I'm sure it's innocuous, like the use of "Tartar" instead of "Tatar" by English-speakers.
--- On Tue, 10/7/08, Wojtek Sokolowski <swsokolowski at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>
> [WS:] It is interesting that such an obvious racial slur
> comes from someone like you, James. Mau mau was a name
> given by the British colonizers to a popular revolt
> in Kenya that called itself by different names.
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mau_Mau_Uprising
>
> Of course, for the Brits, there were nothing but a bunch of
> gangsters, but that is hardlly suprising. However,
> creating the cognitive frame of "racialized"
> gangster metaphor for a community movement strikes me as
> reactionary - something you would find in the Repug (or
> Tory?) talking points rather than in the progressive
> discourse of any kind. Using the same frame to
> characterize bankers is fundamentally no different than
> using anti-semitic slurs to critique the finance capital -
> a common trope amoung Euro-fascists.
> Wojtek
>
>