Wew lads. It's really late and there are a lot of ideas running around here. I'll chime in with my two cents, but this post is gonna be pretty sloppy so bear with me.
Firstly,
I am not your friendly, neighborhood progressive. If your previous view of me was that, erase that from your head right now. I do not care, intrinsically, about minorities, or women, or people, or racism, or anything like that. It is not part of my rhetoric to convince people that these things are morally bad, it is not part of my characters to be inherently concerned with these things.
I believe that feminism and equal opportunities for minorities tend to produce better outcomes worldwide. This is why I end up at many of the same positions that progressives end up.
I am repeating this one more time, my internal thought process is not motivated by any pure, morally virtuous desire to help people or make people feel better.
Now that we have that out of the way, let's talk about homophobic and racial slurs.
From a personal point of view, I don't think any word, inherently, should be off limits or out of bounds. There are times when using extremely vulgar language can achieve a great effect.
This, so far, should be undeniable.
Does racist language make a person racist? Does homophobic language make a person homophobic? Not necessarily, as much as it might upset some of you to consider this.
A person using homophobic language is not necessarily homophobic, though they oftentimes are unintentionally spreading homophobia.
This seems like a meaningless distinction, but I believe there's a great deal of difference between telling someone they are unintentionally empowering homophobic people vs being a homophobic person. Maybe you don't care, but to the person receiving the message, it matters, trust me.
As a public figure who lives in a society I have to be mindful of how I speak. Ultimately the way my message is interpreted by a viewer is my responsibility, or at least I believe I have some due diligence to ensure people aren't taking away the wrong message from my speech. This is why I generally avoid things like "faggot" or other types of heavy racial humor, and it's why I've been trying to edit out things like "retarded" and "autistic" from my vocabulary. I don't like the idea that people watching me could get an idea that I am homophobic in a way they might be, and I don't like the idea that racist people could listen to me and find companionship in what I'm saying, or some kind of affirmation in their horrible worldviews. I've written about this more extensively
here, if you care to read.
Do I say offensive jokes privately that I would never say on stream? You better believe it. But why, what's the difference?
I have never much been concerned with the words themselves, but rather the thoughts/ideas they can spread.
A community that openly uses the word "faggot"
probably feels unwelcoming because there are still a lot of gamers (and, larger, elements of society) that still act incredibly homophobic. If a friend of mine uses "faggot" in some insulting way in a private setting, I don't generally think twice about them saying it. If a stranger uses that word, I'm very uncomfortable around them because I don't know if they're actually a homophobic person.
These distinctions may be meaningless to you, and to some extent you can argue that using racial/homophobic slurs in
ANY context should be off limits, and I'm fine with tackling those arguments. I generally don't like being called "racist" or "homophobic" because I believe my body of work (can u call a utube channel that tho) speaks for itself, but if you believe that my actions help to spread homophobic thought, maybe you don't care to make the distinction.
I'm sleeping and I'll answer what I can when I wake up, and maybe even proofread/edit this if there are major fuckups.
Stay safe my children.
