My father was in the army for the whole of WW2 and was in India, the Middle East, South Africa and Italy. He called brown people wogs, as did all the adult men I knew as a child (I’m 62). I think the word isn’t used much now, it’s very offensive I suppose - at least as offensive as nigger, I would imagine. Italians were called wops; my f…
My father was in the army for the whole of WW2 and was in India, the Middle East, South Africa and Italy. He called brown people wogs, as did all the adult men I knew as a child (I’m 62). I think the word isn’t used much now, it’s very offensive I suppose - at least as offensive as nigger, I would imagine. Italians were called wops; my father loved the Italian prisoners of war, and learnt Italian from them. He wasn’t at all racist and tried to help the very poor Pakistani men who worked in the slaughter houses in our hometown by giving them our grown-out-of clothes for their children. I will always remember him talking about one of these men, ‘poor Ali,’ with great compassion. This was in the late 1960s; Ali’s descendants still wear Pakistani dress and still live in self-imposed segregation; since around 2000 the women have started to wear Arab-Muslim dress, head to toe black, even face covering, rather than the colourful saris they wore back in the 60s.
Yea, it is a bit frustrating how normal short names for groups, which are usually not inherently offensive, drift into being considered offensive over time for seemingly no other reason than someone used it in a negative context once.
My father was in the army for the whole of WW2 and was in India, the Middle East, South Africa and Italy. He called brown people wogs, as did all the adult men I knew as a child (I’m 62). I think the word isn’t used much now, it’s very offensive I suppose - at least as offensive as nigger, I would imagine. Italians were called wops; my father loved the Italian prisoners of war, and learnt Italian from them. He wasn’t at all racist and tried to help the very poor Pakistani men who worked in the slaughter houses in our hometown by giving them our grown-out-of clothes for their children. I will always remember him talking about one of these men, ‘poor Ali,’ with great compassion. This was in the late 1960s; Ali’s descendants still wear Pakistani dress and still live in self-imposed segregation; since around 2000 the women have started to wear Arab-Muslim dress, head to toe black, even face covering, rather than the colourful saris they wore back in the 60s.
Yea, it is a bit frustrating how normal short names for groups, which are usually not inherently offensive, drift into being considered offensive over time for seemingly no other reason than someone used it in a negative context once.