Very, very tangentally related to something Doc Lemming was talking about

[james_davis_nicoll]

What's the correct response for a superhero who discovers their crime-fighting name, selected in all innocence and without malice, happens to be an ethnic slur?

Come to think of it, this situation has come up before [1]; the late Mark Gruenwald decided to give the new Captain America's sidekick the same superhero name the original Cap's orginal side-kick used, Gruenwald being unaware that there could be anything problematic about calling an African American man "Bucky". I know they changed the name but I don't recall how it was handled in-story.

1: Note that Marvel also once named a superhero after a combination of cocaine hydrochloride mixed with morphine sulfate; presumably Speedball himself was unaware of the other meanings of his name. In his defense, he was just a teenager.

Comments

[derekl1963.livejournal.com]

"Buck" significant? Hardly. I grew up in the South and the only places I've encountered it is in GWTW and conversations like this.

[nihilistic-kid.livejournal.com]

Well, if some random Internet person says it isn't significant, who is anyone else to say otherwise?

[derekl1963.livejournal.com]

Well, since some random internet person said it was significant in the place - what would be your point?

[nihilistic-kid.livejournal.com]

And you objected based on your experience as a random Internet person, so you clearly think mere experience is sufficient to make declarations and have no grounds to object.

Amazingly enough though, it actually isn't all that hard to find people calling black men "big black buck[s]", even in the media, more recently than Gone With The Wind.

[erikagillian.livejournal.com]

I believe they used it in Blazing Saddles, one of my main sources for What Not to Say. Along with that song from Hair. I grew up in Berkeley, I never heard them in person.