Meta post I've decided to make. I enjoyed the unixporn subreddit a lot when I used reddit more. I enjoy customizing my linux de as much as the next nerd.
But you definitely shouldn't use racist slang to refer to the process.
To be clear, I didn't know the origin of the term 'ricing' until fairly recently. I was chattimg with my friend and used it to describe my de setup. They informed me that apparently it's from car customization, and is a pejorative against generally asian men who customize their car to look like a racecar.
After learning this I was sad to realize just how engrained it is in linux de customization culture. I personally have stopped using the term, and I would ask everyone here stop as well.
Ok, Asian here and rice eater here also and I think the right way to respond to racist cliches is with hostility, same way we ought to respond to Nazism and other forms of fascism. if you want to reclaim the word, fine whatever. But you're drawing a false equivalence between westerners trying to self-criticize their use of chauvinistic language, and the imperial governments that enforce that chauvinism in the first place (wtf?)
That's the problem.
Westerner often force this rules towards everyone.
Like that one time someone got banned for using "nasi goreng" as their username with reasoning "it has similarity with Nazism" despite it's on international group.
Or when Asian English group that usually co-exist within recognition of different culture suddenly has Westerner that policing everything about language. "Oh this is so offensive towards Asian", while no one in group never know or even used the word in negative connotation.
While in reality because SEAsian are multi-language speaker, we just self moderate in case of potential language conflict, like budak in Malay is children, but in Indonesian means slave.
The thing is you aren't the audience. Discussion about anti-Asian racism in English tends to be focused on the experiences of e.g. Asian-American people and on the racist abuse they get from white people.
It's actually that exact kind of self-moderation, surely? "hang on, doesn't this word suck, let's not use it"?