ace_of_something said:
Okay, so i'm not Australian and have never been. But could someone explain to me the connotation of the word 'abo' i understand it's a derogatory racial epithet for an aborigine.
Here's what i don't get:
In the game dead island they fling the word around in a few places. One quest sticks out where a man wants you to "go kill that abo bastard" and the introduction for the character 'purna' shows that people called he a 'half-abo' in a derogatory manner.
I don't get why people aren't up in arms about this. The world got mad in resident evil for killing 'non whites' or in deus ex because a black person speaks poorly. So on and So on.
Yet this bothers no one.
I'm kind of confused. On a scale of 'offensiveness' where does that term fall in to? It is like the dreaded 'n-word' or more like... i dunno calling someone a 'brit' it's just descriptive and context is everything?
To put it bluntly it's not offensive, it's just shorthand.
In the end when it comes to allegations of racism it's all about how much attention someone can get by making a stink. A person getting "upset" by "Abo" or "Jap" or whatever else on it's own is only going to happen if they have something to gain by it. "Dead Island" isn't a popular franchise and doesn't get the same level of attention that trying to make racist allegations about a series like "Resident Evil" does for example.
On top of that, I think part of the issue is that Americans don't seem to realize that our standards of political correctness don't apply everywhere, and that at the same time nations appeal to those standards, we're also kind of being mocked for our stupidity (which I won't get into).
Like it or not throughout a lot of the world people don't have any real issue calling things like they are, and calling a backwards culture backwards, or annoying people annoying, and trying to take action where they see problems based on group. All comments from aussies on these forums about what aussies are like and what they talk about have to be taken with a grain of salt given the extreme left wing audience here. If you've ever sat down on game chat with some aussies and listened to them talk about some of the odder political situations down there, they do seem to a little less willing to walk on eggshells in saying exactly what they think and explaining why they think that to confused Americans.
While it's been a while, when it comes to the Aboriginals issues I've heard people go off about are how they have done things like build a giant eyesore of a "tent embassay" outside the Austrlian parliment, refusing any kind of proper office or building access to make some kind of a deliberatly obnoxious point, then we have brushfires which have been directly attributed to Aboriginals insisting on holding tribal rituals at times and in enviroments when it's not safe to do so. A few of the bigger and nastier fires in fairly recent memory apparently having been tracked back towards "Abos" building bonfires in unsafe, dry enviroments and causing tons of deaths and property damage as a result, then there is this whole thing about gas laws getting ridiculously involuted because the "Abos" like to huff gasoline fumes, and oddly enough like to chill gasoline so they can sniff cold fumes, leading to attempts to ban gas stations from chilling gasoline and selling it to aborigitals to huff because then they have a tendency to stagger around and do all kinds of idiotic things which end with things like automobile accidents.
Now some people are probably going "whoa, Therumancer, your the most hateful person I've ever heard", but really this isn't my issue, I have no first hand knowlege of it, it's just the stuff I've heard Aussies go off about, sometimes at great length. Some of the crazier things... like huffing chilled petrol... I had to look up due to the "WTF" factor, and I must say that I was shocked to find out it's true (and incidently Encyclopedia Dramatica seems to have since used that paticular point as a focus in their article on Aboriginals... in their own tasteful and dignified way of course).
If anything I get the impression that we here in the US are considered part of the problem because largely due to our efforts through the UN and such, Australia can't deal with the problem due to all the "rights of exploited indiginous people".
The point here is that I don't think "Abo" is inherantly insulting, but it can (like any word) be made that way depending on how you say it. I just don't think Australians in
general really give a crap, and if that comes through in certain video games, that's accuracy more than anything. To be honest I don't think it's actual racism (as in "these people are inferior" on a genetic level), so much as it is a lack of political correctness and a desire to correct behavior that has been leading to things like gigantic brush fires, but being unable to do so. After all Austrlia would have the hippies of the world all over them in force if they were to say arrest an entire tribe for engaging in a mass, ritualized lighting of bonfires when they were told specifically not to due to the conditions, did it anyway, and caused acres upon acres of fire damage, and the lives of dozens of people.
