I interpreted it more as (like the title implies) Jack’s inherent racism. Due to the type of company he usually surrounds himself with, the only time he ever hears the term “Puerto Rican” is in a negative context, in which someone is using the term as a way to insult someone or complain or something. Jack does not have a diverse enough friend circle to actually have ever heard someone use the term “Puerto Rican” to refer to someone’s ethnicity without making some sort of judgement on the person.
This happens with the word “disabled” too, so much so that there was a whole #SayTheWord thing about trying to educate people a couple of years back about it not being a negative word or a pejorative, just a factual one, and why euphemisms (“special”, “differently abled”, “handicapped”, “handicapable”, and so on and so forth) are infantilising, othering, and otherwise harmful to the community, but it went about as well as you’d expect…
I interpreted it more as (like the title implies) Jack’s inherent racism. Due to the type of company he usually surrounds himself with, the only time he ever hears the term “Puerto Rican” is in a negative context, in which someone is using the term as a way to insult someone or complain or something. Jack does not have a diverse enough friend circle to actually have ever heard someone use the term “Puerto Rican” to refer to someone’s ethnicity without making some sort of judgement on the person.
Isn’t that just racism? I thought internalized racism when minorities unconsciously assimilate to the racism they are subjected to.
This happens with the word “disabled” too, so much so that there was a whole #SayTheWord thing about trying to educate people a couple of years back about it not being a negative word or a pejorative, just a factual one, and why euphemisms (“special”, “differently abled”, “handicapped”, “handicapable”, and so on and so forth) are infantilising, othering, and otherwise harmful to the community, but it went about as well as you’d expect…