Cyycloptichorn:
It's the line I've pulled several times because it illustrates the phoniness of the poster telling the story. It is clear that Lash and Foxfyre want to lessen the stigma against whites using the N-words against blacks, and these ridiculous stories are concocted to serve that purpose.
The right, or at least the part of the right inhabited by Lash and Foxfyre, seem to consider that getting the N-word acceptable on this forum comprises some sort of significant victory, and it stinks.
I remember reading an article where the leader of a women's group said that rape is the ultimate weapon men have against women-women have no commensurate threat against men. I think most would agree.
Similarly, it seems to me that use if the N-word against blacks is a similar situation. Call us what they will, no epithet blacks can use against whites can compare to the N-word whites can use against them. And use it white people did, for many years.
So when the civil rights revolution took place and society decided to finally open itself up to black people, that word slowly was pushed aside. Not right away, of course. It is not like the Civil Rights Bill of 1964 was passed and white people sudently said, "Oh well, out goes the N-word out of my vocabulary". But slowly it happened.
Just to give a brief timeline, I was watching an old romantic comedy from 1958 or so on TV and the romantic heroine-a sophisticated New York reporter no less-arrived at a wealthy house. While perusing the luxurious furnishings of the house, the heroine said, "I am surprised you don't have pickanninies in the corner playing banjos". Notice, this was not said by a crude character, but by the heroine in a prettied up Hollywood treatment of the chic high livers. This says a lot about the position of black people in the fifties-you can just imagine what white people thought was acceptable to say to blacks away from Hollywood's prettied up world.
In the late sixties I got a summer job in a factory, my first full time job. There was a black couple working there. During my very first break, I saw the black guy go to the soda machine while a few tables away a white guy was railing at him, "He licks her black nipples like chocolate" and on and on. There was machinery going, I don't know if the black guy didn't hear him or felt he had to grin and bear it. At any rate, a white guy screaming epithets at a black guy just for working in the same place, in suburban New York, drew no notice in the late sixties.
By the early seventies I was in upstate New York and another black man got a job there. Several workers including myself were talking, and one guy started talking about "the N-word" working there, repeating it over and over, (out of the black worker's earshot).. These were farmboys, not especially socially conscious. Their reaction? They just uncomfortably moved away. Nobody confronted the race baiter, but nobody wanted to listen either. Quite a change from a few years before.
There were setbacks. A year or so later, Earl Butz, a member of Nixon's Cabinet, said the following on Air Force One:
Quote:"I'll tell you what the coloreds want. It's three things: first, a tight pussy; second, loose shoes; and third, a warm place to ****."
He was forced to resign shortly after.
Perhaps partly because of this-a Cabinet member being forced to step down because of a racial remark is a big victory for a group that was so universally put down-and because of the various court decisions and simple social momentum, by the eighties or so it had become pretty universally recognized that racial jokes were out. Employees who made them were routinely fired. Public figures who made them were routinely forced to step down. Even more important, people who still made racist jokes were considered "out of it" both professionally and socially, in so many ways.
Mind, if a black person walked into the room from the mid eighties on, he had no gurarantee that there would not be a reaction from people-just that he had a fair expectation that something nasty would not happen just because he showed up and he was black. And he had a decent expectation that the people in charge would do something about harassment.
And so it stayed for the last twenty years, with the idea that people who throw around epithets were really "out of it" getting stronger, if anything. And bit by bit black people took places in society that they had not before. If things were not perfect, at least they were moving along nicely in the right direction. Some of it was simply mathematics-the people who were middle aged when the civil rights movement first achieved success, (1964), were by the mid eighties retired or getting ready for it, and were replaced by people who by and large understood the new racial realities.
So now come along the Lashes and Foxfyres-people who are just so
sick of all this "politically correct" stuff. They want you to believe that all that civil rights stuff is so passé and that the really hip thing is to brag about how little you care if anyone else gets upset by what you say. Especially about blacks. In a couple of decades we have gone from cabinet secretaries openly insulting blacks to being unable to turn on Wall Street Week or similar shows without seeing some black guy who has made millions. Progress is all around us. Yet the conservatives-or the Foxfyre-Lash conservatives anyway-want to return to the days before the Earl Butzes had to worry about fallout from their "politically incorrect" statements.
Well, I don't see any merit in going back there, thank you very much. I think much progress has been made by the present social compact of not using the worst epithets of the past, and am quite unwilling to yield to any new Conservative Chic movement letting those words back in unless somebody besides the likes of Lash or Foxfyre presents some real evidence that that is the way it goes now. And so far, I haven't seen it. Indeed, Imus has just shown quite clearly that the Conservative Chic standards of what is okay to say is a lot more hype than reality.
