Do you consider "cotton-picken" to be racist or offensive?

[Jasmine]

**Racist English Phrases with a Seriously Awful History **

The phrase “are you out of your cotton-picking mind?” seems to have a serious racial overtone, particularly against black slaves in the Southern United States, who were the pickers of cotton for much of American history. Cotton-picking is usually used as a stand-in for “damn,” to make it more socially acceptable than swearing (ironically enough). If you’re not from the South, you may have heard the adjective “cotton-picking” for the first time from a Bugs Bunny cartoon from 1952.

Linguist Gary Martin over at The Phrase Finder has found that “cotton-picking” is actually a pretty old term, dating back to the first European cotton plantations in the 1700s, but that it only really showed up as an adjective in the 1940s. And in the examples he found, it referred to Southerners in general, not just blacks. But as a massive debate over the use of the phrase in Canadian parliament in 2011 shows, many still believe that to ask somebody to “wait just a cotton-picking minute” is to make a derogatory link between a slave occupation and a modern expression of frustration. Obviously, it’s not difficult to see why.

My take on it is that it is best to avoid the usage.