos, which don't seem to have progressed much, except for a layer of surliness and aggression added to the hectares of bare flesh... Sorry for the derail.

Words across borders: I was often called the word that rhymes with 'maggot' in Fairytale of New York as a child, it was a term of mild rebuke, derived from the word for a bundle of twigs i.e. something worthless. It had nothing to do with sexuality. It's obvious from the context of Fairytale that it's the traditional meaning that's intended.
But to most people outside of my sociolinguistic milieu, it's a homophobic slur.
Tricky. Trickier still if as in Tyla's case, it's how she identifies... I don't know what the solution is.
I'm now hitting 'post' before Fate censors me again ☺

I follow an instagrammer who is a dancer. She posted a thing about how dancers using the word 'gypsy' to describe an aesthetic are being racist because gypsy is a racial slur. I don't disagree that 'gypsy' as an aesthetic is problematic but gypsy outside of the US is NOT a racial slur. It's a descriptor word used by gypsies and travellers to describe their ethnicity and culture. She literally hadn't thought that her US perspective might not be the only one.

Sorry I've not dug deep here but America appoints itself the last word. This offends. This does not.

interesting from the general point of who is and isn't allowed to choose their own identity, who is allowed to decide what is and isn't offensive.

Isn't it? Where the power lies.

And yes. Gay people not allowed to reject the word queer, or to call themselves homosexual without nicely re defining it to value other people's identities by sacrificing their own.

Try telling an activist that you identify as a biological adult human female, or that it's rude of them to coercively label you 'cis' when you don't identify as such as you quickly find you're not part of the powerful group who gets to have identities and command that others respect them.

It's never reciprocal. Only oppressive. And never rooted in genuine values.

Newsflash. Academic theories around “identity” more often than not are ridiculously impractical so don’t work in real life and create more tension and division than they solve.

I find it all horrible depressing tbh. Especially when I see and hear them parroted as though fact and attempted to be applied in real life and if you don’t comform then you’re slurred as racist.

The rules for race are as tricky as those for 'gender'.

Of course I would never intentionally use a term that offends someone, but I have never been given a rational explanation as to why 'coloured people' is offensive but 'people of colour' is polite.

It's US cultural imperialism. Anything that they deem offensive is unacceptable, no matter the different contexts around the world.

I mean she has trouble here in the UK when she calls herself 'coloured'.

By 'you', I obvs don't mean you, Buttercup. I mean 'one'.

Yes, many South Africans would be offended to be called 'Black', because their identity is Coloured/Cape Coloured or another sub group. SA has so many different cultures, tribal, and ethnic identities. 30 odd 'indigenous' languages, 12 official languages, lots of inter racial tension and history going back centuries. If you're going to get into identity politics there, you'd better read some books first.

Thanks for posting this, I read it and thought about posting too.

This is the quote that interested me:

"To have the audacity to question somebody's self-identification and replace it with your own - that's ridiculous. You are not progressive."

Some might argue this supports the view that biological women should not question a man's self-identification as a "trans woman". But really it says to me that no-one can force the identity of "cis woman" on anyone else. It is equally not progressive to try and force a new system on our society of "gender by declaration" (meaning 'woman' includes transwomen i.e. men who declare themselves women and ciswomen i.e. women who declare themselves women) instead of what we already have which is "sex by observation" where nobody needs to declare anything to be a member of a sex class.

I have a friend from SA who identifies as 'Cape Coloured' and she has a lot of push back from people who think she's insulting their 'Blackness'.

'Oriental' to describe people of far eastern heritage is another one that really offends people in the U.S, but is normal to use in Britain.

I suppose this is one of the consequences of globalisation.

Conversely I've seen US people get enormously defensive when it's pointed out that some words they commonly use are offensive elsewhere (spastic and retard being two common examples).