UPI:
Public information officers for the City of Seattle have been advised to stop using the terms “citizen” and “brown bag” — as in brown-bag lunch — saying they could be offensive to some city residents.
Elliott Bronstein of the Office for Civil Rights circulated the memo encouraging government employees to avoid using the potentially offensive terms.
Instead of “brown-bag lunch,” he suggests “sack lunch” or, for some inexplicable reason “lunch-and-learn,” as in, “do you want to go out with us, or are you lunch-and-learning it?”
He defended the recommendation on the radio, saying the term “brown bag” has a sordid history.
“For a lot of particularly African American community members, the phrase brown bag does bring up associations with the past when a brown bag was actually used, I understand, to determine if people’s skin color was light enough to allow admission to an event or to come into a party that was being held in a private home.”
As for “citizen,” Bronstein notes there are many legal residents of Seattle who are not citizens.
“A lot of people who live in Seattle aren’t citizens, but they are residents,” said Bronstein. “They are legal residents of the United States and they are residents of Seattle. They pay taxes and if we use a term like citizens in common use, then it doesn’t include a lot of folks.”
It is more than a touch ironic that it was BLACK people who performed the ”brown bag test,” not whites.
It refers to a ritual once practiced by certain African-American sororities and fraternities (like at Howard U.) who would not let anyone into the group whose skin tone was darker than a paper bag.
See:
So, it’s sort of like if Seattle told blacks to stop using the N-word.
Heh.
Ain’t gonna happen.
I wonder if the Brown Bag restaurants in Kirkland and Redmond consider the words offensive.
We have millions of people out of work. And little prospects. We have millions upon millions of people on welfare-unemployment-food stamps-disability. We have an economy that is in shambles. We have a president who is dividing the country, who wants to be King. We have a Congress that cannot stand up for this country and do what is best for the COUNTRY. We have a out of Control Government. We have a Government plagued with scandal. I don’t need to go on…
OMG!! Exactly WHO are these people that comes up with this dribble?? What exactly are we becoming…??? I mean, – really?
DEFINITION
citizen |ˈsitizən; -sən| (abbr.: cit.)
noun
a legally recognized subject or national of a state or commonwealth, either native or naturalized.
So, california (not capitalized on purpose) wants to change the definition of “citizen” to mean anyone who enters california.
DEFINITION
anyone who leaves california for good
A person who wants to work for themselves, and not for the illegals, or the state.
@FAITH7: #3
I started asking questions like this when obama RAN for president the first time. I’m glad to hear more people are asking the same questions. Why weren’t they asking these questions five years ago?