One of my hispanic buddies/co-worker calls me "white boy" all of the time. I like it and think it's funny but I just wouldn't feel right doing it back to him or another person of color for this very reason.
My uncle was a police officer for 35 years in SLC. For the first two of those years, there was another cop who would say “Hey $p1c” every time he saw my uncle. He showed a lot of patience, but no one stood up for him. This was in ~1975.
Eventually they almost came to blows in a morning meeting. Then one of the sergeants finally told this guy to stop. After two years.
A few years later, my uncle wanted to be on the motorcycle squad. Only the guys who wrote the most tickets qualified (don’t ever believe a cop who tells you that they don’t have quotas, they absolutely do).
So my uncle upped his numbers for a couple months. They eventually pulled him aside and informed him that they “already had one Mexican” on the squad, and would not be adding another.
Those events need to be contextualized by what happened when he was a kid. When my mom’s family moved to SLC, they found a house for sale in Sugar House. It was for sale by owner, so my grandfather talked to the owner and they agreed to a sale. But when the owners neighbors found out that my mom‘s family were brown and had a Spanish surname, they started putting pressure on him to reverse the sale.
My grandfather caught wind of this, and rushed to get a loan from a bank so he could pay the balance.
When they started going to church, they discovered that barely anyone would speak to them. All the parents told all the kids to not associate with my mom and her siblings. So while they were able to accomplish something amazing for 1950’s Salt Lake City, they still paid a heavy (and unnecessary) social toll for decades.
So, while it may not be right for a Latino to call a Caucasian “white boy”, it’s not happening in a vacuum. It will never be from the position of power that it would be if it were reversed.
It’s the same for African-Americans and their jabs (playful or otherwise) at Caucasians, reuse of the N-word, Etc.
I hear people complain that it’s not fair that minorities are allowed to insult Caucasians and “own” their own derogatory terms that way when this type of usage has been popularized. But there are layers to this **** that need to be understood in historical context.
It is a small, subcultural unfairness in response to a much larger, 400-year-old system of abuse and cultural destruction.
So when you read Cy, try to understand the context of what he is trying to accomplish. It doesn’t do to simply take offense and go *** for tat. I’m certainly not defending all of his behavior, and he may not be able to reach everyone he wants to with the way he goes about things on this forum.
But even if Milsap is 100% wrong (or lying) an overt effort to listen to Elijah and to vigorously defend him with a take-no-prisoners attitude is probably healthy at this point in our history. What you are actually encountering here is old, national trauma that has been passed on in the form of hatred.