The main arguments in (straight, white men’s) defence of PewDiePie seems to consist of one or more of the following:

a) words only have the power you give them, so stop taking offence

b) he didn’t mean n*gger as in black person, he meant n*gger as in stupid idiot

c) he did it in the heat of the moment and he didn’t really mean it

These arguments are fuelled by the fact that some who criticize PewDiePie make the mistake of jumping from “he said a racist thing” to “therefore he’s a rotten racist” to “therefore, everything he’s done is tainted by him being a rotten racist and he should lose everything”. By going to that extreme, those criticizers evoke the opposite extreme.

To me, it’s very obvious how flawed the logic in the “PewDiePie is a horrible person and should lose everything” extreme is, and I feel no need to pick that apart further. However, the other extreme has arguments that I have struggled with in the past, and so I’d like to pick them apart. I am not comfortable with using n*gger and it’s not my place to reclaim it, so I’m going to use faggot as example henceforth. N*gger and faggot are very similar from this perspective; both are slurs, both get the same arguments from defenders of people who use them, and being a gay man I have personal experience of faggot as a slur.

The first part, “words only have the power you give them” assumes that the person objecting to the use of the word took personal offence. It also repeats a logical fallacy, that the burden of communication lays on the receiver alone. This is akin to waving your hand in front of someone’s face saying “the air is free” — you put all the responsibility on the other person because you’re not doing anything that’s illegal. But words have the power that both the sender and the receiver agree upon. You would never use faggot against someone unless you thought it has a negative connotation. So in using it as a slur, you give the word the power of being an insult. You extend an invitation to perceive the word offensive, as it were. If someone is offended, you can’t wash your hands saying “it’s their fault”, just as little as you can say that you didn’t break the law when selling illegal drugs to someone because it’s the buyers fault for buying.

This brings us to the second argument: “I didn’t mean faggot as in male who has a sexual and romantic interest in men, I meant faggot as in stupid fucking jerk”. The problem with this is that you know what you want to say: that someone is a stupid fucking jerk. But that doesn’t sound as a big enough insult, so you take a word that conveys the message in a shorter, more precise and more forceful way. You don’t see yourself as a homophobe, and in your head faggot really means stupid fucking jerk. I believe this is why (almost) only straight people defend this use of “gay” and “faggot” and only white people defend the use of “n*gger”: they really don’t understand this connection. They cannot experience faggot or n*gger as a pejorative description of who I am because they are not gay or black. To them, this is a slur describing what you do and so they think that people who react are just being too sensitive.

But faggot has long been a pejorative description of gay men, and still is. So it has two meanings, a derogatory term for a male who has a sexual and romantic interest in men and stupid fucking jerk. The second meaning is an extension of the first. If faggot traditionally meant “awesome and cool person I look up to”, you would not use it against an opponent you want to hurt. By using it in the meaning stupid fucking jerk you are preserving the negative connotation of faggot, even if it’s not your intention.

This brings us back to the assumption that I take personal offence when a person in a public setting uses faggot as shorthand for either of the meanings. I don’t. I know it says nothing about me and everything about that person. But I have had 40 years to mature, grow up and realize these things. As a closeted 15 year old, these words did hurt, especially when they come from someone I look up to (which I think a lot of young people do in PewDiePie’s case) because it tells me that this person also associates faggots with something negative.

Now for the last argument, that he did it in the heat of the moment and he didn’t really mean it (which in one case was very creatively phrased as “I think that the brain is way too complicated for us to understand his motivation to use the word”). This is based on the assumption that initial reactions are not the True You, that the True You is the one you are when you are composed, have had time to think and react. This is of course a fallacy, that initial reaction is as much “I” as my reaction ten seconds later. Research shows that it takes 6 seconds for the initial, more basic impulse to subside and leave room for a more directed and controlled response. In other words, in some situations it may take six seconds for our empathy to kick in. But that doesn’t mean that we cannot be held responsible for that initial reaction. That initial reaction is a learned and practiced one, albeit not consciously in most cases. It’s okay to become angry or afraid, but it’s not okay to punch someone in the face or scream at someone. I think these people are defending the right to feel angry in this particular situation, but end up defending acting on that anger in a way that hurts us a community more than it hurts the target of the slur.