There's a difference here, the names I have called Dump are like big fucking asshole, names that I could call anybody, and I don't call him a hillbilly or a cracker, which I think if black people were to call him that they would be accused of being racist. You say you that you didn't dislike Obama because he was black, but would you have called him Yo Mama if he was a white guy? I assume you chose Yo Mama because it rhymes with Obama, but you know it is the kind of phrase that Obama would never use. If you went into a bar where the KKK hangs our and Obama came on the tube and you told the guy on the next bar stool, "I call him 'Yo Mama,'" I expect that they would be lining up to buy you a beer.
When I graduated from grade school instead of going to Gage Park, I went to Tilden Tech, it was supposed to be some kind of superior technical school. It was also an all boy's school, and half the boys were black. Before this the only contact I has with black people was when the bus to downtown passed through a black neighborhood. I did indeed come across the phrase Yo Mama there, It was like the prefix for one of those jokes like Yo Mama is like a bowling ball, they roll her down the alley. Oh there were hundreds of them, it wasn't too much trouble to make up your own. And you could use the phrase by itself to say something like fuck you.
Now Old Dog tells me there is a difference between being Black and being African American. I didn't know that. The last time I had any dealings with colored people, we were still calling them Negroes.
We have four of the five names for black people here. I assume nigger came first and back in its day was not a particularly pejorative name. Negro was considered more polite. Then in our day colored came to be preferred, as labeling the drinking fountain that wasn't white only. I'm sure you've heard the joke about the white northern kid who came south and saw the colored drinking fountain, but then was disappointed to discover the water was just transparent like any other water. Then in those wonderful sixties we had black (and proud, say it loud). Since then we have added African American. I generally use black, but if I was in any kind of formal situation like a letter to the editor I think I would use African American.
Certainly nigger is a racial slur, negro probably also, colored would not be a slur, but it would be considered rather insensitive, maybe something you could get by with if you were an old white guy. I like to think I could still get by with black, but for more formal occasions I would use African American.
Well do white guys get to choose what to call black people? I don't know.
Old Dog makes a distinction between between black and African American, which (of course) I take exception to. I think the true distinction here is of class, with lower classes being black and upper classes being African American. There is a thing you hear about black kids who do well in school being accused by their classmates of acting White.
I don't think Obama was too cool and dispassionate for his own good. He won two elections didn't he? And despite tremendous resistance he got a lot of stuff through. If he had acted more black,in Old Dog's definition, he would be more like Jesse Jackson, and how far did Jesse ever get in national politics? The thing I most like about Obama was that when he spoke to you he spoke to you as if you were intelligent too. We won't see that like again anytime soon.
No comments:
Post a Comment