LogFAQs > #955108778

IronWolf87 posted...

What a cowardly article. Birds ARE racist AF and it's about time we addressed it. I once had a blue jay fly up to me and whisper in my ear "Go back to Ireland ya god damn Mick!" And don't even get me started on the shit humming birds talk about.

fucking lol

But yeah, as that article snippet shows, there's a lot of traumatic, racist history tied to the naming of birds. Just because you don't value the topic, doesn't make it ineligible for discussion or without merit.

"These birds were named after great men who did great things!" yeah, and some of those great men were incredibly cruel and racist, even for their time. Imagine being an Indian dude who's really into a bird like the furrowed drakehawk or something, and learning it's named after some guy named Edgar L. Furrows, a man who was notorious for beating and raping his Indian servants in the British Raj, but who really liked hawks.

We don't have to imagine worst case scenarios like that, because as that article snippet shows, there are birds whose name stems from cruel, racist figures - like a man who bought a girl in Africa and would draw her being brutally murdered. What good did that man do that offsets the deeply disturbing nature of his racism? Is there a point where we should go "yeah this guy owned indigenous and African slaves and we have records of cruel and violent acts committed against them, but he funded ornithological studies into finches so he gets his own finch, his importance to birds supercedes the documented violence he committed against his slaves and the legacy of his estate which is still horrifically racist"? Should people not be disgusted by the history and legacy of that man, and how his legacy is perpetuated through his ornithological presence?

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If I don't want to put my dick in them then it's bad character design. You can quote me on that. - Gurifisu