It doesn't matter whether it is in New York or West Virginia. Niggah, of
course, is a southern pronunciation of the same word that otherwise has
an R sound at the end and that tells you that it is not really a new
invention or alternative word. Nevertheless, no matter where you might
be in the United States Black people who use the word to refer to each
other affectionately insist that it be pronounced without the R sound
and if it is pronounced with the R sound, even by a Black person, that
is disapproved of. The problem is that when two words are so similar you
hear what you expect to hear. If a white person is unaware of the lack
of the R sound that white person will likely hear it, or think he hears
it, even if it is not there and that leads to questions like why is it
okay for them to say it and not for us to say it. Similarly, I would not
advise a white person to start calling Black people niggahs. For one
thing, a white person is not part of the fraternity that is allowed to
use the in-group word. For another thing, I am almost certain that if a
white person says it to a Black person the R sound will be heard even if
it is not there.
On 6/27/2015 10:07 PM, Miriam Vieni wrote:
I'm not so sure that the pronunciation of the word, "nigger" by black people
in New York is the same as in West Virginia. I wasn't paying particular
attention to whether or not the r was pronounced when I heard people refer
to each other that way, but it seems to me that it was.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Roger Loran
Bailey (Redacted sender "rogerbailey81@xxxxxxx" for DMARC)
Sent: Saturday, June 27, 2015 8:13 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: "It's Not Polite to Say Nigger in Public...."
The word used affectionately for each other by Black people is niggah.
The R sound is left off and those who use it are quite adamant about that.
However, it is clear that the word is derived from the same word with the R
pronounced and with or without the R sound if you are white you had better
avoid it. It is not uncommon that a group will take a derogatory word for
their group and use it acceptably among themselves to take the sting out of
it. A lot of gay people, for example, will call each other faggot or queer.
The point is that if a bigot calls you something like a faggot you can
answer, okay, I'm a faggot, so what.
There is some controversy within the gay community about whether that should
be done though. Other times the attempt to turn a derogatory term into a
neutral word is not completed and the word niggah is an example.
If a white person calls you by that word it is not acceptable. Some other
ethnic groups do the same thing. People of Hungarian descent often jokingly
call each other hunkies, but it is not so easily accepted if someone else
uses the word.
On 6/27/2015 8:19 AM, abdulah aga wrote:
HI
Carle and other folks on list
Now I have question what I couldn't understand sins I cam in USA!
why black people say mostly ich other in joke like what's up my
nigger, but if some body als told them who is not black then is problem?
-----Original Message----- From: Carl Jarvis
Sent: Saturday, June 27, 2015 12:10 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: "It's Not Polite to Say Nigger in
Public...."
First of all, I'd been thinking for some time now that Pat Boone was
dead. I had to quickly resurrect him. Born June 1, 1934, Boone is
about 11 and a half months older than me. But we are millions of
light years apart. The difference between his wealth and mine would
be enough. But that is not the million of light years I am referring
to. It is the difference in how each of us see our fellow human
beings.
But that's not what I set out to talk about. Pat Boone can talk for
himself.
I want to focus on our strange habit of creating a bunch of symbols,
declaring that they have a certain meaning and then keep changing what
that meaning really means.
Take the word Gay, for example. My mother loved her gay coat. It was
a multicolored cloth coat. Mother took good care of her things,
having been a young mother during the Great Depression. So that coat
lasted her for many years. But she was greatly disturbed when she
mentioned to some friends that she was wearing her Gay Coat. They
quietly advised her not to say that word. "Gay?" mother asked.
"What's wrong with Gay?"
Tinker Bell was a little Fairy. Enough said about that. A fagot
referred to a young boy who gathered fire sticks in the forests of
Europe. Later the word was shortened to Fag, meaning a cigarette.
Sort of a short fire stick.
But when I was teaching Braille, one of my students, a young Lesbian,
objected violently to the word Fag in her Braille lesson book.
Naturally, knowing her to be a bright and understanding person, I
believed I could explain the meaning of the word back when the Braille
lesson book was put together. 1960. But it would not do. So I took
my handy Braille eraser and she and I rubbed out one Braille dot from
the "F", turning it into a "B", and the word became, Bag. I did not
tell my student that in the storage room I had an entire shelf of the
identical Braille books.
For me, the hardest word to push out of my mouth was, "Fuck". Four
letters succinctly defining a very fundamental activity. But we
decided that Fuck was a dirty word, while copulate was much "nicer".
Both describe the same activity. But although I write the word here,
I would most likely never say it in a presentation before a mixed
audience.
Nigger is a word that was part of the language of the Old South. That
Old South still exists in many places, and not all of them South of
the Border. But I have to tell you, I am damned sick and fucking
tired of saying, "The N Word". As if that makes it just hunky Dorey.
We used to say, Negroes. But we changed to Blacks as the word of
choice by Negroes. I have no idea if that's true or not. My grandma
Jarvis, born in Missouri back in 1874, said, "Niggrah". She talked
about her "Colored wet nurse". And the Black Mammy who cooked for the
family. And the little Pica ninnies, the little children who lived on
the plantation. Did I mention that my grandma Jarvis was raised on a
plantation? And her father had two or three slaves prior to the Civil
War. My own great grandfather Tom Hickman. Judged to be a fair and
kind man, by his family and the other white neighbors. But no one
ever wrote down what his slaves thought him to be. He owned other
human beings, for Gods Sake! And yet, my grandma adored her dad. She
followed him about the plantation, avoiding the Women's work inside
the house. Grandma ended up living on an old age pension, but always
believed she was better than the Niggrahs she lived among.
The word Niggrah was not what made my grandma think the way she did.
Force her to say, "Black People", and she would continue to think of
them as she had been trained to think of them back in the 1880's as a
young girl.
I know blind folk who avoid the word, "blind". But you know what?
They are just as blind as if they used the word. And the entire world
sees them as blind.
While I do not believe we can easily change people's attitudes, that
is the place we must work. And if stopping our use of certain words
or tearing down old rags of Confederate dogma helps, let's do it. But
only as a starting place.
Carl Jarvis
On 6/26/15, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Boardman writes: "An unintendedly brilliant example of self-induced
moral blindness to racist behavior comes from Pat Boone, the
octogenarian multi-millionaire musician whose fortune was built on
racist exploitation of black music in a racist music industry devoted
to catering to America's white racism."
CNN discusses President Obama's use of the N-word. (photo: CNN)
"It's Not Polite to Say Nigger in Public...."
By William Boardman, Reader Supported News
26 June 15
"Racism, we are not cured of it. And, and, and it's not just a matter
of, uh, it not being polite to say nigger in public. That's not the
measure of whether racism still exists or not. It's not just a matter
of overt discrimination. Societies don't, overnight, completely erase
everything that happened two to three hundred years prior."
- President Obama, June 22,
on Marc Maron podcast
This piece will end with a brief personal experience I had recently,
an experience that illuminates what the President is saying and
raises the question of whether it's polite to say "nigger" in
private. My experience underscores that what the President is saying
is obviously and profoundly true, and has been since long before he
was born. And my recent experience illustrates the abiding armor of
denial and determined ignorance that allows people to enjoy the
advantages of a racist society without having to acknowledge that it
exists.
An unintendedly brilliant example of self-induced moral blindness to
racist behavior comes from Pat Boone, the octogenarian
multi-millionaire musician whose fortune was built on racist
exploitation of black music in a racist music industry devoted to
catering to America's white racism. Boone's fundamentalist Christian
self-delusions about race appeared on WND (aka WorldNetDaily),
self-described as "an independent news company dedicated to
uncompromising journalism, seeking truth and justice and revitalizing
the role of the free press as a guardian of liberty."
According to Boone, it's President Obama's fault for not preaching
that "racial divides and prejudice had greatly diminished and that
our society was truly becoming colorblind." Having said that, Boone
provided a white racist analysis of the killing of two black
children, Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown, unarmed and shot by
reckless white men. As for Charleston, where an avowed white racist
killed nine black people in church in hope of starting a race war,
Boone explains it away as having a "racist element,"
but being "inspired by Satan"! While blaming Obama for "erasing" God
from public life, Boone pleads for a return to America as a Christian
nation - but he does not mention that American Christianity was a
powerful defender of American slavery.
This mode of thinking, or rather this mode of avoiding real thought,
is endemic to a large section of the American population and has
been, in one form or another, since before there was a United States.
How else do you get a Constitution in which slaves don't get to vote,
but do get counted as three-fifths of a person in order to inflate
Congressional representation of slave owners? Orwell called it
Doublethink in "1984," but it's a much older American tradition.
One form of denial is feigned shock that "Obama said the N-word!"
Assorted television babble-heads on CNN, NBC, MSNBC, CBS, Fox and
elsewhere got all a-twitter over the President's saying "nigger,"
which they sanitized to "the N-word" with such characterizations as
"extremely direct language"
and "shock value" and "jarring comment" and "electric" and "one of
the most charged racial slurs in the English language" - all of which
are projections of the commentators' subjectivity. They are not at
all accurate descriptions of what the President said, which was
detached, measured, analytical, and precisely accurate. But who wants
to hear that on TV? As Wolf Blitzer put it on CNN, "Many people may
find this offensive." CNN's black legal analyst said the word should
never be used. In sharp disagreement, CNN black anchor Don Lemon
articulately defended adult conversation about difficult issues on
television (for example, on Democracy NOW).
By paying attention only to the President's use of the word "nigger"
and not to his much broader context, television's purveyors of
conventional wisdom manage to deny the relevance of the President's
larger point: that racism has been endemic to American (and
pre-American) culture for some 300 years and that racist thinking
remains alive and well in many forms.
Focusing on
the President's use of "nigger" as an excuse not to talk about racism
in America is, arguably, just another form of racism in America.
Larry Wilmore on The Nightly Show reduced the TV babble to its
ultimate Fox-accusing absurdity, President Obama saying "nigger" in a
State of the Union speech. Wilmore also played clips of other
presidents saying "nigger,"
albeit in a less thoughtful way than Obama:
. Nixon: "Our niggers are better than their niggers"
. LBJ: "there's more niggers voting there than white folks"
Wilmore also indicated that, while there's apparently no record of
presidents like Washington or Jefferson saying "nigger," they did own
one or more.
Another effect of all the empty blather about the President saying
"nigger"
is to distract from the empty gestures about various Confederate flags.
American devotion to the Confederate flag is, literally, insane or
dishonest or hypocritical, or all three, or pick your word. Why? All
Confederate flags are symbols of treason against the United States of
America, and somehow it's OK to celebrate them and merchandise them
and pretend they're something they never were. The Confederacy
committed treason as defined by the Constitution and too many people
would do it all over again, for the same racist reasons.
What does one young South Carolinian tell us about America today?
So here's the personal experience I mentioned. Over the weekend of
June 20-21, I was at a family wedding in northern Maryland. The
Sunday before Obama's podcast became public, I was at a post-wedding
cookout with maybe 20 people of various ages, many in their twenties.
It was a definitely non-political social gathering.
One young man in his mid-twenties was there as the new beau of the
bride's sister. He was pleasant, attractive, well-spoken, polite, and
had grown up in South Carolina. During our first conversation with
several other people in the kitchen, David (not his real name) spoke
enthusiastically of his work with horses and Brahma cattle. He
described a roping gone wrong when he was forced to jump his horse
over a fallen Brahma cow, whose horn scored his horse's underbelly.
He seemed comfortable and at ease as the conversation shifted from
person to person. He gave no hint of any socially disruptive opinions
or behavior. But he was drinking.
Some time later I wandered into a conversation David was having with
the bride's mother on the screen porch. This conversation was already
political.
David was complaining about Jon Stewart on The Daily Show for calling
out Charleston for having streets named after Civil War generals and
otherwise ridiculing South Carolina's history. Stewart was about to
start a race war, David argued, without mentioning Dylann Roof
killing nine people. David said he was concerned about a race war
because someone had already shot at the Confederate flag at the
Capitol. David said we should just let history be history, and
besides some people treated their slaves well.
By the time our hostess came into this conversation, David was
talking about Obama being Kenyan and like that. Our hostess told him
firmly not to talk like that in her house. When he didn't seem to get
the point, I leaned in and suggested that maybe we should both be
quiet. He admitted he'd been drinking, but throughout this
conversation he remained polite, friendly, quiet, apparently sincere
in beliefs he didn't seem to think anyone would find unusual. He came
across as a basically sweet kid.
The last thing he said to me, before others took him swimming, he
said with the same earnest pleasantness. He said, "I don't hate
niggers."
________________________________________
William M. Boardman has over 40 years experience in theatre, radio,
TV, print journalism, and non-fiction, including 20 years in the
Vermont judiciary. He has received honors from Writers Guild of
America, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Vermont Life magazine,
and an Emmy Award nomination from the Academy of Television Arts and
Sciences.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work.
Permission
to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader
Supported News.
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error! Hyperlink reference not
valid.
CNN discusses President Obama's use of the N-word. (photo: CNN)
http://readersupportednews.org/http://readersupportednews.org/
"It's Not Polite to Say Nigger in Public...."
By William Boardman, Reader Supported News
26 June 15
"Racism, we are not cured of it. And, and, and it's not just a matter
of, uh, it not being polite to say nigger in public. That's not the
measure of whether racism still exists or not. It's not just a matter
of overt discrimination. Societies don't, overnight, completely erase
everything that happened two to three hundred years prior."
- President Obama, June 22,
on Marc Maron podcast
his piece will end with a brief personal experience I had recently,
an experience that illuminates what the President is saying and
raises the question of whether it's polite to say "nigger" in
private. My experience underscores that what the President is saying
is obviously and profoundly true, and has been since long before he
was born. And my recent experience illustrates the abiding armor of
denial and determined ignorance that allows people to enjoy the
advantages of a racist society without having to acknowledge that it
exists.
An unintendedly brilliant example of self-induced moral blindness to
racist behavior comes from Pat Boone, the octogenarian
multi-millionaire musician whose fortune was built on racist
exploitation of black music in a racist music industry devoted to
catering to America's white racism. Boone's fundamentalist Christian
self-delusions about race appeared on WND (aka WorldNetDaily),
self-described as "an independent news company dedicated to
uncompromising journalism, seeking truth and justice and revitalizing
the role of the free press as a guardian of liberty."
According to Boone, it's President Obama's fault for not preaching
that "racial divides and prejudice had greatly diminished and that
our society was truly becoming colorblind." Having said that, Boone
provided a white racist analysis of the killing of two black
children, Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown, unarmed and shot by
reckless white men. As for Charleston, where an avowed white racist
killed nine black people in church in hope of starting a race war,
Boone explains it away as having a "racist element,"
but being "inspired by Satan"! While blaming Obama for "erasing" God
from public life, Boone pleads for a return to America as a Christian
nation - but he does not mention that American Christianity was a
powerful defender of American slavery.
This mode of thinking, or rather this mode of avoiding real thought,
is endemic to a large section of the American population and has
been, in one form or another, since before there was a United States.
How else do you get a Constitution in which slaves don't get to vote,
but do get counted as three-fifths of a person in order to inflate
Congressional representation of slave owners? Orwell called it
Doublethink in "1984," but it's a much older American tradition.
One form of denial is feigned shock that "Obama said the N-word!"
Assorted television babble-heads on CNN, NBC, MSNBC, CBS, Fox and
elsewhere got all a-twitter over the President's saying "nigger,"
which they sanitized to "the N-word" with such characterizations as
"extremely direct language"
and "shock value" and "jarring comment" and "electric" and "one of
the most charged racial slurs in the English language" - all of which
are projections of the commentators' subjectivity. They are not at
all accurate descriptions of what the President said, which was
detached, measured, analytical, and precisely accurate. But who wants
to hear that on TV? As Wolf Blitzer put it on CNN, "Many people may
find this offensive." CNN's black legal analyst said the word should
never be used. In sharp disagreement, CNN black anchor Don Lemon
articulately defended adult conversation about difficult issues on
television (for example, on Democracy NOW).
By paying attention only to the President's use of the word "nigger"
and not to his much broader context, television's purveyors of
conventional wisdom manage to deny the relevance of the President's
larger point: that racism has been endemic to American (and
pre-American) culture for some 300 years and that racist thinking
remains alive and well in many forms.
Focusing on
the President's use of "nigger" as an excuse not to talk about racism
in America is, arguably, just another form of racism in America.
Larry Wilmore on The Nightly Show reduced the TV babble to its
ultimate Fox-accusing absurdity, President Obama saying "nigger" in a
State of the Union speech. Wilmore also played clips of other
presidents saying "nigger,"
albeit in a less thoughtful way than Obama:
. Nixon: "Our niggers are better than their niggers"
. LBJ: "there's more niggers voting there than white folks"
Wilmore also indicated that, while there's apparently no record of
presidents like Washington or Jefferson saying "nigger," they did own
one or more.
Another effect of all the empty blather about the President saying
"nigger"
is to distract from the empty gestures about various Confederate flags.
American devotion to the Confederate flag is, literally, insane or
dishonest or hypocritical, or all three, or pick your word. Why? All
Confederate flags are symbols of treason against the United States of
America, and somehow it's OK to celebrate them and merchandise them
and pretend they're something they never were. The Confederacy
committed treason as defined by the Constitution and too many people
would do it all over again, for the same racist reasons.
What does one young South Carolinian tell us about America today?
So here's the personal experience I mentioned. Over the weekend of
June 20-21, I was at a family wedding in northern Maryland. The
Sunday before Obama's podcast became public, I was at a post-wedding
cookout with maybe 20 people of various ages, many in their twenties.
It was a definitely non-political social gathering.
One young man in his mid-twenties was there as the new beau of the
bride's sister. He was pleasant, attractive, well-spoken, polite, and
had grown up in South Carolina. During our first conversation with
several other people in the kitchen, David (not his real name) spoke
enthusiastically of his work with horses and Brahma cattle. He
described a roping gone wrong when he was forced to jump his horse
over a fallen Brahma cow, whose horn scored his horse's underbelly.
He seemed comfortable and at ease as the conversation shifted from
person to person. He gave no hint of any socially disruptive opinions
or behavior. But he was drinking.
Some time later I wandered into a conversation David was having with
the bride's mother on the screen porch. This conversation was already
political.
David was complaining about Jon Stewart on The Daily Show for calling
out Charleston for having streets named after Civil War generals and
otherwise ridiculing South Carolina's history. Stewart was about to
start a race war, David argued, without mentioning Dylann Roof
killing nine people. David said he was concerned about a race war
because someone had already shot at the Confederate flag at the
Capitol. David said we should just let history be history, and
besides some people treated their slaves well.
By the time our hostess came into this conversation, David was
talking about Obama being Kenyan and like that. Our hostess told him
firmly not to talk like that in her house. When he didn't seem to get
the point, I leaned in and suggested that maybe we should both be
quiet. He admitted he'd been drinking, but throughout this
conversation he remained polite, friendly, quiet, apparently sincere
in beliefs he didn't seem to think anyone would find unusual. He came
across as a basically sweet kid.
The last thing he said to me, before others took him swimming, he
said with the same earnest pleasantness. He said, "I don't hate
niggers."
William M. Boardman has over 40 years experience in theatre, radio,
TV, print journalism, and non-fiction, including 20 years in the
Vermont judiciary. He has received honors from Writers Guild of
America, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Vermont Life magazine,
and an Emmy Award nomination from the Academy of Television Arts and
Sciences.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work.
Permission
to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader
Supported News.
http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
