Good Sunday morning, Abdulah.
It is not the word itself that is the problem. It is who says it. If
a group of young Black men call one another, "Boy", it is done with
the understanding that they are all young men or boys. When I worked
in the drapery factory, I would go for coffee or lunch at George's
Tavern/Cafe. There I sat among a group of burly White men,
longshoremen and truckers. George, an old Greek, would say, "Okay
boys, put your money up". These "boys" were not offended by George.
They called themselves Boys. "Come on, boys, time to get rolling."
But when I brought my helper, a young Black man, working his way
through college, and we sat down for coffee at Georges, and George
came down the counter and said, "Okay boys, money up", my helper
jumped straight off his stool and hunched over like a boxer looking
for an opening, and shouted, "I'm a man. Don't you call me boy".
Old George had that deer in the headlights look. He had no idea what
had made this young Black man turn into a raving maniac. The same is
true with the word, Nigger. Among Black people it is received
differently than when it is said by a White person. Regardless of
what the intent is.
When I worked for the Department of Services for the Blind, the agency
building was in the Southeast end of Seattle. This was a neighborhood
of mixed races. Large influx of Asians and Blacks, along with the
long established Italian residents. When I boarded the bus one
evening, a very large Black man stepped on behind me. "Hey Niggers!"
he shouted down the aisle. All the Black people on that bus looked
up, grinned and greeted him, using Nigger as a warm, familiar
greeting. What do you imagine would have been their reaction if I'd
shouted the same greeting. Even if I were grinning just like that
fellow. The word had been used by Whites as a put down for so many
generations that I could never use it as a warm greeting.
But while I can agree that we need to let the word Nigger fade into
history, what makes me crazy is the idea that we can't say it when
we're talking about the word. "The N word". What the Hell is the
difference? If I boarded that same bus and looked down the aisle at
all those dark faces and shouted, "Hey, N Words. How're you all
doing?" What do you think would happen?
But we go about thinking that if we sanitize our language we will also
change peoples long entrenched attitudes. If it were that easy, blind
people would not be struggling with our efforts to gain first class
standing in our sighted world. Women would not still be fighting for
equality. But, coming from another part of the world, you, Abdulah,
probably are not conditioned to see the word, Nigger, in the same
context as do Americans born and raised here.
I hope this helps you, and does not further confuse you.
Carl Jarvis
On 6/27/15, abdulah aga <abdulahhasic@xxxxxxxxxxx> 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
