Posted on 04/24/2018 7:28:31 AM PDT by Kaslin
Every now and then a news item pops up that is so ridiculous that you figure it's just got to be fake news, somebody's idea of a joke. You check the calendar to make sure it's not April Fools' Day. And when you realize it isn't, you come to understand that in our hypersensitive culture, a news story can be factual, accurate and preposterous all at the same time.
Which brings us to the TV play-by-play man for the Oklahoma City Thunder, a team in the National Basketball Association. The announcer, Brian Davis, was calling a game in which the team's star player, Russell Westbrook, was having another spectacular game. He had just made a pass setting up a basket -- one of a stunning 19 assists he made in the game -- when Davis put an exclamation point on the Westbrook pass, saying Westbrook was playing "out of his cotton-pickin' mind."
Davis is white and Westbrook is black, in case you haven't figured that out. And in case you have absolutely no knowledge of history, slaves once upon a time picked cotton in the South.
So reparations for the ugly past had to be paid, more than 150 years after slavery ended. How? By taking what passes for the moral high ground. The Thunder suspended Davis for one game. No fooling.
Never mind that cotton pickin' is a term used in the South by a lot of old white guys and old black guys as a genteel replacement for a harsher words, like damn.
"It's cotton pickin' hot today," sounds more refined to the southern ear than, "It's damn hot today" or the even coarser, "It sure is effing hot today."
The term has ugly racial connotations mainly for those who look in all sorts of places for supposed ugly racial connotations.
None of this matters, of course. The comment touched off a heated reaction on social media, where the sanctimonious play judge and jury. And when the verdict was returned, Davis was found guilty.
A team executive, Dan Mahoney, the Thunder's vice president of broadcasting and corporate communications, said the Thunder considered the comment "offensive and inappropriate" and announced the suspension.
But it gets worse. Davis, the play-by-play man, said while he meant no harm, he deserved what he got. "While unintentional, I understand and acknowledge the gravity of the situation," he said. "I offer my sincere apology and realize that, while I committed a lapse in judgment, such mistakes come with consequences. This is an appropriate consequence for my actions."
The only word that comes to mind is pathetic.
Like most journalists, I try to write about things that are important. So I hesitated to write about something so inane. But after a while I came to believe that this is important -- as an indication of how silly we've become on serious matters like race.
If using the term cotton pickin' is "offensive and insensitive" then what should we call words that really are offensive and insensitive? Doesn't making a mountain out of this molehill -- if it's even that -- trivialize serious questions about race in America?
If there's any good news coming out of this, it's that we've made so much progress on racial matters in this country since the days of Jim Crow, that matters like this come off to reasonable people, regardless of their race I suspect, as nonsense.
In the bad old days, Martin Luther King wouldn't have wasted two seconds of his precious time on this. We shouldn't either -- except to point out how cotton pickin' ridiculous our PC culture has become.
Deja Vu
Cultural Marxism in action . . . divide and anger . . . divide and anger . . . stoke the resentment, rinse & repeat
Wait a cotton pickin’ minute!
Political correctness is such a corrosive force in our culture. Where does it ever end?
Then you think of comedy such as the old movie “Blazing Saddles”, which poked fun at various stereotypes and types of people. Many have said that they couldn’t make that movie today, because of political correctness.
Then you hear people like Seinfeld, who have said, he can’t do stand up comedy at colleges anymore, because of political correctness. He can’t tell many different types of jokes anymore, because someone is going to be offended.
Then you see what happens to people such as Paula Deen, who lost her entire career of books and TV shows about food, because she had said the dreaded “N” word at some point.
This world is getting too absurd.
The problem for the snowflakes, is that half the south over a certain age picked and hoed cotton. Black or white, everyone did it. My mom for one.
Yes, I’ve heard that. I never lived down South, but have heard, that black and white both worked the fields. But mostly we hear of the legacy of slavery, and black sharecroppers struggling to earn a living, and then they create caricatures of slaves or black sharecroppers toiling away.
My fiancee’s parents are native Alabamians, they all worked in cotton fields as kids and this is in the 50’s and 60’s.
At least the Red Army generals executed by Stalin after their show trials made the NKVD torture the confessions out of them. Geez, Davis, man up. Make them work for it.
Brian Davis needs to be more niggardly in his speech.
hehehehehehehe
We need a manual of some kind to keep track of all the taboos. I guess it would have to be in grid format and lay out who could use what words to who.
Bet he would bave gotten 2 days if he had said watermelon eatin mind.
If you control speech, you control thinking. It’s a subtle version of thought control.
If you can’t talk about it, then you can’t think about it. That’s why the left is so freaked out about controlling our speech. The real goal is to control our thoughts.
In the words of Stalin:
Ideas are more dangerous than guns. We don’t let them have guns. Why should we let them have ideas?
I’m tired of this cotton pickin’ story.
Good one. (or bad one?)
Good post!
Yeah, we’ve got to avoid saying “cotton picking” since some folks can be so uppity.
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