Racists Are Recruiting. Watch Your White Sons
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I mean, look at the geek community. How many jokes are just references to common patterns to signal that we're insiders? I mean, Monty Python was entertaining, but not THAT entertaining.
Kids aren't knowingly repeating offensive stuff with the intention to get a "rise" out of people that care about it (at least, not 99.9% of them). Kids are repeating what they're exposed to. Something encountered once or twice gets amplified into "normal", and soon it IS the new normal. To turn your position: 99.9% of the time people don't think about what they're saying.
I've experienced this myself - I'm notably socially liberal when it comes to things like civil rights and acceptance of diverse sexual identities and practices, yet I found myself doing "did you just assume my gender" jokes without thinking about the underlying meaning just because I was passively exposed to it. I even found myself trying to rationalize how it wasn't offensive - using logic I hadn't ever considered in the first place - to avoid admitting that my behavior was part of the problem.
It turns out that thinking about the impact of our words and taking responsibility for the impact we create is hard, and requires effort. If "being an adult" is tricky for adults to pull off, why should we magically expect kids to be any good at it?
Like the Yeti, nobody has actually ever met one. But, some "journalists" keep reporting that they've, like, totally heard that someone has seen them a bunch, fer shure...
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/08/new-york-times-m...