To avoid derailing the Guidelines thread wrestling with a specific part of the Guidelines. I thought we could move this discussion to its own thread.
When someone uses a word that you feel is a slur during a conversation that you are part of, how should you handle it and what do you expect of staff when you report it to them?
If the slur is addressed to you by someone who intends it to be derogatory, then you've got a pretty clear case for the Report Abuse button.
But what about the cases when someone isn't speaking to you or even directly about you specificly but uses an offensive term? And continues to use it after you ask them to stop?
When someone describes something as "that's so ghetto". When someone says "that bitch had it coming". When someone says "I'm going to be a gypsy on Halloween". When someone says "that's so geh". What can we as a community do to help make folks comfortable?
Who is responsible for which parts of the strategy to handle a situation like this?
Long ago and far away, one of my elderly relatives continued to refer to African-Americans as "colored" long after general society had begun to use the term "black". She was using what had been respectful terminology, but the world changed around her, and she innocently thought she was being polite, even as people around her cringed.
What do you do in that situation? What if the polite term you (and most of the rest of society) are currently using is pointed out to you as a slur by a member of the target group? Do you become someone who leads the education and change? Do you bite your tongue? Or do you defend the current, non-hateful use of the word?