Wow, Twitter.

[conuly]

They've still yet to do anything about their infestation of Neo-Nazis... but apparently they're right on top of banning Jewish users for saying "goy" and "goyim."

Wow.

Shows where their priorities are, doesn't it!

Comments

[chelseagirl]

WTActualF? I had never heard of "goy" being considered offensive. When I taught a few classes at Yeshiva U. I used to jokingly refer to myself as "the goy in front of the room."

[conuly]

I mean, any term for a group of people can be offensive, but as Jews don't have any sort of meaningful collective power throughout the West it's not a term with any force behind it even if it IS being used offensively.

[elf]

A few years ago, shweta_narayan had a post that explained the "insult" in terms like goy: Let's talk about category structure and oppression!

A[n] albatross is more like a robin than a robin is like an albatross; a queer WOC is more like a cishet white man than a cishet white man is like a queer WOC. Which characters in stories count as "relatable"?

Everyone is expected to relate to a cis straight white anglophone American man. We're all like them, they're just (default, category-central) people after all! But they're not like us. We're the albatrosses, here. How can the poor robins be expected to relate to us? This is why they think it's so ludicrous that they should be expected to read about marginalized characters (who are nothing like them!!) but think it's normal and fine that marginalized people should be expected to read about category-central characters.

Terms like "goyim" or "cis men" or even "white people" - which define an "other" that happens to be part of the default-assumption category-central group - automatically push them out of the central focus. These terms make them not the default, because the default doesn't need a label. The supposed insult isn't in how the word is used or whether it's derogatory; the fact that it implies they might need a label at all is considered insulting.

We don't need to mention "I saw a winged bird" or "I have a human friend." Bird implies wings; friend implies humanity - you only need to mention exceptions to these. Saying, "I spoke to some goyim," some non-Jewish people, implies that people are not innately non-Jewish. It implies that "not Jewish" is not a default trait--that they are not part of the central norm for "people."

None of this explains why Twitter is banning the term; that's because Twitter supports right-wing white supremacists. But the central/default categories thing is why the racists get upset over it; they hate even the implication that their identity is not the assumed default for all humans.