We are talking about the descendants of the wealthy or dissident people who were escaping the Cuban revolution, where Cuba at the time was largely owned by foreign sugar plantations which was perpetuated by the the brutal military dictatorship of Batista, which was supported by the US government as well as organized crime (and where one ends and the other begins is sometimes unclear…)
This state of affairs is very much due to competition (instead of cooperation) and the feast-and-famine shape of what software invention and development looks like, especially in the US.
It takes time and effort to optimize software for performance, user-friendliness, developer-friendliness and everything that ethical and mindful developers hold up so highly, but that’s not the kind of thing that the big money or academic prestige is very interested in. The goal is to get the most users possible to participate in something that doesn’t repulse them and ideally draws them in. The concerns of ethics, dignity, and utility are just consequences to settle, occasionally dealt with before the world raises a stink about it, but are hardly ever part of the M.O.
Imagine if developers could make a dignified living working to listen to people and see what they really need or want and can focus on that instead of having to come up with a better ‘feature set’ than their competitors. It’s essentially why we have hundreds of different Dr. Pepper ripoffs sold as ‘alternatives’ to Dr. Pepper (is this really a good use of resources?) instead of making the best Dr. Pepper or finding a way to tailor the base Dr. Pepper to the consumers taste, assuming enough people claim they want a different Dr. Pepper.
Everybody, in fact, takes innumerable social parameters into consideration when you say anything, especially with strangers.
For the sake of mass communication where you can’t really know your receiver, you have to do your best to just communicate whatever you need to (i.e. ‘a single approach’). Choosing to use a word that is ambiguous as to whether it is a slur is a bit unwise. I think it is probably unwise to do the same in personal interactions.
By ‘find an article’ you mean find ~10 real citations including the resolution of an authority a long time ago and to tell the reader it is not clear or definitive?
Better to be careful and let any individuals or communities tell you what they want. I have Roma connections in my family and at one point the word we’d use is ‘gypsy’. But, because I’m not Roma myself, if I came across some other group I wouldn’t assume I’m just allowed to say it to them.
It’s a tale as old as time!