Says someone from a country where the word for people from my home town is used to mean “penis”.
That’s the thing: if you don’t consider racism to be a bad thing, using racist terms isn’t done to show anything.
To get back to my original example: Using “wiener” to mean penis is deeply offensive to people from Vienna, because in German it just means “Person from Vienna”. But people from Vienna aren’t a group that’s “protected” by anti-racism, and thus people commonly use it. They often don’t even know that the city of Vienna exists, let alone that it’s called Wien and that people from Wien are called Wiener, and that the sausage is named after that city.
So they happily use the word “wiener” to mean “penis” and sometimes they even use it as a generic derogatory term: “You are such a wiener”.
In that context it’s not surprising that before anti-racism became a thing people would just use racist terms for every-day items like food.
The point still stands: If you don’t see discrimination against a certain group of people as something bad, using discriminatory terms isn’t a statement but just a thing people do without thinking.
I think the origin was 100% racist. But most people just used the words without thinking about the origin.
When I was s kid, they had racist names. It was just the name like a bicycle is called a bicycle. You just used the name. The realization came later when I was older and knew that the words can also be used as a slur.
To be fair though, Germany changed a lot since the 90s. Racism was way worse in the 90s/00s than now.
Never understood why people had to give names to food, just to show how racist they were.
Says someone from a country where the word for people from my home town is used to mean “penis”.
That’s the thing: if you don’t consider racism to be a bad thing, using racist terms isn’t done to show anything.
To get back to my original example: Using “wiener” to mean penis is deeply offensive to people from Vienna, because in German it just means “Person from Vienna”. But people from Vienna aren’t a group that’s “protected” by anti-racism, and thus people commonly use it. They often don’t even know that the city of Vienna exists, let alone that it’s called Wien and that people from Wien are called Wiener, and that the sausage is named after that city.
So they happily use the word “wiener” to mean “penis” and sometimes they even use it as a generic derogatory term: “You are such a wiener”.
In that context it’s not surprising that before anti-racism became a thing people would just use racist terms for every-day items like food.
I have never heard any German speaking person use “wiener” to refer to penis ever. Maybe it’s a thing among some people but it’s certainly not common.
There’s “weener”, but that’s an American term as far as I know.
Sorry, I figured from your post history that you are from an english-speaking country.
The term isn’t “weener”, it’s “wiener”: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/wiener
The point still stands: If you don’t see discrimination against a certain group of people as something bad, using discriminatory terms isn’t a statement but just a thing people do without thinking.
I think it can be spelled a few different ways, “weener” is the one I come across the most
That’s because americans have difficulty spelling/pronouncing foreign words.
That’s fair
I think the origin was 100% racist. But most people just used the words without thinking about the origin.
When I was s kid, they had racist names. It was just the name like a bicycle is called a bicycle. You just used the name. The realization came later when I was older and knew that the words can also be used as a slur.
To be fair though, Germany changed a lot since the 90s. Racism was way worse in the 90s/00s than now.