I am too, actually.
You left out a few steps:
- People start using the agreed standard
- Somebody, somewhere gets offended by the community standard
- They start a hashtag to abolish the community standard
- Go to step 1 to come up with a new standard
Repeat forever.
I grew up hearing this all the time, it was my dad’s favorite exasperated phrase and was often appended with n*gger. It’ss not an expression I use as an adult. I agree that it has perhaps drifted from its original moorings to slave labor, but I’m uncomfortable with using it myself and would be hearing it from others as well.
You’re saying that the average American doesn’t associate picking cotton with black people? Is that a stand you want to make?
It was good to see Jordan Peele’s film Get Out reference this. Tip of the hat to history.
Certainly not for the average American but definitely some. Where I live, all of the old folks (defined as anyone over 60) picked cotton when they were young. It has nothing to do with race and everything to do with having to work hard as kids.
There is zero chance it was intentionally insulting. Brian Davis is an employee of the team (Thunder). The quote was about Russell Westbrook, the star player of that team and the defending league MVP. It was also after he had made an outstanding play. If he had said it in any way that was an insult to Russ, he’d have been fired that night. Might not even have been allowed to finish the game.
The guy was stupid to say it. Of course, it’s racist. I am a bit surprised at the weasely excuses/explanations for why it is not. It ain’t no capital crime, bit it ain’t right. Times have changed since the 1950s.
Ah. So people whose opinions differ from yours, are wrong and explaining themselves with outdated weasely excuses.
Given the response ratio, on a message board notoriously sensitive to social matters, and the calm, logical explanations provided…I’d say you’re a bit out of line.
No, what I am saying is people have different experiences and contexts that may vary greatly from yours or mine. I didn’t grow up hard and poor in the pre-1950s, I wasn’t even born yet, but I know and believe that poverty was crushing for lots of types of people and they were traumatized by it for reasons modern day folks like us can’t even begin to relate to. And that there were put downs and class divisions that were beyond mere black and white.
So I am not taking any kind of “stand”. I make a point of trying to step back and see a bigger picture than that.
My family has picked cotton for four generations. Don’t you appropriate our identity then reclaim it as a racist slur!
Having picked some cotton in my time, I can tell you it is the hottest, nastiest, back breakingest job I’ve ever encountered. The stoop is just a little so, not even a full bend where your muscles can get a stretch, but just enough to compress your vertebrae and make you wonder if you’ll ever straighten up again.
That’s why “high cotton” is a good thing. It doesn’t make the bolls any bigger, it just means your back won’t hurt all Winter.
And bolls. Do you know about bolls? Cotton is the fiber at the center of a seed pod. The pod bursts open and is dried out when you come by picking the fluffs. And the pod pieces are stiff and sharp and pointy. If you do it just wrong, as you will several times a day, those pointy bits slide right up your fingernail and under the cuticle to the nail bed. Hurts like a melonfarmer. But if you whine out loud, somebody will come over and check, and then you’ll get yelled at for bleeding on the fresh cotton.
Then there’s the bag. The bag is probably taller than you are, and made of scratchy material. Through the course of the day you’ll be clutching that thing so long your bag hand will feel like a claw, and you’ll wonder if you’ll ever straighten THAT again either. It’ll cramp, along with the muscles under your arm from keeping that bag from dragging on the ground. That shoulder will never be right again neither.
Why, I could go on ALL DAY! It’s always amused me to see folks treating f*** which is a generally pleasant experience, like a bad word, but they’ll spit out “cotton pickin’” in any company at all. They just don’t know what they’re saying, is what it is.
It’s foul rotten language in my book, but it’s not racist. Picking cotton is awful no matter what you look like.
I do agree with this somewhat. Though I think most people who use it don’t have any of that back story. It’s just a series of sounds to them, a useful euphemism for words they aren’t allowed to say.
There’s nothing wrong with starting the conversation “Hey, do you know where that came from? Maybe think it through and choose another phrase.” But a suspension seems way out of line to me.
Here’s a good video of it:
I don't believe for one minute that he meant anything bad by it. He was excited for the guy.Now I’m going to have to research whether this is racist or offensive.
I’d wager it may have been originally meant as racist and then lost the taint. Discourse activists are really seizing on words like that, though. There’s a meme going around stating that “Eskimo” is racist. I’m quite sure that the vast majority of people who use that word don’t mean anything derogatory, but if enough indigenous arctic folks think it’s offensive, it probably is.
It’s totally offensive! It’s a derogatory term for psychiatrist, suggesting their skillset is more akin to repetitive farm labor than medical science. Darker-skinned psychiatrists are particularly sensitive to it for obvious reasons.
This, exactly. The phrase is derogatory because the work itself was so despised. It has nothing to do with who is doing the work, picking cotton is just as foul for anyone who has to perform it. “Cotton pickin” describes the work and is used in the same way as any other derogatory exclamation. “Cotton picker”, OTOH, is used to describe a person and is generally expected to be offensive, as in “You are not fit for anything but the worst menial labor”.
What you left out is 5a) Some bigot, somewhere, uses the new community standard word with deliberate intent to be hurtful, this catches on, and the word is used to not only refer to the original group that the word refers to, but is also used as an insult to imply that other people are as “bad” as the group that that word is properly used for. This is insulting to the target, as they are obviously being insulted and being compared to something bad, and this is insulting to the group of people that are described by the word, as it is being used to imply that there is something wrong with them.
I like the “reverse seinfeld rule”, if you can mentally append “and there is something wrong with that” to your term, it may just be a slur.
I see how it is intended in good spirits, but it is still tearing down. He is saying that this player is not in his “right mind.” Maybe mild and maybe even good natured, but it is certainly on the insult side of the spectrum of descriptions.
Never thought about it, and not in the habit of using the phrase. But I suspect racist overtones, and went with that in my vote before looking at other posts. if for some reason the phrase popped into my head I hope to choose an alternative.
Choosing vocabulary that I think is less likely to offend other people is generally such an easy thing to do (unless it’s a random slip). I don’t often want to offend people, and never want to on the mere basis of who they happen to be. What a terrible reason to want to leave somebody worse off than we found them.
Things change over time. The acceptability of bigotry is one of those. When I was a Boy Scout, I learned how to tie a hangman’s noose. It’s an elegant knot, and I was proud to have learned how to tie it. I’d tie one to show off, if I found a piece of rope. I was embarrassed to learn, years later, that displaying a noose is a reference to lynching, and very offensive to black people who might see it.
I never saw cotton-pickin’ to be racist, ever. It was just folksy, like when Tennessee Ernie Ford said, “Bless your pea-pickin’ heart.”