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Saturday, January 14, 2012

Word You Shouldn't Say Today: Half-Breed

It's 2012 people, if you have words like "half-breed", "octoroon", "mulatto", or "quadroon" in your day to day working vocabulary, you should probably work hard and fast to decrease your vocabulary size. You can replace all of those terms with the words biracial or multiracial, or better yet, don't use those words to describe a person if it isn't relevant.

In this wonderful town that I grew up in and currently live in (Louisville, KY), it is completely acceptable to be a media personality (Mandy Connell) and use the word "half-breed" to refer to our current president. You need only apologize and you will suffer no consequences.

This comes as such a shock to me because I've never actually heard the word used except in a Cher song. (A song that I love by the way.) You would think that if this word were in common usage I would have heard some bigot or ignorant person use it at some point, but I haven't, and I've heard some pretty racist things in my time. She claims, of course, that she didn't mean it in a derogatory way, but that is of course complete bullshit. (Pardon my French.)

There are so many things I love about Kentucky, but the backwards, ignorant complacency is something I can't live with. Thank G-D I'm getting out of this place soon. Now I can't even listen to local radio (except NPR, of course, but is that really local).

Post Script:
After writing this, I went back to the article and discovered that this happened about a year ago....I guess 84 WHAS doesn't update their website enough. I clicked this link from another article about something that happened today. Even though that makes this story old news...it doesn't make it untrue. It happened and there were no consequences. This is Kentucky.