Date: Sat, 19 Oct 2002 14:50:13 -0400
From: shawn wilbur <swilbur-AT-wcnet.org>
Subject: Re: moorish temple




Maldoror wrote:

> you're missing the point entirely. arabs, in talking
> to the better half who is arab, (who grew up in an
> arab country, who would have as much experience being
> called a moor by outsiders as a black would have being
> called a nigger by outsiders), equate moor as being
> equivalent to nigger, especially considering how it
> came about and the context that the term was born
> into.

You realize, don't you that the previous paragraph is incoherent. "the better
half who is arab"? I'm guessing this *isn't* a colloquial reference to
inter-ethnic marriage, but that's about as far as i can parse things.

> american is not a derogatory term. moor/moorish is.
> turkish is not a derogatory term, moor/moorish is.

Actually, even standard-white american dictionaries acknowledge that "turk"
*can* be both a potentially inappropriate generalizing term - referring to
all muslims - and a slur - referring to brutality and authoritarianism. And,
certainly, "america" and "american" are regularly used in ways which are
derogatory, both within the boundaries of the US and outside them. Certainly,
"moor" *can* be a derogatory term, but (even if your defense above was more
coherent), the self-identification as "moors" and "moorish" by folks like the
Moorish Science Temple adherents seem to torpedo any simple statement about
what a word "is."

People are the source of meaning, and they seldom arrive at uniform meanings
of *any* word. If you want to talk about "anti-progressive" moves - and
apparently you do - you might think about how "anarchistic" a tendency to
reduce individual's meanings down to some forced consensus is.

-shawn