• TMP_NKcYUEoM7kXg4qYe@lemmy.world
    87·
    4 months ago

    Languages evolve over time. The term “to serve” is derived from the Latin word for “slave”. That does not mean it’s somehow offensive to use the term to describe the job of soldiers.

    The modern day “riced” comes from “R.I.C.E” which stands for “race inspired car enhancement”. If you rice a car, it means you put components that look like race car components but are actually just cosmetic. Fake vents, huge spoilers on family cars, exhausts that are optically bigger, etc. The orange Japanese car in the linked article is an example of that. 70s Japan had renown ricing culture so I guess that’s where the R.I.C.E and the racist “rice burner” split.

    Nowadays people who use the term “riced” don’t even know that at some point in time it had something to do with Asian cars or bikes. It’s even common to jokingly associate it with the food with the same name to spite other car nerds because you can “um actually” bait someone to correct you that it has nothing to do with food. Which is obviously not true according to the article but if 99 % of people don’t know the racist origin, it’s not an issue at all to use the word.

    • Zozano@lemy.lolEnglish
      9·
      4 months ago

      I can’t find any source to indicate Race Inspired Cosmetic Enhancement was ever a term that existed as anything other than the Japanese version of an N-word-pass.

      That is to say: the acronym only exists as a means to explain why I should be allowed to continue calling your car a RICEr.

      The problem here is that someone fabricated an explanation for why they should be allowed to continue to say RICE, in response to a fallacious argument for why they shouldn’t be allowed to.

      The term is so far removed from any malicious origin, that some people wouldn’t even know they should feel offended, unless someone told them they should be.

      • TMP_NKcYUEoM7kXg4qYe@lemmy.world
        1·
        4 months ago

        I cannot give you any source, unless you want to waste hours of your time watching some car videos. The difference between an n-word pass and rice-pass is what you mean with that. Some secret way of saying the n-word does not change its racist connotation but a ricer by default has nothing to do with race. If you want to be racist, you would have to explicitly specify that you are talking about the owner’s race or the car’s origin or whatever.

        The term is so far removed from any malicious origin, that some people wouldn’t even know they should feel offended, unless someone told them they should be.

        That’s not normal human behavior. Try to imagine it. 3 people are going down the street. One of them points out that a car on the street is “riced”. Second one tells the third who is of Japanese origin, that he should get offended because of the word’s origin. It would be weird to get offended because someone told you to.

        • Zozano@lemy.lolEnglish
          1·
          4 months ago

          “It would be weird to get offended because someone told you to”

          Right, but it happens. The post which triggered this reply chain is essentially a litmas test for what I’m describing.

          The acronym of RICE was made after the racist connotations were already established. It’s an attempt to rewrite history so people could continue saying it.

          It is documented to have come from racial origins in the 1960’s. Yet, I can’t find anything about the acronym from more than twenty years ago.