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.”
Critics say it’s political correctness gone mad, and liken it to recent efforts to use gender-neutral language like “first-year” for “freshman” and “handwriting” for “penmanship.”Read more:
Mr. Bronstein, ARE YOU FUCKING RETARDED? oops I meant Mentally Defective or Deficant or whatever the new PC word is.
Who get’s offended by the terms BROWN BAG or CITIZEN. Let me tell you something I often brown bagged/packed my lunch; is that offensive too? ‘ I wouldn’t want to offend a drug mule or someone that is carrying a gun by the word packed’ thats how stupid this sounds, at school and ever since and I even went to school with several Black students who would brown bag it and there where never any riots or fights because of it In fact because you said this when I go to the store tommorrow i’m just going to ask random people if they are offended.
As far as the word CITIZEN. i’m not even going to go there. shera~
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