These gentlemen were not Southerners, they were stupid racists probably with relations going back to slave owners.
I've had my dealings with such people in the South and I hate them with a passion. I have personally chastised my own mother for using that word to describe one of my friends while in high school. To this day it still bothers me that she had done that. My experience of being raised in the South is that it is mostly a generational thing that hopefully will be stamped out in the South except in Florida where they will retire. I would slap my own child for referring to another human being in such a derogatory manner. It is uncivilized to behave in such a manner.
My mother from the north referred to my black friends as the "colorerds" or the "colored boy." I would always respond, "What color is that? Pink? Blue? Aqua?" And then I would duck to avoid the slap to the face. Our next door neighbor, who was born and bred in "peanut country," Virgina would use the "N" word to refer to my friends, often to their face.
My grandmother has told me about one time she got a bag of licorice candies and referred to them as n-babies -- local slang at the time -- and was chided by her mother. This would have been in the late '20s or early '30s. It wasn't a question of civil rights or political correctness -- it was just a crass, ugly word, not suitable for a young lady.
When I was in elementary school, in the mid-'70s, n-jokes still popped up occasionally. But always in hushed tones, as if the teller knew it was a shameful thing, as if the joke-teller would rather be caught using the f-word than the n-word.
I'm tempted to agree with you that usage of the n-word will fade, but I'm not so sure. There are always pockets of hard-core bigots -- everywhere, and not in the South any more than anywhere else -- who throw it out and revel in its shock value. It will disappear from casual usage, and survive only as an intentional obscenity thrown by white racists and black gangsta rappers.
And while Southerners do indeed come off as extremely friendly, in my experience, the friendliness is often cosmetic. For example, I can recall ....a mixed-race business meeting in Columbia, South Carolina......one of the good 'ol boys, who must of forgot that I was a Yankee, said right in front of me and five of his southern colleagues, "I really like Thomas. He's not a bad for a n....r." As soon as the words came out of his mouth, he knew he had made a mistake, but rather than keeping his mouth shut, he and his buddies started in with that smooth talking southern crap...160 posted on 07/14/2005 7:07:22 PM CDT by Labyrinthos
From your perspective though, I suppose I would have to give these guys credit for not trying to cover up their rudeness with a bunch of "smooth-talking cr-p." They were actually quite proud of their racist attiudes, and they didn't even think of apologizing. I guess that just makes them more "honest" though, right?
161 posted on 07/14/2005 7:15:29 PM CDT by bourbon
These gentlemen were not Southerners, they were stupid racists probably with relations going back to slave owners.
I've had my dealings with such people in the South and I hate them with a passion. I have personally chastised my own mother for using that word to describe one of my friends while in high school. To this day it still bothers me that she had done that. My experience of being raised in the South is that it is mostly a generational thing that hopefully will be stamped out in the South except in Florida where they will retire. I would slap my own child for referring to another human being in such a derogatory manner. It is uncivilized to behave in such a manner. [Emphasis supplied]260 posted on 07/15/2005 2:01:33 PM CDT by talmand
The above was an interesting exchange. May I comment?
I gather that, from the anecdote told by Labyrinthos, that he wants us to understand that, as a New Yorker, he suspects that Southerners are still unreconstructed racists, and all their professions of social progress and personal amelioration are facile self-service and untrustworthy; and that if a Northerner hadn't been present to hold the Southerners' feet to the fire, they'd have all relapsed and probably would have gone on talking as if they were at a Klan klavern.
I don't think bourbon got it.....far from "not trying to cover up their rudeness with a bunch of 'smooth-talking cr-p,'" that is exactly what they did, in Labyrinthos's retelling, precisely because the speaker suddenly realized that one of the visitors was still present.
But bourbon has a point, sort of, and I think Labyrinthos saw it, too, but discounted it, and that is that one of the speakers thought to say something favorable about the black businessman. The speaker, in so doing, laid his original low expectations on the table along with the compliment, then impaired the compliment by using country speech to describe his visitor. About which a further comment.
It seems to me that there has been a social struggle in progress since at least the 18th century and the first of the big slave revolts, when whites realized that having numbers of bondmen in their midst was a personal and physical danger, a point underscored by Roman history and the Servile War (Spartacus). In the ordinary course of business, slaves had access to tools that could become weapons in an eyeblink, and they often had access to firearms, about the supervision of which the first firearms laws in America were written as part of what were, to all intents, colonial black codes.
In the 18th century, New Yorkers shared the danger: there was at least one, perhaps two, significant conspiracies to raise slave revolts. In 1820's South Carolina, a further conspiracy fostered by Denmark Vesey was put down. In between, the successful slave revolt in Haiti in the 1790's killed every white person the slaves overtook, without exception, man, woman, and child. The only white person known to have escaped the slaughter after her estate was overrun was a plantation mistress who'd owned Toussaint L'Ouverture and who had hidden out in her outbuildings. She was found there by L'Ouverture, who, escaping from another property, returned to her plantation, and then concealed and protected her because she had taught him to read (illegally) and then given him books, and an education. L'Ouverture eventually conducted her to a French-held enclave (which I believe was later occupied by the British, who sustained an expedition there for some years in the 1790's) and then went on to a career in the French army and Haitian politics, before finally being imprisoned and constructively killed by the French who imprisoned him in an Alpine fortress in wintertime. Haiti, meanwhile, passed under the barbarous misrule of the slave-dictator Henri Christophe, who was eventually killed by his own people.
The example of Haiti was always a powerful one for Southerners (not Northerners, who didn't face the problem of potential extermination), who were always sensitive to being "tried on" by blacks as a test of resolve preliminary to a death-struggle. One can scold that this isn't how neighbors treat neighbors in the best Fred Rogers tradition, but the fact of the matter is that Southerners did not see black slaves as part of society at all -- hence the two-thirds rule on enumeration in the Constitution. It isn't that they didn't see them as men, because they did, very much so -- hence the danger -- but that they saw them as members of African society, the chances for friendly relations with which were slim and none if it were ever established, or, if black society were ever confounded with their own, would both redefine downward the sociopolitical status of white yeomen and poor whites by equating them with (ex-, but not very ex-) slaves, and also destroy white Southerners' own sense of having a society by confounding it with another, very different society, which then raised another social issue in the form of the biological fact of partial dominance.
All of which suited Northerners just fine, since they were in sociopolitical and economic competition with Southerners anyway, and any plague on the Southern house was, to sectionalist Northerners in the 1820's and later, a joy to behold -- and something which they tried to precipitate in 1859, by sponsoring, and then ostentatiously mourning, John Brown.
This Southern emphasis on resolve, on never giving an inch (because you might wind up being killed in your bed), is a powerful idea that had a strong hold, IMHO, on Southerners' thinking all through the 1960's. The John Brown raid, and the reaction of Northern opinion to it, planted the idea in Southerners that Northerners would be content to look on with cold eyes while a slave revolt triumphed in the South (with attendant great slaughter), and that idea has never really died away, although it has been palliated by various recent presidents' assertions that law and order must be maintained in cases of racial disturbance. In the old Southern mental model, the Watts and South L.A. riots would never have been opposed by federal authority, but rather the federal government would have stood malevolently by while the Crips and Bloods roved through white and Asian neighborhoods, killing everything that moved. I mention this to give some idea how different the terms of reference were between Southern opinion in Jim Crow days and what they were in the rest of the country.
That model of resolve in the face of implacable hostility explains, to my mind, the refusal of some Southerners to yield to appeals to courtesy, in refraining from using "unacceptable" language about blacks: those who use such language believe they are being frank and displaying intellectual integrity and resolve in the face of insidious political and social challenges to their own existence. To them, putting a euphemism in their mouths is the first step toward political correctness and the mouthful of lies that rots the brain and produces P.C. self-hatred. I think they're wrong, but given the unfolding panorama of liberal self-loathing and racial antipathy toward their own race, country, and civilization -- toward their own God -- it's not hard to fathom their reluctance.
Nevertheless, it is consistent with conservative principles (i.e., 19th-century "liberal", Jeffersonian and Lockean principles) to cultivate a certain civility in discourse, and to allow the black community to impetrate a modification of forms of address and nomenclature without going overboard and beginning to yield up personal integrity. "African-American" is a nomenclatural invention of the Left that I don't use, precisely out of suspicion of the Left's impulse to dominate others by defining terms. Nevertheless, it's possible to retire some country English without doing great violence to the language, even in the face of black hypocrisy on the subject.
It isn't necessary, however, to yield to the impulse to self-flagellate, or to flagellate one's own mother, as talmand talked about, or to talk about "stamping out" or "hating" one's own regional culture. Considering that others have been less forthcoming on their own behalf on this subject -- both Northern whites and blacks everywhere -- the demand for constant Southern self-censorship is hypocritical, and expressions of shame and remorse by Southerners for failing to measure up to these hypocritical yardsticks is idle. Better to point out that the Carolinian, for all that he misspoke and then backtracked unconvincingly, nevertheless thought to say a good thing about another, than to indulge one's own New York prejudices against Southerners, as Labyrinthos does, by pointing to his solecism as if it were the only object in view and the only topic in the room worth commenting on.
The Carolinian will do better next time with his attempts at civility, and at meeting others in the middle of the road. By then, the New Yorkers might even think about trying it themselves.