>The first incident was several months ago in a PR meeting about sensitive words. Several people afterwards told him how inappropriate and hurtful his use of the N-word was, and Jonathan apologised to those that had been in the meeting. We hoped this was an awful anomaly never to be repeated.
Guy slipped up, apologized, and was warned. Makes sense to me.
> Three months later he spoke to a meeting of our Black Employees @ Netflix group and did not bring it up, which was understood by many in the meeting to mean he didn’t care and didn’t accept accountability for his words.
Why was he expected to bring up unintentional mistakes made months ago? At what point can someone be allowed to let bygones be bygones?
> For non-Black people, the word should not be spoken as there is almost no context in which it is appropriate or constructive (even when singing a song or reading a script). There is not a way to neutralize the emotion and history behind the word in any context. The use of the phrase “N-word” was created as a euphemism, and the norm, with the intention of providing an acceptable replacement and moving people away from using the specific word. When a person violates this norm, it creates resentment, intense frustration, and great offense for many.
Perhaps I’m not coming from the same cultural background as Reed (or his PR advisers) I don’t really understand how the mere utterance of a word, without the intention to offend or even to use it as anything other than a descriptor for the word itself, can be this offensive. For my part, I’m trans, and I don’t feel “resentment, intense frustration, and great offense” when I hear people speaking slurs referentially, as long as they’re trying to refer to the words themselves as opposed to using them as labels for a person or group.
I would find it very helpful if someone can explain this to me.