Many, many, many Southerners toiled long hours in the cotton fields. It was a vital source of income.
Race has absolutely nothing to do with it.
I find it insulting to my own family heritage that people associate hard work in the cotton fields with any race. My grandparent’s skin looked like leather. That’s what fifty years of working in the fields does to you.
The cotton plant rips right through gloves and leaves your hands shredded. My dad had to work in the fields until he graduated high school. The military was his ticket out of that life.
As I said upthread, I don’t think the adjective “cotton pickin’” has its origins in racism at all, and has a lot to do with having the same cadence as “mother fuckin’” It seems highly probable that this was a euphemism, on a par with “freakin’” and “shoot” and “mother lovin’”
But that still doesn’t mean I’d use it today. Now that plenty of people demonstrably feel that it’s tied to a racist pat, you’d have to be pretty tone deaf to modern nuances to continue using it.
It’s like the Swastika - sure, yeah, ancient religious and spiritual symbol, uh-huh. Yep, agreed, nothing racist in the origin, lots of peoples used it and continue to use it across the world. But if you wear one in modern Western society, none of that matters. So, all the people who want to pretend cotton-picking is still free of connotation? Should probably think about how that makes you look…
You know what, I just saw it in the wild, and I get it now. This man is not Southern, he’s not rural, he in no way resembles a person who just uses the phrase naturally. There is no question that this is a dog whistle:
This is just one of those times when I shake my head and wonder how the heck am I going to remember not to use this phrase? It’s one of those things that comes out without thinking. Argh! Will the racists end up owning the entire language?
My father used to use it in this fashion, when my sisters and I were of a tender age. He grew up in Los Angeles, far from any cotton fields, and his parents were Jews from eastern Europe. So I’m kinda skeptical about the alleged racist implications of this phrase.
Can you elaborate? Exactly how is using the phrase “punching down”, in your view? For example, how would you describe the “pushing down” in the phrase “I just slammed my durned hand in the cotton-pickin’ door”?
But no one says “cotton picker”. How would “burger flippin’” be “punching down” in the phrase “he thought I’d give him the burger flippin’ meal for free”?
Everything is offensive. Im blind, and I even hesitate to use that word in certain company. Some people (but not blind ones) think you need to say sightless, or unsiighted, or visually challenged, or “special” or “you poor dear”. I’m sure there is a movement among the self-appointed faux-libereals to create epithets that are even less offensive than that. And then there is “visually challenged American”.
Cotton-pickin is not offensive to peoplle whose ancestry reflects cotton picking labor. It is offensive to the fringe radicals who make it their business to impose sanitized language.
Did Joel Payne say he thought it was offensive? Or did Fox News’ legal affairs department say they had to cover their ass to defend themselves from exactly the fringe of radical offense-mongers that I described in my post?
Yes,he said so on air, immediately: “Brother, let me tell you something, I got some relatives who picked cotton and I’m not going to sit back and let you attack me on TV like that.”
So is Joel Payne a “radical offense-monger”? Or just a man whose “ancestry reflects cotton picking labor” and who was personally offended?
The discussion was already confrontational, and it is characteristic for “protected” people to play the offended card with every opportunity. If Bossie and Payne were both supporting the same side, nobody would have said a word about the remark.
I grew up in an all-white community, and we used the expression when adults were around and we couldn’t say “goddam”. Seventy years ago. Nobody attacked anybody “on TV like that”
Same here- not even that far back. Both my grandfather & grandmother’s families on my father’s side were migrant farm workers from 1930s-1960 and I know at least my grandfather and his family picked cotton. We are about as white as you can get (and all sides primarily from the South).
I never imagined it would be a problem. Farthest thing from my mind. A phrase I haven’t heard since Foghorn Leghorn used it. Now that I know it is a problem for some, I will be certain not to use it.
About a month ago a family member, who is black, asked me what I thought about this phrase, and I explained how innocuous it seems to me and said that it’s not worth getting worked up about if some older guy says it in an obvious substitution-swear-word fashion.
Nevertheless she expressed to me how the phrase is offensive to many. I will take her assessment at face value and put the phrase in the same bucket as “coon’s age” and “calling a spade a spade”–things that are probably innocent in origin but are best never uttered. The list of offensive words and phrases is short enough to be avoided.
My fear is that some day I’ll use some other random phrase that is lurking in the ever-changing English language like a land mine and get in serious trouble. Until she asked me about this particular phrase, I had never considered it anything other than dated and quaint, so I could have easily used it and gotten myself in trouble.