Meta post I’ve decided to make. I enjoyed the unixporn subreddit a lot when I used reddit more. I enjoy customizing my linux de as much as the next nerd.
But you definitely shouldn’t use racist slang to refer to the process.
To be clear, I didn’t know the origin of the term ‘ricing’ until fairly recently. I was chattimg with my friend and used it to describe my de setup. They informed me that apparently it’s from car customization, and is a pejorative against generally asian men who customize their car to look like a racecar.
After learning this I was sad to realize just how engrained it is in linux de customization culture. I personally have stopped using the term, and I would ask everyone here stop as well.
The arguments being made here are the same ones that were used for f*ggot, tr*p, nword, g*psy, r*dskins, etc etc etc.
It’s the same damn thing every single time, a bunch of reactionaries will piss and whine and piss and whine and piss and whine because they have to make the most minimal amount of effort to adopt a new word in their vocabulary instead of the problem one. They will piss and whine forever until eventually accepting it, like all the others historically.
They join a long long line of pissy whiney losers for making the same tired old arguments we’ve seen for so many things before.
This is an example of the American cultural imperialism someone else was whining about above. In the UK a f@ggot is a type of food. There are adverts on the telly for it. A fag is a cigarette. Gypsy is not necessarily perjorative (it appears as a category on the census). Not sure what tr*p is, but if it’s tramp, that’s a homeless person. Also, a fanny is ladybits.
Is f____t not used as a
pejorativeslur for gay men in the UK?I must revise my earlier reply. Watching a documentary about George Michael, it seems it was a current and offensive slur in the UK even decades ago. Apparently my childhood was sheltered from homophobia.
It’s a stupid term that is based on an antiquated mindset where Asian people are not creative and cannot invent anything of substance; we are only able to poorly imitate what the West develops. It needs to die.
Also, I’ve been using and customizing the X Window-based desktop for 25 years and I’m not sure that the term “ricing” was ever used anywhere before Reddit and even then only within the past decade or so. Let it die with that culture.
I’m with you especially on that last part. My most insane privately racist lug-mate called it modding or customization. Even in the windows shell hacking scene no one described it like that.
I do like using “tuning” though, fond memories of import tuner magazine and my dearly departed first car and first computer.
If you cant put a set of rays on your pc can you even call it done? 😤
Now they need to just find an Asian person saying it’s not a big deal so they can dismiss your comment.
Asian here and rice eater here.
Language doesn’t work in absolute way, it could change its meaning all the time.
It’s better to regain is neutral meaning instead of letting the racist weaponize neutral word.
Also, this mindset is also Western centric, go to Asia and people in Linux and car community simply use the word without any negative connotation.
Edit: By doing this, you’re no different from imperial government who tries to make one standard of morality, which in fact further hurts Asian living in Asia. And as Indonesian, I’m hurt with your statement. Let me regain the neutral meaning. Don’t speak for us.
Ok, Asian here and rice eater here also and I think the right way to respond to racist cliches is with hostility, same way we ought to respond to Nazism and other forms of fascism. if you want to reclaim the word, fine whatever. But you’re drawing a false equivalence between westerners trying to self-criticize their use of chauvinistic language, and the imperial governments that enforce that chauvinism in the first place (wtf?)
westerners trying to self-criticize their use of chauvinistic language
That’s the problem.
Westerner often force this rules towards everyone.
Like that one time someone got banned for using “nasi goreng” as their username with reasoning “it has similarity with Nazism” despite it’s on international group.
Or when Asian English group that usually co-exist within recognition of different culture suddenly has Westerner that policing everything about language. “Oh this is so offensive towards Asian”, while no one in group never know or even used the word in negative connotation.
While in reality because SEAsian are multi-language speaker, we just self moderate in case of potential language conflict, like budak in Malay is children, but in Indonesian means slave.
The thing is you aren’t the audience. Discussion about anti-Asian racism in English tends to be focused on the experiences of e.g. Asian-American people and on the racist abuse they get from white people.
It’s actually that exact kind of self-moderation, surely? “hang on, doesn’t this word suck, let’s not use it”?
Thank you for making this post. The number of times I’ve seen the term used here lately has been bothering me.
ITT:
The "pick-me"s are almost as bad
How the fresh fuck is this even a thing still? Even back in the 90’s I heard dudes making gags about “Uncle Ben Hot Rods”. You know. RICE IT UP!
GET IT? They’re shitty race cars made by a shitty race who only makes cheap stuff!
🤮
Yeah I’m actually amazed people are still using this term. Figures it’s about computers though lol, of course the antisocial nerds are stronger holdouts than car enthusiasts.
Yes please, I agree.
I wasn’t aware of this, thank you for posting
100% agree!!
I’ve never used the term and the first time I’ve heard about it even without knowing the origins/meaning it already was clear to be a pejorative term.
The excuse the mods in the old r/unixporn subreddit was that the term was broadly accepted by the community.
Well guess what we are not reddit and one of the reasons I left reddit was because I was tired of being in communities like that. We can do better, let’s shape our communities with the right values and not just carry on a legacy that should’ve died with reddit itself.
As an east Asian that eats rice every day, I must say that I don’t consider this term racist at all. The meanings of words shift over time. For example, nice used to mean “foolish, ignorant, frivolous, senseless,” but now it means “kind, thoughtful.” Gay used to mean “lighthearted, joyous,” then a slang for homosexuals, and ultimately became the term with which many homosexuals choose to describe themselves. Rice may have been a racist term, but now what it means is “to extensively customize one’s desktop system to one’s liking, especially Linux systems.” It no longer is racist.
Linguist here. Totally agree the term should stop being used. As a practical concern, it would be easier to get people to stop using it if there were another term that was a drop-in replacement.
Yeah, we can say “customize” as the verb, but what about the noun? Sharing “customizations” doesn’t really refer to the same kind of DE-specific customization as the other term.
Is there any such word in usage? If not, can we coin one and just start dropping it on forums?
Hi Linguist, which side of the linguist camp you are?; the one that thinks the meaning of the language is fix and people should be following it or the one that let people decides how the language works and let it change overtime?
There aren’t really two sides of the linguist camp. That language changes naturally over time is well documented.
And new coinages are part of that process. ;)
Discussions like this always bring me back to one thing…can a word itself be racist? Is it racist to use a word if it’s not being said with racist intent? It’s reminiscent of the gimp debacle…if a words use isn’t intended to offend it’s honestly beyond me how anyone could find it offensive. Are we supposed to ban every single word that has the slightest history of being used in an offensive fashion? Feel like we’d have a really long list if we did that.
Thanks for the heads up. I tried looking up the origins of the term once long back when I first heard it but could never find it after a search. This again makes me iterate how Racist and White-centric the Internet is in general, which is observable to me as a person from Assam.
Another term people should avoid is the «soyboy» meme term. It is also a racially prejudiced word against Asians.
- https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/soy_boy, Soy consumption is high in many Asian countries. (There is no scientific evidence for any correlation between soy consumtion and feminization for anyone curious to know.)
Removed by mod
lmao like moths to a flame
@dessalines@lemmy.ml there’s a lot of cryptofash in here begging the question that need to be banned, not merely have their comments removed
