Ambrya wrote:
One day we went to the San Diego zoo and on the way back, got caught in a traffic jam and had people in uniform look in at us through our car windows, which the Californian-aunt called a "beaner check." The next day, I was talking about to incident to my other aunt (the one who was raising me) and used that phrase, and she got very angry with me and eventually informed that the term was a racial slur.
Now, had I not had that conversation, it's possible that I could have gone years, even decades, using the word "beaner" without understanding its racial implications. Would that mean I was racist against Latinos? No, it wouldn't. It would simply mean I was using a word whose connotations I didn't understand.
Reminds me of a situation with a few of my friends/cousins when we were all kids. We used to play D&D back then, and somewhere along the line they had picked up a term to use for when you abuse the rules to gain "free" experience points. They'd use this term anytime they were able to defeat some bad guys or complete some other task in a way that didn't actually involve much effort or risk. They called the exp gained in said manner "Jew Points".
They had no clue what the word "jew" meant. Nor did I back then. Certainly, they had no clue that it was offensive.
I think that many many uses of derogatory terms tend to fall into those catagories. In the same way that nursery rhymes seem to pass from kid to kid without any adult intervention, these terms also pass as well. And unless those kids use the term in front of an adult and that adult corrects them, they'll simply never know (until they get much older typically). In some cases, they may use the term even much later in life without realizing it (like the Macaca incident for example).
Heh. For the record, I'd always learned it as "tiger" as well. Never knew there'd ever been a different word in there...