“That’s mighty white of you” was a common phrase for good behavior, on the assumption that was typical of white people.
True, and a little more poking around the grotty corners of the internet even reveals other examples of mtnmatt’s coal-company motto:
Good golly, it seems as though every coal company in the early 20th century was using that racist-ass slogan.
My house has a coal boiler, converted to oil years ago.
I posted this aside in the Why Do Brits Eat Heinz Baked Beans thread back in Jan:
PS: (Hideous anachronism warning) - this has nothing whatever to do with the thread, but I just have to share this. I confess, I used a 1987 Roget’s thesaurus to clean that up. Specifically, the synonyms of Probity , which include (quoting): “…truepenny, brick, trump, true Briton, white man…”. Sheesh.
Roget’s Thesaurus, fer Chrissakes.
j
And now:
"Wood burners triple the level of harmful pollution particles inside homes and should be sold with a health warning, says scientists, who also advise that they should not be used around elderly people or children".
Wood burners triple harmful indoor air pollution, study finds | Environment | The Guardian
I have only ever heard that used sarcastically/insultingly. Like the Southern “bless your heart” only in a more racial context.
I remember seeing the rag and bone man frequently in London (UK) in the 50s. Always with a horse and cart. The local rag and bone men kept their horses in some stables just off the main shopping street, and my and my school friends used to go and feed the horses sugar. They were there I think till the early 70s.
That’s HORRIBLE! trump doesn’t have any probity!
Doesn’t seem like the 70s were that long ago but they are in the dustbin. I got a raise at work when I got engaged, and then again when I got married. The companies didn’t specifically state it for that purpose but it was obvious and a traditional approach, and I was the one who brought up the subject because I wanted more money. It was still common at the time to say a young man getting married would make him a more stable and reliable employee. At the same time it was said a young woman getting married would soon become pregnant and leave her job.
Until about the 1960s in the British Civil Service (Government service) a woman had to leave when she got married. And it wasn’t until some time after I started there in the early 1970s that it was acceptable for a women to wear trousers in the office.
If she could get the job in the first place. Up through the 70’s help-wanted ads were routinely divided into “help wanted: male” and “help wanted: female.” Sometimes there was a third section, “male or female”. (I don’t know about the UK, but they certainly were in the US.)
I remember calling for jobs based on ads that were listed as M/F. More than once I was told they were unlikely to hire men because the rest of the staff was all women. Can’t really complain about that considering the general state of affairs at the time.
Yes, it wasn’t only that women were cut out of the men’s jobs; it was also that men were cut out of the women’s.
The jobs coded female tended to be poorer-paying and further down the supervisory chain than those coded male, however.
When I was working in an office back in the early 70s, the woman in charge of the typing pool (remember them?) was an absolute dragon. No trousers, no mini skirts, nothing low cut etc.
However, I also remember a new girl who was having trouble with it all. One day, the other women were teasing her because her blouse was fastened with safety pins at the back. The ‘dragon’ took her out and bought her a couple of outfits so she wouldn’t be embarrassed.
Right out of college in the mid 70s, I worked for a Christian campus organization (it was a hell of a lot more fun than that sounds…). Full of liberal, open-minded hippies… BUT the national president was so old-school that if two staff workers got married, one of them (always the woman) had to quit.
So a few couples I knew just lived in sin…
My parents got married twice, because the first time had to be kept secret.
It was 1936, and my father was in medical school; the students weren’t allowed to get married.
I’m probably being naive, but I never thought the expression “That’s white of you” had anything specifically to do with ethnicity, but merely with a kind of white-hat versus black-hat symbolism. Similarly LOTR, I never imagined that the Black Riders had anything to do with people of African descent, whatever that might have meant in Tolkien’s grand legendarium, although there is at least one passage that describes ordinary black men in a disparaging light.
That said, I can certainly understand how such cultural symbols may have ultimately originated from racist ideas.
OK, so this thread has been running for about two months, and it has been one of my go-to threads all that time. And I have just realised that a prime example hangs on a toilet wall downstairs - and I wouldn’t have realised at all if Mrs T hadn’t just taken them down to decorate.
Quite a few years ago, Bamforth & Co Ltd went out of business. Culturally they were best known for what was commonly termed the Bamforth Postcard, though a generic name might be the Seaside Comic Postcard - they were strongly associated with British seaside holidays in the mid to late twentieth century.
But by the late 20th century, British seaside holidays had fallen out of fashion; people had stopped sending postcards; the politically incorrect humour of the cards had fallen out of favour; and the whole thing really became an anachronism and an irrelevance. It’s kinda Benny Hill style smutty humour - here are some examples, and I guess these are strictly not safe for work, thus spoilered: COMIC POSTCARDS .
Shortly after the closure of Bamforth was announced, Mrs T and I happened to be on a day out by the seaside, and noticed a large display of the cards at a shop - so we bought a handful before they vanished into oblivion. Yeah, they’re sexist and old-fashioned and a bit cheesy and all that, but it’s part of our past and an oddly fond memory - a more innocent time, I guess. And so they were framed and hung on the toilet wall. The first two cards shown on the website linked above are actually part of the display.
As a postscript to this - we managed a very brief COVID-times holiday to The New Forest last autumn, and stone me someone has bought up the rights and you can buy Bamforth postcards - or versions thereof - once more. Looking at them again in 2020, it very much felt like someone had been rifling through the dustbin of our social history.
j
I’ve only heard it from people who were either 1) racist, or 2) Black and trying to be funny.
Merriam-Webster at least links it to the racial meaning.
In that case, the Black Riders had no other attributes that linked them to African people, and “black” simply represented evil. Orcs were sometimes described as black, but their physical features (large nose, for example) didn’t correspond to Africans. The Haradrim were dark-skinned because they came from the south, not necessarily because they were allies of Sauron.