Well, looks like I shouldn't have posted my reply till I read further. Looks like JJ did apologize. My bad!
Are you serious right now? Your intent has NOTHING to do if people take offense against your words or actions, what reality do you live in?
I've always taught my kids to apologize if someone is offended by what they say whether they intended as an offense or not. Apology means you care about the other person's feeling and you feel bad that the person is hurt by you. It makes no difference whether the hurt is physical or emotional.
Just cracked Top 20 topic.....haha Spoiler Earlier last year Gigi H. was kept away from the Vict. Secret's show in Shanghai because of that.
No, an apology means you acknowledge you did something you should not have done and you accept some moral responsibility for their pain. What you are describing is empathy. Simply expressing that you feel bad is not an apology. In his initial response when he said he was “disappointed” in the reaction — that his him saying he is feeling bad about how his greeting was taken. Is that really any different than him saying he feels bad that people were hurt by his greeting? Edit: As I write that — I realize I could be contradicting myself. An “apology” feels appropriate when I bump into someone, but not if I get tongue tied and a sound comes out I didn’t intend. I think the difference is that not being careful about your surroundings when you are walking around in public seems like something you can control. Flubbing a greeting seems less controllable.
durvasa, it's just one of those moments when you would do best to retreat from the keyboard. No offense.
No. But there are plenty of scenarios I can think of where our society doesn’t allow a public figure to “get away” with something where I don’t feel they should have to apologize. I’m sure you can think of many such scenarios as well. Should they “get away with it” if they were legitimately tongue-tied or they were trying to say something else that just ended up sounding like the N-word? In my opinion, yes. I am surprised you disagree.
While intentions matter, the basic premise that one can't be offensive without intending to do so is wrong. When the entire Spanish national team made the photo with the eye gestures they can claim it was not intended to be offensive. It doesn't change the fact that Asian people can rightly be offended because that is a gesture usually made to make fun of Asian people's eye features. All of us have probably unintentionally said offensive things. Most of us are apologetic. You OTOH probably say something like FU, I didn't mean it F__k your feelings only my "intention" matters. Maybe you are one of those "Redskins" name supporters since the name is not "intended" to be offensive. As for JJ Redick, only he knows the truth. Assuming he was truly tongue-tied, he can say so while being empathetic as to how it might come across. Some people would call that being apologetic even if he truly didn't intend offense.
That is different. They still intended to mock the appearance of Asian people, perhaps out of ignorance for how it would be received by people outside their community. A more apt comparison would be if they weren’t even trying to make a gesture that had anything to do with Asian people, and it just ended up looking that way.
Not to start a debate here but I work with Chinese people every day and they always use a term "nega" that sounds oddly similar to the N word. Now all they are saying is "that" as in trying to find their words similar to how we use "um" or "uh" in a sentence while searching for a word in the middle of talking.. So you hear them talking amongst themselves and you hear "nega, nega" but to an American is sounds like.. well you can see how it would come off. Should they apologize for speaking their language? Absolutely not. But could certain people that aren't familiar with it hear that and be offended? Sure they could. Should Redick apologize? Absolutely and he did. Redick's second apology was much better than the first, and he should have apologized just like that the first time. I personally can't imagine he would say that and intend on it sounding the way it did. Why would anyone put that out there on purpose?? The editing team should have caught that and they didn't and that is a shame on them because it is pretty obvious it came off the wrong way and in a derogatory way. Whether or not he is a closet racist is anyone's assumption. He very well could be, I know many people from many races that are closet racist. It isn't just white or blacks either.
Why do you think the first “nega” case doesn’t warrant an apology for the offense caused, while the second case does? — again, assuming Redick wasn’t trying to say the word “chink” and he just flubbed his greeting. Would you have been OK with him saying something like: “I feel bad for messing up that greeting and people being offended by how it ended up sounding.” So, not exactly an apology, but an acknowledgement that an unintentional mistake on his part led to people taking offense.
Get him. Noose him up. Kick him out of the league. Unless he's trying to sign here at a reasonable rate I hope y'all burn his ass. Please sign him.
Why should someone apologize for speaking their language? In Reddicks case, he says a racial slur that is not part of the English language that has a different meaning.. The term he used specifically refers to a racial slur.
Hmmm. This leads to me another question that is at least interesting to me. What does it mean to "say" a word. If I vocalize something, and a listener hears it and interprets it as some word X, does that mean I said that word X? I think not. Saying a word means that that word-idea was in my brain and due to some impulse or reason I vocally expressed it. If I was actually speaking a different language and the word I was using in that language happened to be received as "X", I think we're in agreement that I did not actually say the word X. But suppose I was speaking the same language as the listener and I garbled my words and it ended up sounding like "X" to the listener. You are saying that means I said "X". I'm saying that just as in the first case I merely said something that you think sounded like X. If X wasn't actually in my brain then I don't see how it makes sense for someone to assert that I said "X".
The whole "race" thing is so overblown. Sick of it, literally sick of it. Physiologically we are 99.99999% the same. Identity politics is the culprit here, a truly evil and destructive strategy to promote division for political gain. Race cannot be identified by DNA analysis, only where our ancestors came from. Physical differences are largely environmental.
