liquornspice:

strugglingtobeheard:

karnythia:

bakethatlinguist:

strugglingtobeheard:

All you have to do is play Xbox with a black avatar or a “black voice” and hear the word nigger over 50 times in a week. My room mate plays xbox360 regularly and he is very good. He plays a lot of madden and first person shooters like halo and call of duty. But why is it…

(Warning: Children, and some adults, foul language will be repeated.)

Not so long ago, I took phone calls for Sony PlayStation and also answered the emails that customers would send to us. Most people have no idea how often things like this occur for a lot of the online games. Not just Sony or Microsoft. And even better, not!, I would have to reset passwords or research hacked accounts. Some people thought that it’d be a funny idea to make the answer to their secret question, “Where were you born?” “in my bitch of a mother’s pussy.” Or their actual passwords would be “nigger +/- bitch.” (Or any combination of ethnic slurs with female-bashing pejoratives.)

I’ve worked hard to forget most of this, because it got to the point where I hated to read these emails or do password resets. One day, just about every account that I had to correct used epithets for non-white and non-male people. Normally, I don’t take this to heart, but it was account after account after account. I had to actually talk to these people without sounding like I wanted to slap them. Still, I don’t know what look I had on my face, but my manager (who’s caucasian) came past to look at my screen and as soon as she saw what I was looking at, she asked me if I was ok and how often I see things like this on these accounts. (She knew that this occurred, but not at the rate that it had been at that time.) I told her that we all see it quite often, but I’d been seeing it all day and can I take a 15 minute break, because I feel frustrated? (She gave me a 3 hour break! She was awesome! I went home and took a nap.)

When I came back to work, I’d found out that she had checked with everyone else in our department and found that they had seen the same things. The elders in our dept were really upset by it; none of them were Af. Am. if that matters for any of you reading this. The sad non-irony of this is that half the accounts that I worked on that day alone, were made by kids; the other half of the accounts were made by adults. I signed a confidentiality agreement, so I can’t tell you how we dealt with those accounts, but I can tell you that I had a blast “correcting” them for violations of the TOS.

Oh, yeah! ^^

Welp…

Wow. That makes the inner workings of this shit sound almost even scarier.

Never forget the fact people enjoy racism and sexism. People engage in it for pleasure.

This shit is not only disgusting, it is poisonous. It degrades the people around it. Even those who would not normally engage in such language acclimate to hearing it and it loses it’s power.

One of the people I am the closest with is a gamer and despite being perfectly aware that I am queer, and being pro gay rights, will use the word ‘gay’ in a negative manner. It’s like a stab each time I hear it and although we’ve talked about it, the environments he is in make it not seem like so big of a deal, I suspect. I struggle with this influence because I see it in him and his friends and while I know they are good people I feel awful being around them whenever I hear the word used like that.

I’m just glad the racial slurs don’t crop up as well, I think that would be more than I could bear.

(via thecoolmoniker)