Yes! Yes! Yes!
And I have to say that every time I hear someone say "the N word" when
purporting to quote a racist but feeling that if they utter the actual word
"nigger" which is the word that the racist used, it drives me crazy. Amy
Goodman does it all the time on Democracy Now. So does everyone else. What
is accomplished by not saying the actual word, I'll never know. But I have
ranted about this before on this list when the phrase involved, is mentally
retarded as opposed to cognitively impaired or developmentally disabled. We
all began using what was supposed to be the socially acceptable term, Native
Americans, until I discovered from reading and listening to interviews that
the people to whom we refer, wish to be called American Indians. In our
zeal to undo the sins of the past, well of the present as well, we can act
very foolishly. Way back when white Americans began adopting children from
Korea in the 50's, they pretended that race didn't exist. The initial
adoptive parents tended to be white Evangelical Christians who lived in the
West and Midwest. Some of the children whom they adopted had identity
problems because their country of origin and racial identity were treated as
if they were nonexistent. Some did not. Practises in international adoption
of children who aaren't white, changed after the black consciousness
movements of the late 60's although no one worried much about the cultural
identity of children from Russia or Romania. So by the time people began
adopting children from China in the 90's, a whole set of rules and practises
were developed by these adoptive parents, most of whom initially, came from
the east and west coasts, and were highly educated and financially well off.
People dragged their children, who had come here as infants, to Chinese
language schools and Chinese culture camps. They hired Chinese babysitters,
sometimes to the extreme distress of their babies and toddlers. They
organized trips back to visit China, to visit the orphanages from which the
children came originally. They learned to cook Chinese food. For some
children, this worked out. For many, it did not and I could take hours to
explain why. What brought this situation to mind is a book I found on
Bookshare called, The Year We Lost Her by Kathryn Ma, a novel about a girl
adopted from China into a Chinese American family.
But I bring this up to illustrate Carl's point more fully and to say that
the guilt and well meaning gestures of people who consider themselves to be
liberal and fair minded, can sometimes lead them to do stupid and even
harmful things.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Saturday, June 27, 2015 1:10 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:
role of the free press as a guardian of liberty."
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
According to Boone, it's President Obama's fault for not preachinghaving a "racist element,"
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
but being "inspired by Satan"! While blaming Obama for "erasing" God"nigger"
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
is to distract from the empty gestures about various Confederate flags.role of the free press as a guardian of liberty."
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
According to Boone, it's President Obama's fault for not preachinghaving a "racist element,"
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
but being "inspired by Satan"! While blaming Obama for "erasing" God"nigger"
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
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
