Thursday, June 26, 2014

First Lady Uses Racial Slur, Gets Away With It

6/26/2014


Who cares about the Redskins? Probably not first lady Michelle Obama, who turned her sights on insulting the Romani minority community Monday.
While describing her struggles as a working mother, the usually politically correct first lady used the racial slur, gypped.
“The first thing I tried to do, which was a mistake, was that I tried the part-time thing… I realized I was getting gypped on that front,” Obama told ABC’s Robin Roberts at the White House Summit on Working Families. “What happened was I got a part-time salary but worked full time.”
The term “gypped” is a racial slur deriving from the word “gypsy,” a slur for the Roma. The slur refers to the act of defrauding or robbing through practices such as swindling or cheating. The correct usage of the term is most certainly not synonymous to “slighted or “cut short.”
Defenders of Romani point out that the abbreviation, “gyp,” is nothing more than a callous slur used by the culturally insensitive. Similar slurs to “gypped” include “Jewed down” or calling someone an “Indian giver.”
All offensive. Definitely not something that the first lady of the United States of America should be saying in interviews.
But it’s not entirely Michelle’s fault. It seems as though she borrowed the offensive colloquialism from her husband, President Barack Obama. In 2009, at a town hall meeting in Allentown, Penn., Obama said that he was seeking to regulate health insurance companies to make sure that people don’t get “gypped.”
Ouch. When will the first couple clean up their language? It’s amazing not amazing at all that no one in their own party has called them out on it yet.

source

4 comments: