Phrases I have heard growing up in the rural South:
Nigger rigging (or Afro-engineering)
Nigger knocking (running up, knocking on a door, running away)
Nigger lipping (when you try someone’s food with their utensil and use your lips rather than just your teeth to get the food off. Similarly done when sharing a cigarette)
Nigger lover
Nigger toes (Brazil nuts)
Eeny Meany Miney Mo, catch a nigger by the toe, etc.
Read Little Black Sambo as a kid, had no idea it was racist. We also had a book called just “Sambo” where the kid was white.
I should note that I was not racist and my mother discouraged my saying any of the above. My father grew up with a racist dad who refused to watch “Sanford and Son”. He overcame these views. I married a Mexican, my brother married a black woman.
I don’t know too many Mexican slurs; I met my first one when I was 14.
A lower-middle-class neighbor’s daughter met and married a rich RICH doctor. He was very intelligent and nice, a real catch. They eventually moved to another city where they lived in a splendid house, had matching Cadillacs, the whole nine yards. I had some elderly relatives who still tsk-tsked the union because this doctor was black and his wife was white. ‘Too bad he’s a negro’. ‘I hope they don’t have kids’. And my favorite, ‘aren’t there enough white men to go around?’
This was a looong time ago, I was about 12, but I remember how furious those comments made me. He was a nice guy, we all met him! He was a doctor, and rich to boot! But he was just too darned dark!
I still frequently see and hear “hot tranny mess” and “looks like a tranny”–such TV shows as 30 Rock, Talk Soup, Style by Jury, What Not to Wear, lots of others I can’t remember but switched off and stopped watching. In my own office, I hear, “Did you see that tranny out on 6th Avenue?” Not, I assume, talking about cars or radios. From people who would never dream of saying–or even thinking!–words like nigger, faggot, kike, spic, wop.
Is there such as thing as bigotry towards the unemployed?
When I was 18 I was searching for a job (had lived “on my own” with a boyfriend for a year already, the job I had cut my hours until I had to quit) and times were REALLY tough. I walked into a shoe store downtown here and politely asked if they were hiring. The woman literally sneered at me and said “No. And I think if you were serious about finding a job you’d be dressed a lot nicer.”
I had just come from a second-hand clothing store where I’d just sold my nicest clothes to buy food.
I choked back my tears, thanked her for her time and left.
To this day that memory haunts me. The store closed a few years later so I never got the chance to walk back in there with my current $45,000/year salary and tell her precisely why I would NOT be buying shoes there.
The house on the other side of my parents’ next door neighbors house was up for sale a number of years ago. After a black family looked at the house, my parents’ next door neighbor said that if a black family moved in, he’d move his family out. I told my mom I wouldn’t miss him if that happened.
To be fair, I understand that Little Black Sambo is about an Indian boy, not an African one. Tigers, you see.
And not that it excuses it, but my older family members don’t know any term for Brazil nuts BUT “nigger toes”. So sometimes they try to specify those nuts in a very weird roundabout way.
One of my Mom’s most embarrassment moments (that she admits to) is that while at work (this must have been in the 1990s) she referred to Brazil nuts as nigger toes in front of a black coworker.
I thought it would have been funny if the coworker brought in a bowl of some other type of nut and offered some to my mom, saying “Would you like some honkey-lips?”?
Up until it got fried in the housefire at my parents I had an antique copy of LBS … and the illustrations made it quite plain that it was an indian kid, he wore a dhoti and turban:D
[it was part of a collection of books my dad had when he was growing up in the 20s, it also had Uncle Wiggly, and Raggedy Anne and Andy books. I really miss the complete collection of Oz books :(]
During a law school internship, I became work-friends with an undergrad intern, and we’d frequently grab lunch together. One time, we started talking about religion, and I mentioned that I was an atheist.
Undergrad’s eyes went HUGE. Her next words: “But you’re so nice!”
A few weeks ago I had a guy in a suit in line behind me at an upscale supermarket* begin his idle chit chat by telling me a n****r joke. I said “I don’t want to hear that” and he told me the punch line anyway and started cracking up. After I paid I told him to stay classy and walked out, dumbfounded.
*Zuppan’s in Portland, Oregon. Not exactly the most racist place in America.
Once my wife was yelled at to “go back to India!” She’s Canadian, with Norwegian and Slav ancestry. But she’s thin and has brown hair, I guess, so that makes her Indian.
Also, although I live in the south, I really don’t run into much overt bigotry. I’ve only heard the ‘n-word’ used in casual conversation once by an older man, and I was quite shocked.
A while back I was having a small party at the house and my clothes got soaked by a spilling baby. I went upstairs and changed. One lady, who I had only recently met said she was surprised because my dress was above the knee length. Because, my husband is a Muslim. ???
Mind you, she previously mentioned about an outfit I was wearing that she couldn’t wear it successfully, because she’s got small boobs and it did require some cleavage to look right. So, I guess cleavage = a ok, knees = no-no? That seems off to me. I do usually wear longer dresses or skirts, its because I’m knock-kneed and it looks funny.
I get a lot of instances like that, but I don’t expect it from people who know my husband and me, even fairly casually. We’re not, like, bible-thumpers, or Quran-kissers, or whatever. In truth, we are pretty (very) far from it. In public, I am used to getting the stink-eye from people, and heaven forbid he gets a step ahead of me! He must be one of those furriners who think da wimmins got to keep their place!
Coincidentally, the dress lady’s husband was also a Muslim, although a recent convert. Guess its different since at least he was American?
I got something similar from the elderly aunt of a former boyfriend. The boyfriend had brought me to a family gathering (we’d been steady for about 2 years at that point) and mentioned to one of the aunts he’d met me at an Irish dance and that I was part Irish. The aunt’s eyes got really big and she said “You’re too nice a girl to be Irish!”.
Thank Og he didn’t mention I was half-Jewish, no doubt Elderly Aunt’s head would have exploded.
That reminds me of the story told about my father’s family. His younger brother was seeing a young lady who, to his parents’ eyes LOOKED Italian. He was ordered to never see her again because after all what would the neighbors think. Eye-talian. Nooooo. Not for these German immigrants.
I remember my mother using that phrase when I was a teen (~50 years ago). I was repeating her story to my boss a few years later, including that phrase, not even stopping to think that my boss was Jewish. He was very kind as he told me it was not a good idea to use that phrase. I haven’t used it since, and I don’t remember even hearing it again – until yesterday when a woman at work said it!
I still recall the day in 1989, when I was eating in the enlisted mess at SUBASE, PH. I was sitting by myself, reading a book while I ate, and this lieutenant (jg) comes and sits down at my table and starts talking to me. Evidently he’s fulfilling one of his collateral duties as an OOD by confirming that the food is up to snuff. I wasn’t exactly thrilled to be eating dinner with an officer of any sort, but I wasn’t going to be rude and tell him to shove off, either. Plus, he’s wearing a cross on one of his collarpoints; he’s a chaplain, how bad can it be?
Pretty bad. For some reason he decided to tell me about how he was trying to buy a house; he was looking at this one place that was pretty nice, “It’s a little more than I want to spend, but I think I can Jew him down.”
I’m going out on a limb here and I know I’m going to get flamed but here goes:
I get freaked out when black guys talk to me at the bar.
…because my city is mostly white, and it seems that the black guys come up from The Big City to party here because they can pick up white women. One time I was at the bar, by myself (a 105 lb white girl), having a drink and enjoying the music, when this black guy started talking to me and WOULD NOT LEAVE ME ALONE. He was grabbing my hands going “Where’s your boyfriend? Do you have a ring?” and even when I told him that my friends would be there soon he kept harassing me and standing way too close until I finally had to forcefully tell him to leave me alone. (That had NEVER happened to me before, at that bar or any other, and I used to bar-hop all the time.) Other women at the same bar had the same type of experience on many occasions, so it wasn’t just me. Many women said how the black guys are more aggressive when hitting on you and have a hard time taking no for an answer or being respectful of “leave-me-alone” body language.
I KNOW that everybody is to be treated like a nice guy until they prove otherwise, but I still tense up when a black guy approaches me.
I like to think I’m not racist or bigoted and I know this sounds terrible, and I have no excuse other than being a small white woman in a small white town.
:mad::dubious::smack:
