Ethnic slurs in old books that you like - what impression?

Cafe Society
61

I once read a biography of Mitchell, who, before she was an author, was a reporter for the Atlanta Constitution. She did mostly human-interest stories, and habitually, when quoting blacks, she used a phonetic dialect. She was roundly praised for it by those of the time.

The passage which has always struck me as particularly bad in GWTW is the one in which Mitchell describes newly-elected black politicians during Reconstruction. Since I can’t quote it exactly off-hand, I’ll paraphrase it: that they spent their time in office eating goobers and slipping their unaccustomed feet in and out of shoes.

62

As an aside, I’ve read that for many years, it was common for sportswriters to quote black ballplayers in this style. It wasn’t til the Civil Rights Movement that this changed. Seems so bizarre now.

63

Tolkien is clear. They’re men from the Far Harad, and they’re black like troll-men. If you don’t read it that way, you’re not alone, but, like I said, I don’t buy it, and I probably won’t unless I see some convincing counterargument from an authority with actual knowledge of Tolkien’s intent with that passage.

64

Blake. You’re talking some blish, yo.

Nigger was a perjorative hurled at blacks throughout the 19th century, and earlier. The more genteel and educated peoples didn’t use it, most religious leadership didn’t use it, anti-slavery forces didn’t use it, the better class of journals, pamphlets and newspapers didn’t use it. People who did use “nigger” had livelihoods that thrived on black labor: landowners, bankers, slave traders, patrollers, etc. Also run of the mill bigots like the postwar KKK and common folks.

Common, working class black laborers and agriculturally-based blacks called themselves niggers, true, but people in the black (and white) professional classes and polite society resounded rejected it and referred to them as coloreds, negroes and Creoles by the turn of the century.

The United States Colored Troops (also known as Buffalo Soliders) was formed in 1863. It wasn’t the United States Nigger Troops. The Freedman’s Bureau was formed after the war; not the Free Nigger Bureau. The NAACP was an Association of Colored People, not Nigger People.

Lovecraft was born in 1890, born into a solidly middle class family and was writing the Dream-Cycle stories and Chluthu mythos by 1925. Do you honestly believe that by then this 35-year old man was so sheltered he had *no idea * nigger was an offensive word?

Do you honestly believe a well-read Anglophile like Lovecraft would be ignorant of the connotations of nigger in his writings?

Do you really think a conservative, anti-immigration, isolationist, germophobic, psychophobic white man isn’t very likely racist?

Niggerman the Cat is supposed to be, what, charming?

C’mon, maaa-aaa-aan.

Lissa. Some can be said of Joel Chandler Harris, who worked at the Atlanta Constitution even before Mitchell did, and the essays and short stories of sociologist Zora Neale Hurston.

65

Here’s a bit of analysis from a Tolkien scholar, Tom Shippey. I find it more convincing than the lame apologists who try to deny what is right in front of them because Tolkien must be a pure saint for his work to have merit. A salient quote:

Shippey goes on to discuss how outspokenly hostile Tolkien was to Nazism. Again, I think Tolkien’s wording is simply insensitive, and hence unintentionally damaging, not the least to himself, since he clearly takes pains in other parts of the book to embrace a pluralistic solution to the problem of Evil, to the point that the heros are the weakest and smallest of Middle Earth’s denizens. It’s unfortunate, because Tolkien’s preoccupation with “race”, as it concerned not only different species, but also strains within those species, in emulation of the myths that inspired his fiction, make him an obvious target for charges of racism. I think the final analysis will reveal Tolkien was, at worst, far less racist than the society he inhabited.

66

At the risk of opening another can of worms, it’s clear that the Calormens of the Narnia books are both Middle Eastern {particularly recalling “The Turk” of medieval times} and bad, unlike the jolly wholesome middle-class English Narnians. Why, the swarthy bounders even have the temerity to worship a different God. While there are one or two good Calormens, taken as a whole they are Dusky Heathens and Frightful Rotters: that should play rather nicely at the movies right now, actually. Roll on A Horse And His Boy.

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No, he isn’t at all clear. They also had red tongues and white eyes, features never seen in any human or even ape. Certainly they were humanoid, just like trolls, elves, dwarves and various other races in his world, but it is far from clear that they were men.

If they were clearly men then why did they have white eyes and red tongues?

Askia,

You don’t quite get society in the 19th century. There were a great many terms that were used by the working classes or men that wouldn’t be used by the gentry or in mixed company. “Nigger” is certainly one of them, but so is “pregnant” or “toilet”. That doesn’t mean that pregnant or toilet was an offensive term at the time.

See the difference? This has nothing to do with offensiveness per se but as a way of being polite and marking oneself as genteel. We could construct a whole list of these terms that wouldn’t be used in polite company that weren’t in any way offensive of themselves.

Your questions are themsalves very telling. Anyone who doesn’t agree with your politics must likewise be racist, even when his politics have nothing to do with race. And an educated person has to agree that nigger was offensive. Hmmm :dubious:
Niggerman the Cat is almost certainly not supposed to be charming. It’s rather hard to explain the effect to someone who clearly doesn’t understand the concept of gentility and social taboos that aren’t enforced by law. The closest you can probably come to it would be imagining the effect of calling one’s cat “Sodomy” today. There’s nothing inherently offensive about the word but it would be considered rude or risque. It’s not a word people would be inclined to use casually in polite company. But once again it’s hard to explain if you just don’t get the concept of gentility as it was then. People will discuss almost anything openly these days whereas in the 19th and early 20th century that just wasn’t ‘done’. But it’s the same general concept. In the modern parlance it would be considered ‘edgy’, not offensive.

I hope that clears it up a bit for you.

68

Last I checked I had white eyeballs and a rather dark-pink tongue. The color contrasts might be more dramatic to someone not used to very dark skin. Read the Shippey quote.

69

That’s certainly true, but then Lewis never tried to disguise the fact, even going to the extent of calling the rulers pashas and giving them scimitars. The whole Narnia series was a Christian allegory so the inclusion of allegeorical infidels is hardly racist, even if it is sectarian. The Calormenians weren’t bad because of their race, they were bad because of their religion and rejection of Aslan and support of false gods. That they also happened to be another race was mostly a side issue that clarified the “us” and “the” distinction.

Conversely the Middle calss English Narnians were wholesome because they were literally saints, not because they were middle class and English. There were certainly many ‘white’ people in the stories who were at least as unwholesome as the Calormenians if not worse. Remember the white witch?

IMO there is a difference between racism and not subscribing to moral relativism. Lewis believed that there was an absolute morlaity and one true faith and his books were written to tell that story. Along the way he used various races and species to simplify a complex real world as all good fables do, but that doesn’t constiute racism.

70

Read it.

So you don’t have white eyes and a red tongue then? I though not.

71

Not gonna get through, am I.

72

IIRC it says somewhere that all humans in the Narnian world originally came from Earth through various magic portals. So they actually ARE explicitly Turkish.

73

On lovecraft, I will throw in that lovecraft, in 1912, wrote a poem called “On the creation of Niggers” which, to summerize, is pretty hateful.

There are also references to lovecrafts racism in “Call of Cthulhu”, specifically when the narrator insinuates that his uncle was probably murdered by a “swarthy dockworker”. The Horror at Red Hook isn’t particulary flattering, though I can’t remember much of it( It’s far from my favorite story of his for a number of reasons, racism being one of the lesser ones).

And of course, there’s the scene in “Herbert West: Reanimator”, at the end of the “Six Shots by Moonlight” chapter where a reanimated black man is compared unfavorably with a gorilla.

In his defense, I will say that Lovecraft appeared to be growing out of his xenophobia(which is no doubt heavily intertwined with his racism). In “At the Moutains of Madness”, his attitude towards the old ones is not that they are monsters, but that “They were men!”. Perhaps if he had lived a bit longer, we would have learned how WW2 had influnced his views.

S.T. Joshi, in his Bio of lovecraft, argues that Lovecraft’s racial views were somewhat independent from the rest of his thinking, a stunted growth from his upbringing that remained static while the rest of his thinking tended to change and evolve as he grew.

74

Blake. 1) You’re contradicting yourself. Agreeing that “nigger”, “pregnant” and “toilet” weren’t used by the Victorians out of a rigid code of politeness and then asserting they weren’t offensive to the Victorian’s sensibilities is just wrong. I will agree, however, concede they were probably more scandalized by the bodily function references than in the racial slur.

  1. I’m not responsible for your delusional inferences twisting my questions into unsupported suppositions of my politics or my opinion of you.

  2. Look, son. Lovecraft named his pet Nigger-Man. It’s a common, low-class thing to do. It betrays a racist thinking, however warmly expressed, to equate a beloved pet with an ethnic gender widely regarded in your day as being brutish, childlike potentially dangerous and subhuman, especially when using the meme, “Nigger.” You are not going to convince me otherwise on this point.

(On Preview)

Thank you for your 2 cents, HPL. Here’s the relevent poem, found on this Aryan website where they (Har dee har) suggest it me used as a poem during Black History Month.

On the Creation of Niggers
H. P. Lovecraft

When, long ago, the gods created Earth
In Jove’s fair image Man was shaped at birth.
The beasts for lesser parts were designed;
Yet were too remote from humankind.
To fill the gap, and join the rest of Man,
Th’Olympian host conceiv’d a clever plan.
A beast they wrought, in semi-human figure,
Filled it with vice, and called the thing a Nigger.

Touching. And it doesn’t constitute racism at all.

75

Do you mean metaphorically literally or literally literally? I don’t recall anyone being beatified at any point, either the children or anyone else - they became legendary heroes, but that’s not the same thing - so I’m unclear as to your point here.

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Never did I suggest that those terms weren’t offensive to Victorian sensibilities. I said that they weren’t offensive per se, and weren’t intended to or believed to cause offense to black people. I’m amazed that you can’t make that distinction all by yourself. The fact that people won’t use the word sodomy in polite conversation in 2005 doesn’t mean the word is offensive to homosexuals and other practitioners of sodomy.

We’ll let the Mods deal with this. I dont; believe that accusing people of being mentally unstable is appropriate in this forum.

Child that much is obvious. You have made up your mind with half the facts and obviously limited knowledge of the era. We can only fight the ignorance of those who want it fought. Willful ignorance is a lost cause.

They were beatified insofar as at the end of “The Last Battle” they quite literally ascend to heaven with Aslan, who Lewis himself said was Christ. My point is that the kids were the direct representatives of the Christian apostles within the stories, walking with Aslan, talking to him, fighting his battles, exhorting others to have faith in him, ruling the Earth in his absence etc. At the very finale they are lifted into heaven with Aslan while their “earthly” bodies die in a train crash.

77

Just as an afterthought, using another ethnicity, for want of a better word, as an allegorical shorthand for badness - the “them” and “us” polarisation, where “we” are good - seems to me to be the main point of his using the “dusky heathen” stereotype: I’d call that a fairly clear example of racism and not merely a “side issue”.

For an interesting fantasy reversal of Tolkien and Lewis’s sloppy stereotyping {dark and foreign=bad}, I’d suggest a comparison with Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea trilogy {it is a trilogy; Tehanu was merely a rumour} in which “we” are swart of hue and “they”, the Kargad raiders, are Nordic pirates.

78

You did mean literally metaphorically then. Ascension to heaven is not synonymous with beatification, I do remember that much from Sunday school. I don’t, however, remember the apostles fighting Christ’s battles and ruling the Earth in his absence. Unless, of course, you’re speaking metaphorically again.

79

BUSTED. Never, eh? Not even when you typed, “That doesn’t mean that pregnant or toilet was an offensive term at the time.” You’re the one who brought up sodomy in this polite conversation! Twice! We aren’t arguing terms, we’re arguing names. The real problem isn’t sodomy, but calling a gay man a sodomite.

CALLED BLUFF. Did you hit “Report Bad Post” or should I? I called your inferences delusional and that Lovecraft was a germophobe and psychophobic. You introduced the words, “mentally unstable.”

APESHIT RANT. “…obviously limited…” Okay, that’s it, Blake … you know what?

Sometimes shit is so blatantly obvious you don’t need to waste time with all the facts to intuit the correct conclusions. Lovecraft is racist. Lovecraft fans says Lovecraft’s racist. Lovecraftian scholars say Lovecraft’s racist. Fucking Chluthu would say Lovecraft is racist, except he’s imaginary. Be an apologist who won’t look at the facts, fine. Just don’t smugly lecture me of having “obviously limited knowledge” or that “I don’t quite get” facts at hand. The next time you refer to me as “child”, son, you better had married my Mama.

TRUTH. I note you made no reply to the crushing racism in Lovecraft’s poem, which should speak volumes to anyone else reading this besides us two who’s really being willfully ignorant here.

FREE TIP. Print the last six words of your last quote and tack them to a mirror.

PARTING SHOT. “The Negro is fundamentally the biologically inferior of all White and even Mongolian races” – Lovecraft, 1915.

80

Catholic Sunday School?

Beatify to Non-catholics simplymeans to move to a state of grace/bliss. Similarly a saint is simply a person who has gone to heaven. Check it in your dictionary oif you doubt me. So no, I didn’t mean figuratively, I meant literally. they were literally beatified and literally saints.

Similalry the apostles did rule the Earth in Christ’s absence. In the same way the children didn’t rule the whole ERath but just those parts that were beholden to Aslan so the Apostles ruled thos epartsof the tayh beholden to Christ. If you want to take it word-for-word literally then obviously the children didn’t rule the world either.