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Lumifer comments on question: the 40 hour work week vs Silicon Valley? - Less Wrong
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Serious (and not particularly considering myself part of any oppressed minority).
My experience is that addressing any group as "you people" is a near-infallible sign of hostility and contempt, with (not always but often) a side order of prejudice against whatever (political, religious, philosophical, social-class, ...) group "you people" might be part of.
Maybe my experience is atypical, or maybe yours is. You might want to do a bit of googling and see how the phrase is used and how it's perceived; if your impression on doing so accords with mine, you'll probably want to avoid using it when you don't want to signal hostility and contempt.
My mental autocompleter matches "you people" to things like "you people are all the same", "what the ---- is wrong with you people", etc.
(I note that urbandictionary.com's second definition for "you people" is "Blacks". For what it's worth, that isn't something I read into it -- though I see there's a similar suggestion on wiktionary, so maybe it isn't just urbandictionary.com being flaky.)
I do, on occasion, start sentences with "you people" which is a sign that (a) I'm not very serious about the issue; and (b) consider myself to be noticeably different from those I'm addressing. I do NOT use it to signal hostility and contempt, though I'm aware that some people do.
Context matters.
Yup, context matters. However, you should consider the possibility that an appreciable fraction of your audience will fail to read your mind, and will (consciously or not) take your "you people" as indicating hostility, which you probably don't want.
(Though ... it sounds as if you're talking about a use of the phrase with a rather different structure from the one we're discussing here: using it vocatively at the start of the sentence. "Hey, you people, listen up! Blah blah blah." or something like that. I don't think I've ever heard that done; it would strike me as rather odd, but not as hostile and dismissive in the same way as the sort of usage I thought we were discussing.)
No, I use it in the, ahem, traditional structure along the lines of "Now what you people fail to understand is that...".
I understand that some people might read it as hostility. That's fine. I usually scatter enough hints in the text for the clueful people to figure out I'm not actually foaming at the mouth, plus I prefer to have a bit of ambiguity mixed in -- it adds flavour :-)
(I am commenting only to remark that it was not I who downvoted you.)
Thanks for the concern :-) though I don't care much about downvotes.