Internet trolls have posted several fake stories about white people getting attacked at movie theaters for trying to watch Black Panther. Like a lot of racist fictional accounts, several of these stories include angry black people calling the white person whitey. In all my life, I’ve never heard anyone actually do this. Is this something that really regularly happens?
I’ve been called cracker from guys in a moving car. And I’ve been spit upon by non-white construction workers on purpose. Big deal.
I have been called honkie several times, never whitey.
To make things clear, the question isn’t - “Do white people experience racism/anti-white bigotry?”
In my experience, it depends on the environment. I spent a large part of my career working in technical colleges in Georgia. In these environments, non-whites are in the majority and tend to be the ones with the power in that microcosm, so you see behavior you might not see when the demographic is shifted in wider society. Whoever is in the majority tends to treat whoever is in the minority badly, plain and simple.
An example: I had an African American female faculty member from Ohio teaching a nursing course in my department, let’s call her Denise. Denise’s class is comprised of 90% African American females from Savannah, Georgia. All should be fine, correct? Well, Denise comes to my office one day and says, “I have never seen black people act like this in all my life!”. She goes on to report that the black girls are bullying the 3 white girls in the class and calling them names, cracker, whitey, white girl, pasty face, etc…and she is shocked. I told her, to look at it this way: The black people who live in Savannah are used to spending all their time in predominantly black environments, be it their schools, churches, whatever, since Savannah is a majority-black town. They don’t don’t know what it is like to walk into a classroom and be the only black person in it. Then I asked her, “Denise, you know exactly what that is like, don’t you?”, and she she replied, “Oh yes, I do! When I went to college in Ohio, I was the only black person in many of my classes!” I told her to consider how being the majority empowers people to sometimes act badly, and she was able to get the bullying under control. It was just very telling that she was so knocked sideways by it. Humans, for the most part, suck.
Well, to directly answer your original question, yes, personally I have. But not for years since I was a kid, and it was largely due to going to public rural schools where I was the minority, much as I described in my previous post. I have been on the bullying end of a racial slur, and yes it hurt at the time because as a child it always hurts to be called a name, but you grow up and become stronger than that.
I have a black friend who is fond of telling me how white I am. It is good natured for the most part. I am fully aware that i act white, because I am white. I dont know how to be anything else. But yea I have been called ‘whitey’ several times in my life.
One fine evening in New York city, I was walking back from Times Square to catch the Weehawken ferry to New Jersey. It was just after dark, and I heard a voice yell out, “Hey Whitey!”
I looked around, and realized I was the only person I could see on the street to whom that appellation could be properly applied.
I heard it again, “Hey Whitey!”
I saw ahead of me down the block a large dude yelling up at a window a couple of floors above the street level. Just as I came up to him the window opened, a guy looked out and the guy on the street yelled out, “Hey Whitey, a bunch of us are going up town, you coming with?”
Just then a lovely and lissome arm reached out and clotheslined Whitey, dragging him away from the window. Before the window slammed shut, a dulcet voice rang out in tones that could bend metal, and declared, “Whitey ain’t going nowhere.”
The guy on the street saw me walking by and looked a little embarrassed . He said, “I guess Whitey’s got better things to do.”
“Looks like,” I said, and continued on my way home.
My white friends and I will call each other Whitey in a mockery of racism in general. I’ve never been called, or heard anyone else called “Whitey” in any serious gesture of racial discord. I have been addressed by nonwhites on several occasions as “muthafuckah” but I’d be loathe to attribute that to specifically racial motivation.
Nope. Not that I heard, anyway.
No, I’ve never been called whitey. It sounds like something from a 70s tv show. I assumed these Black Panther trolls were Russians who don’t have idiomatic grasp of American English.
I read somewhere that “yt” has become a social media shorthand slang for “whitey”, so somebody is using it.
I also read a story about Obama’s portrait artist Kehinde Wiley calling his controversial images of black women beheading white women as a “play on the whole ‘kill whitey’ thing”.
I don’t think it is an outdated term.
A new one I have been hearing is Saltine.
But at the end of the day, all of it is very stupid and inconsequential.
I’ve seen yt as an abbreviation for white, since it’s often followed by a noun - people, man etc.
Wally Cleaver had a friend named Whitey.
Not that I recall. I think I would recall something like that, I hear racial epithets used by ‘white’ people a lot, rarely directed at them.
An ooooooold man called me “ofay” once. I thought it was kind of cute.
FWIW, many, many more black folks have called me “sister,” the youngsters sometimes call me “Auntie,” and one young lady even called me “Boo.” Made my day.
A very ooooooold insult you come across in old folk tale books or slave narratives is black people referring to white people, especially men, as “peckerwood”. I have tried to find the origin of it, but no luck learning what it means. Most of the people who used it are now dead.
I wouldn’t call it a regular occurrence, but a few times in my half century I’ve been called “whitey”, “cracker”, and once, a long time ago “honky bitch”.
It’s not impossible that some white person has had racial crap yelled at them at a screening of Black Panther because there’s always a jerk in the crowd but I sort of doubt it’s anything common. If such an event did occur I’d expect the racists to do their best to make it go viral as “proof” that the black are out to get whites, or whatever their current conspiracy theory is, but one or two isolated incidents do not represent a trend.
Grumbacher Red: Haha, “peckerwood!!” I’ve mostly heard white guys call other white guys that. I did a modern-slang retelling of Poe’s “The Raven” where the narrator tells the bird to “Get your pecker off my wood/ and go find someplace else to stay.” (and the birdie said “No way.”)
I guess the slang wasn’t entirely modern.
Broomstick: Oooh, “honky.” Possibly even more dated than ofay, and admittedly not as charming. Especially with “bitch” attached. But if we were collectors of cultural rarities, I think we both have museum-quality pieces lol.
Ice on the fringe, it’s so damn frosty
That people like, “Damn! That’s a cold ass honky”
–Thrift Shop, Macklemore