PUT DOWN ST. IDES! “Wife beater” is race neutral, unless you can show otherwise. Can you? “House boy” immediately (in the U.S.) conjures up black slavery. Are you really trying to deny this. What metric do you use to decide if some term is racist? It must actually apply 100% to the offended group? Where do you get this shit from. Now if we disagree, there’s an easy way to determine whose take is right. Try the term on the next ten black guys you see. I guarantee you ignorance will be straightened out rather quickly.
But only when that behavior is engaged in by black people, because nearly the entire black population of the country was enslaved. So there is obviously a racial element.
See above. House boys were slaves, too, and it’s not just about betrayal. It’s about perceived betrayal because their lives were not as hard as those of the field slaves.
Imagine a positive version of the term, if you can. If Powell had stood up to Rumsfeld et al and you’d heard somebody say “Great job, Powell! He’s not like a slave at all!” wouldn’t you have said “What the fuck is wrong with you, why are you equating black people with slaves in judging their behavior?”
When I lived in West Africa, it was the normal word for a housekeeper. We had a houseboy and a cook.
Give it up Dio. AFAIK, nobody in the history of the human race has ever been talked out of being offended no matter how illogical their offense is. This is probably doubly the case when they think they are catching a person in some kind of gotcha.
The image that often comes to my mind is that they are suckling their precious offense to their teat, like it were their beloved child that must be defended from all harm.
Don’t you see that your making an issue of Juan Williams’ loyalty to Fox News solely in regards his ethnicity? That’s (soft) racism, I think.
I assume Juan Williams is working for Fox because Fox is willing to pay him well. Why should his ethnicity matter?
Why does Obama deserve only praise from Juan Williams? Because of their mutually shared ethinicity? Why can’t Juan possibly be sincere in his disagreements with Obama? Should he should just shut up because we can’t have black folks disagreeing with each other on TV? Should Juan always show loyalty or solidarity with like-skinned folk, despite what he actually may believe (and disagree with) on some given issue?
“House niggers” were still slaves. Slaves that were held in slightly higher esteem by their masters and much lower esteem by their non-house peers, but slaves nonetheless. Calling a modern black man a “houseboy” is comparing him to a slave. I don’t quite understand how you’re arguing otherwise.
I saw Colin Powell speak two years ago at a user conference that Salesforce.com puts on every year for their customers - Salesforce.com is a software-on-demand company whose CEO, Marc Benioff, is pretty civic-minded. They usually have a keynote speaker address the audience on social issues, charitable giving, corporate responsibility, etc. - last year they had George Lucas and Bob Thurman (Buddhist scholar) in an on-stage chat on education, charitable causes, etc.
So a couple years ago, Colin Powell gave a pretty stirring speech on civic responsibillity, and what called him to serve, not only in the military, but to serve charitable causes, of which there he supports many. During his speech, he kept the political comments to a minimum, but there were a couple fairly subtle remarks that seemed to indicate he was hung out to dry, depending on how you heard them.
After his speech, he sat near a director from my company, who was also speaking - my collague had a few moments to chat as they were dressing the stage for the next speaker. He asked Powell something like “will I be able to vote for you in 2008?”, to which Powell replied along the lines of: “I’ve been through the wringer once, I’d rather not do it again”.
You probably should have mentioned this an hour ago. 
In the standard U.S. context, the way Merijeek used it, it’s more offensive.
If I can make a Spider-Man-style effort to pull this train back to the tracks: I wasn’t aware Powell was advising Obama. That’s a pretty clear, but tacit, endorsement. It may not be Powell’s style to make an open endorsement of a Democrat, but national security is McCain’s chief edge over Obama and I wouldn’t be surprised if they push him into an official endorsement over the summer.
All this from a guy who has almost 30,000 posts on a board dedicated to fighting ignorance. Amazing. So, is Bill O’Reilly a house boy? Sean Hannity? Rush Limbaugh?
Can you point to all the uses of house boy when it referred to someone selling out his own cultural group when that group was not black people?
And finally, how is what Powell did defined as selling out his own cultural group? If anything, didn’t he let us all down?
Please refer to Rule #1: Stop digging.
Your hypothetical does not sound offensive to me. Strange, but not offensive.
I think what you’re missing is that the phraseology in question is intended to disparage voluntary subservience and obsequiousness towards whites. It’s black people choosing to be submissive, and acting live “slaves,” especially when those actions are detrimental to black people as a whole.
Ahh, as you can see from previous posts, I thought you might look across the oceans. But p[lease, feel free to share that unrelated fact to the ten black guys you’re going to try the phrase out on. Do you really think this has any bearing on whether the term is racist here in the U.S.? :rolleyes: x :rolleyes:
The white guys you mentioned are not selling out their won cultural groups that I’m aware of, so I have no idea what you’re getting at.
I also said that Powell was NOT a house boy.
And the St. Ides keeps flowing. Funny thing about slavery, the slave masters were usually the ones who decided who did what. Or were you unaware of that unfortunate fact?
We have no possible way of knowing if this assertion is true. He may have believed what he was stating before the UN at the time and only discovered after the fact that he was intentionally kept out of the loop.
Him not knowing the truth and believing in what later turned out to be an intentionally false assessment of Iraq’s WMD capability may have made his presentation before the UN more believable, as Powell himself believed it.
But they trash Obama, yet the term is never used referring to them. Why can it be used for Williams and not the other Obama bashers? Think…think…
But let’s open it up. Show me all these times, when it was used to refer to someone who supposedly sold out his own cultural group and that cultural group was not black.
I’ll wait.
Not the point of discussion with YOU, and you know it. But at least your looking for some safe haven is a good sign
Because it wasn’t a label applied when **Merijeek **saw a picture of Powell and saw a dark skin tone, it was a label applied because **Merijeek **observed his behavior and thought his behavior mimicked that of, yes, a black slave owned by white masters who is happy to serve them over his own conscience.
I certainly think it’s a land mine of a phrase, and inaccurate, but I have to agree that it’s not precisely racist. It’s an allusion to an ugly time in history, sure. But is every reference to slavery racist?
I’ll also add that Marijeek isn’t the first to make the analogy. Harry Belafonte said in October 2002: “There’s an old saying in the days of slavery. There are those slaves who lived on the plantation, and there were those slaves who lived in the house. You got the privilege of living in the house if you served the master. Colin Powell was permitted to come into the house of the master.”
Now, I’m not going to claim that black men can’t be racist, just that this is hardy an original sin. I think anyone with a reasonable grasp of how analogies work knows that this is commenting on behavior, not race.
How many times does it have to be explained to you that it would make no sense to “try it out” at random. I’ll tell you what…ask the next ten guys you see if they think the phrase is racist.
I wasn’t attempting to weigh in on whether or not the use of the term was racist. I was disputing Dio’s assertion that the term didn’t imply a comparison to slavery.
II ask of you what I asked of the other apologist: show me those instances in which the term was used to describe a man who “sold out his culture” where that culture wasn’t black America.
So what? Belafonte said it about a man who didn’t toe the line of what Belafonte thinks every black man needs to toe. Fuck him, that racist asshole.
I guess you lack a little knowledge of histiry here. Slaves who worked in the house were often better taken care of than slaves who worked in the field. Many times, thos house slaves, seeking the good opinion and continued (comparatively) privelged treatment from the masters, often participated in the degradation of the field slaves and, informed to the masters about their activities and betrayed any plans to escape. Betraying escape plans was a voluntary activity. Modern American blacks who seek to ingratiate themselves to the white power elite by denigrating fellow blacks are thus comparable to those betrayers of old.