But if people do take offence, then it does become offensive.
Regardless of origin, if black people now find it offensive, it’s offensive. Racism is in the eye of the beholder.
Although I think there are more offensive things in the world, I agree - it’s probably offensive now - and this is why I think it’s OK that golliwogs went quietly out of fashion.
I’m not convinced it always was offensive, in all contexts and places.
Well, for starters we have in this very thread adults who grew up with golliwog dolls defending the depiction of black people as grotesque clownlike figures. That you don’t see the problem with this is part of the problem with this.
Do you think that black people weren’t offended by golliwog dolls?
They were designed to look like blackface minstrels, and I gather from Wikipedia that the original golliwog in Upton’s first golliwog book was explicitly described as being ugly.
So golliwogs don’t look human and that a white-skinned golliwog-style doll looks “creepy” to you, but you still don’t see how they’re racist? You realize that for hundreds of years a lot of white people didn’t think black people were really human, right? This was one of the major justifications for slavery. And if golliwogs were just stylized humanoids and not caricatures of black people it shouldn’t matter what color their skin was.
Yes, and in my last post I gave examples of both.
To me, whether the original creator intended it as a racial slur has little to do with the issue. The fact is both the name and image were frequently used to make fun of black people.
Now I’m sure you’ll argue that it wasn’t frequently, and this boils down to “She says, he says”.
But the difference is, I don’t need to imply you’re lying or exaggerating; in any situation where there is racism there will be people, particularly children, thinking “What racism?” As I said, there are people saying that about the damn B&W Minstrel show.
OTOH, for your point to carry you have to imply I’m lying, or exaggerating, and the people I’ve spoken to are doing the same.
That wasn’t my claim – I was saying wog existed as a slur prior to golliwog.
You make some good points on countering the possibility that golliwog is derived from wog, or jolly wog.
It’s still possible of course it’s derived in this way, but I’ll take back that the etymology is obvious, or a huge coincidence.
It’s probably past time to move this to IMHO.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
I don’t understand what you’re talking about, or accusing me of now.
I’m saying that, having grown up in a culture where Golly was commonplace, I am unaware of it having caused enormous offence at the time. You could educate me otherwise with evidence.
In a small NZ village which I will not name for obvious reasons, there is a shop called Gollies, if I remember correctly. It has golliwogs outside. Been there for years and so far no one has torched the place or run the owner out on a rail, as no one considers it offensive. But, it’s not America.
Near my house where I live in East Asia, there are a pair of golliwog figurines outside someone’s house. It’s just not an issue here.
I could tell about the brand of toothpaste here, but I don’t want posters to be calling on the UN to invade to right this heinous wrong.
BTW, if it’s wrong to own golliwogs isn’t it about time to ban all “Irish” jokes, or “blond” jokes or…
Is it racist when black people call white people “whitey” etc?
I have known more non white racists than I know racist white people.
BTW, I had a golliwog when a child and it didn’t make me grow up to dislike black or non white people, which was just as well, as I’ve worked with non white and black people all my life.
In fact, where I live, there aren’t any white people.
It depends on context. If whitey is merely an identifier of white people, like latino is an identifier of people of Hispanic background, then it’s not racist.
If the term is meant to be insulting, then it’s racist.
Note however, that insults directed at the majority/powerful group of a population are less severe than those directed at a minority or marginalized group. That’s not to say they’re OK, but no-one’s going to believe rough caricatures of white people in the US.
So what? Many black people do consider the toy insulting and the insult “golliwog” was common, according to people I’ve known who grew up in that era. Like I said, there are racist things that I encountered growing up that I didn’t notice to be racist at the time. That doesn’t make them OK.
I have lots of gay / female / Jewish friends, so if I say something is not homophobic / sexist / anti-semitic, it isn’t.
To give an example of this, in the UK the term “Paki” is offensive, and racist. The term “Pakistani” however is simply an identifier of people from Pakistan.
It might seem strange to some that specifically an abbreviation can be offensive. Simply put, the former was and is used as an insult (to South Asians in general, not just Pakistanis), and the latter has not been.
We don’t have to wonder about the etymology of the name - the author who coined it had this to say:
Literary fiction of the 19th and early 20th centuries (actually, probably before and after too) is full of names just like this; Fezziwig, Chuzzlewit, Bombadil, Rumblebuffin, Jabberwocky, Bandersnatch etc.
Agreed, and there would be contexts and places still where it is not considered offensive, as evidenced by some of the examples.
And if *actual *gay, Jewish, women said otherwise, would you listen to them?
Honestly, the arrogance of some people is overwhelming.
Erm, whoosh?
To clarify: I was making fun of the position of “I have friends of type X, therefore I know whether a statement is offensive to type X”.
However, I would agree with you that if you have friends of type X who have actually told you they do or do not find something offensive, then that’s relevant, even if only anecdotally.
No-one here has bit the bullet though and suggested they have black friends who grew up in that era and say they don’t find them offensive.
I’m not accusing you of anything beyond what you’ve said in this thread, such as:
That you didn’t see anything offensive about golliwog dolls when you were a child is one thing. Children have a good excuse for being naive/innocent/ignorant: they’re children. Even when I was a kid in the 1980s one still occasionally saw racist caricatures of black people in old cartoons. Thinking of characters one might see on the breakfast table, from 1889 to 1989 the Aunt Jemima line of breakfast foods was marketed with the image of a mammy. (The Aunt Jemima character has since been redesigned as a more modern housewife type.) IIRC then in the 1980s Aunt Jemima was no longer depicted as speaking in an uneducated manner or serving white people, but she was still shown in a slave costume. Although I did not know this at the time, older slaves were often addressed as “aunt” and “uncle” and the name Aunt Jemima was taken from a minstrel show song. This all totally went over my head when I was a kid; I just thought Aunt Jemima was a black woman from olden times famous for her delicious pancakes. I saw nothing offensive about the Aunt Jemima character, and I doubt many other white children did either. I don’t think this made us stupid or racist. We were just kids and didn’t know any better.
We should all know better now though, and there were plenty of adults who did or should have known better even then. While the mammy stereotype includes some positive attributes like kindness and loyalty, it is still degrading to black women and evokes old racist ideas about how black people were happy being slaves. The golliwog character has similar roots in minstrel show depictions of black people and racist caricatures. Here’s a golliwog and here’s a vintage ad for “Pickaninny Freeze”. (I don’t know if this term is well known in the UK, but a “pickaninny” is a black child. This term is considered very insulting today.) It’s not a weird coincidence that they look alike. Golliwogs look like racist caricatures of black people because they are racist caricatures of black people.
Using images like this as toys or in advertizing helps to make racism seem normal and acceptable. It’s understandable that people who had golliwog dolls as children might have fond memories of innocently playing with these toys, but it’s not a good thing that white children grew up with positive feelings about this sort of racist imagery.
Have you been reading this thread? Because a couple of posters have already talked about how they or older people they know considered golliwogs offensive and how the term “golliwog” itself was used to insult black people.
If you’re looking for a sociological study then I’m afraid I haven’t been able to find one, although I did turn up this article: Varge, D., & Zuk, R. (2013). Golliwogs and Teddy Bears: Embodied Racism in Children’s Popular Culture. Journal Of Popular Culture, 46(3), 647-671. It discusses how the golliwog was a “bearer of the codes of black-faced minstrelsy” (p. 648) and explains that “the origins of Upton’s golliwog are firmly grounded in American and British racist popular culture” (p. 653). In the conclusion, the authors write “It is possible for young children to be unaware of racist meanings in stories, and enjoying such books as a child does not necessarily lead to being an unreconstructed racist. However, when *adults *call upon the personal childhood self in order to deny social knowledge of racism, they engage in a display of white cultural power…Benevolent use of golliwog imagery does not turn racism on its head, but fortifies it by making it seemingly immune to criticism.” (p. 666-667)
While I was looking for scholarly articles about golliwogs, I found a citation for a brief piece about the term “wog”: Casselman, B. (2005). Wog! Origin of a Racist Insult. Vocabula Review, 7(8), 1. I don’t have access to the full text, but the summary given for it is “The article discusses the origin of the word ‘wog’ in the English language. According to the author, ‘wog’ is a vile, vulgar, racist slur popularized and first used in England. He mentions that the origin of the word is disputed but the most cogent evidence suggests that it is a shortened form of the word ‘golliwog.’”
I just checked the OED, which says of “wog” that “none of the many suggested etymologies is satisfactorily supported by the evidence”. It does seem more likely that “wog” derived from “golliwog” than the other way around, as the earliest print use of “wog” given in the OED is from 1929 and Upton’s first golliwog book was published in 1895.
Just found this article: Burke, V. M. (1976). Mummy Didn’t Mean No Harm. Language Arts, 53(3), 272-275. Abstract: “The time has come for white authors to realize their own limitations in dealing with minority images in childrens books and quit sowing seeds of racism in the minds of defenseless children.”
The article is mostly about controversy over the Little Black Sambo books, but quotes a 1972 letter that ran in The Times that mentions the offensiveness of the term “golliwog”. “Mr. J. Khalique, a Pakistani, suddenly became little Black Sambo to his classmates when the book was read to his primary class. He suggests that making words like ‘Sambo,’ ‘golliwog,’ and ‘darkie’ obsolete for small children ‘would be a blessing, as to coloured children such words give deep offense, and to their parents such words are obscene.’ He concludes: ‘Any harmonious multiracial society of the near future will find books like Little Black Sambo intolerable.’ (LDT, 4/28/72, p. 15)”
Do you realise that I live in England? It’s not so much that I was ignorant, as a child, of the horrible ways in which these things were uses. It just didn’t really happen here. Like I said, happy to be educated otherwise with relevant evidence.
The word ‘wog’ pre-existed ‘golliwogg’ - the author who coined the name is quoted as being upset that people thought she used it as the basis for the name.
And I take it your anecdote counts as relevant, while conflicting ones do not.
So, are you maintaining that during your entire lifetime in England, as a child in school, and later you never heard this word used to refer to a black person, whether in jest or otherwise? Not ever? Not once?