Yes the word gringo is very offensive!

Telling people to “get over themselves” seems to me to ask others to share our personal sense of what is and what isn’t offensive: it’s about one attempting to enforce one’s own perspective on others. Of course, we all also have the right to actively offend others by calling them names or labeling them through ridicule (e.g., “pearl clutchers”), but no one should be able to say “you shouldn’t be offended by my ridicule.”

I personally wish to re-invigorate the insulting term “fatcats” to refer to powerful millionaires: but I think it would be wrong for me to claim that no one should be insulted if I call them a fatcat, because their status as a powerful millionaire makes them immune to insult words.

I have never felt personally insulted by “gringo,” but I’m not ready to say that no one should be, just because many white people enjoy privilege.

There’s a big difference between calling a privileged group names while discussing a huge issue for a less-privileged group, and just flinging insults to put someone down. I fault NPR for giving this BS any air.

gxm17, take a look at (or listen to) Hernandez’s whole article. It’s not a news story, but rather an opinion/perspective piece.

I understand that it was an opinion piece but IMO it was presented in a news/journalism venue. NPR is, presumably, supposed to be notch or two (or three) above, say, Fox News. When speaking one’s mind in a professional setting, I’m of the opinion that it’s best to leave out racial slang.

thefrogprincess is right (again!): race, like sex, is disappeared in the analysis of these events, because we have normalized and tacitly accepted white male gun violence.

That’s precisely what I said: most folks are, unfortunately, just not interested in because angry white guys with guns are pretty much our national mascots. Not only is this sort of violence normalized, it’s often revered. There are plenty of people who are boisterously proud of the “fact” that this country was established by angry white men with guns, and then there are the rest of us who either quietly or begrudgingly accept that perspective. IMO, it’s a shame that Ms. Hernandez alienated people that would have benefited from her perspective.

Hence, when I moved to Texas, I discovered that people were sometimes uncertain of whether I were ‘Mexican’ or ‘Anglo’. (I speak Spanish and have non-blond, non-blue-eyed features.) Once they established that my family never came from Mexico, they were satisfied that I was Anglo, even though I have never, ever identified as such. (And back in Hometown, people would think I’d gone around the bend even to use such an identifier!) Scots-Americans in Texas identified as such only on Burns Night; the rest of the time, they were Anglo, even if it pained their kin back in Scotland.

I assume that the racial categories in Arizona, another part of Greater Mexico, are pretty similar in nature.