Ponder Place

Brennon wrote:

So you are just getting into bed, you are cozy, exhausted and just about ready to doze off. Then all of the sudden your phone beeps. You open it up to find that you have a text message from an old friend, you think,” Oh, how nice, I wonder what this blast from the past has to say?” You read the message, it is one word, and not a nice word at that (”N****r”). How do you react? What do you do? What kind of message do you think they are trying to send or get across to you?

I would think of this more as a gesture.

You note that this message was not a nice message. However, this is all a matter of perspective. Perhaps because method of message delivery was textual in nature, the tone of the message was lost in translation (more accurately lost in transmission).

Also, the offensiveness of this message depends on a few other factors. Is the sender white, and are you black? Is the sender black, and you are white? Is the sender black, and are you black? Is the sender white, and are you white?

These are things that could affect the stereotypical intention of the message being sent.

Given each of the above mentioned situations (wb/bw/bb/ww).

I think its safe to say that the message being sent was a way of saying hello. This is a conclusion of elimination. Here is why. Usually when the “N” word is used to offend someone; it is used with a certain tone, and spoken a certain way. And because this message was being sent over SMS (text messaging), the sender would obviously not be able to utilize this extended style of communication. Knowing this, it would only make sense to include additional vulgarities or threats in order to make the statement or message clear.

We can conclude that this was indeed a friendly message, simply because it was not packaged with any additional weight.

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