I just don’t hear it often either. Not at the grocery store or at the mall or around my friends here in Nashville.
I have one friend who used the derogatory word for African-Americans up until about fifteen years ago and we “had words” about it and didn’t speak for three years. She doesn’t use it anymore and has apparently adjusted some of her opinions too – not just her language.
I have a family member who lives in Florida who uses it, but I think that is because he is full of contempt for everyone, including me. He knows that it is offensive to me and he uses it to play Alpha wolf. I see him every three or four years.
I have another friend who lives a rough life. She is illiterate and poor. We talk on the phone and she comes to visit every couple of years for a day. She doesn’t talk about African-Americans very often, but when she does, she sometimes uses the derogatory word. She doesn’t seem to hold particular malice or hatred.
That’s it! You can imagine all you want to, but this is the reality of my life in Nashville, Lamar.
Zoe, I think you have illustrated exactly what I am talking about. You know personally several people who use the “n” word regularly. You probably encounter it occasionally in random encounters, but I won’t assume that. No one that I know uses that word in my presense, ever. (I’m talking about whites referring to blacks, blacks using the word among themselves is a different story.)
Do you consider your experience typical? Where I live, it is not.
I live in a very multicultural neighborhood, but not many black people. They’re aren’t a lot of black people in Colorado.
To actually add something to the topic, in west TN and middle/east TN where I go to school the only place I ever hear people using derogatory names towards blacks is the old men at the barber shop. It’s not prevavlent in my day to day life.
That has been my experience, for the most part–the older people(senior citizens, at least 65+) use the “N” word.
I have heard a few people younger than that use it to refer to blacks in general–but never out in public. <sigh>
Then again, while I do feel that it is more prevalent in the South, there are plenty of folks up here in Chicago who may not say nigger, but say “black” in such an inflection that they might as well say nigger.
Perhaps he’s just passing down some of that good old traditional family lore.
As that song from South Pacific helpfully points out:
You’ve got to be taught to hate and fear,
You’ve got to be taught from year to year,
It’s got to be drummed in your dear little ear
You’ve got to be carefully taught.
You’ve got to be taught to be afraid
Of people whose eyes are oddly made,
And people whose skin is a diff’rent shade,
You’ve got to be carefully taught.
You’ve got to be taught before it’s too late,
Before you are six or seven or eight,
To hate all the people your relatives hate,
You’ve got to be carefully taught!
Lamar, If at the age of 61, I know of one person in Florida that I see every three or four years that uses a derogatory term to aggravate me and one person that I see every two years that was probably never taught better, I would say that:
You don’t know what “several” means.
You don’t know what “regular” means.
You aren’t interested in the truth.
Neither of these people even live in Nashville. I listed every person and incident that I could think of because I wanted to be completely honest and look at what you have done to try to twist what I said. Next time try imagining integrity.
Again, I live in a multi-cultural neighborhood. Do you?
I already answered that - yes I do.
I don’t know what the relevance of that is, though.
When you travel outside of the south, do you get strangers making comments about racial minorities to you? That happens to me often when I travel in the south, and virtually nowhere else.
What do you mean by often? And what? You’ve got a swastika tattoo on your forehead that attracts a certain type of person?
I travel a lot around the south. In the past three years, I’ve been to every southern state from Arkansas through Virginia, most of them several times, for extended periods. I can’t remember how many years it’s been since some stranger that I met in my travels made a comment about minorities.
When on the road, it is my inclination to seek out bars and clubs to while away the evening hours. Even in those places, the subject simply doesn’t come up. Is there something you are doing or saying to incite controversy?
Unless you are bringing racial matters up yourself, I simply can’t see how you are encountering these comments to the degree that you claim. It’s not consistant with what I’ve experienced.
First of all, sorry for contributing to the stirring up a bit of a tempest and then not responding for a while. I was in Wisconsin. (Where, I might point out, I spent a lot of time at a meeting of an organization with an all-white membeship.*)
Anyhow, a few comments:
(1) This is becoming very much he-said she-said. I googled around some, but could not find any state-by-state studies concerning level of racism. Does anyone know of one?
(2) Even if it does come down to he-said she-said, there’s a really weird divide (and I’ve noticed this before in these threads) in which some number of basically reasonable-sounding people say they can be in the south for years on end without ever hearing racial epithets, and other basically reasonable-sounding people who say they basically hear the n-word every time they go to a convenience store. I can’t explain this divide. I note, however, that no one claims that they hear the n-word every time they go to the convenience store in the North. So, just by taking the easy way out of crudely averaging all of these reports, there still appears to be at least more frequent, accepted and visible racism in the South.
(3) I also note that, as always happens in threads of this sort, many Southerners are popping up and saying “But I’m not racist! How can you say I’m racist? And look at all the problems you guys have! And we’re getting better! And see, by grouping us all together like this, you’re just as bigoted as you’re accusing us of being.” I leave as an exercise to the reader the logical problems with each of those responses.
Oh, and:
Well, we should note that at the point in time when there was a war fought to end slavery (well, we could argue about precisely to what extent that was what it was about), one of those flags was on one side of the issue and one was on the other. That seems like a pretty big difference to me. Feel free to ignore the many rebuttals of your snide driveby, however.
Max, I know that you’re not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but even you can read. There have been no rebuttals whatsoever to my “snide driveby”. It’s very difficult to rebut a rhetorical question.
What position, exactly, do you think I take on the issue?
Just because the one side doesn’t make unsubstansiated accusations like the other side, this tends to support the claim? Stupid reasoning.
I think all the people of California are jew-hating-Nazis and the Palo Alto bunch is the worst of all. Say it often enough and mental-midgets will believe it to be FACT. If the Californians say “Hey, we’re not like that. I don’t know anyone like that, there are those type anywhere you go” they respond with “See! Their protests prove my point!”. If you have studied the replys as you said surely you noticed that those who live there say “I don’t hear it all the time, practically never.” Those who don’t live there and seek to support their position say “Oh yeah, I can’t leave the house without hearing the N word when in the South”
To the War being about Slavery, I get the impression you knew the stupidity behind this statement before you made it. It was a complex and involved process that let up to war and the issue of slavery was raised in responce to the threat of England and France preparing to recognize the CSA as a sovern nation, establishing trade (cannons, guns, powder, etc.) and off-setting the Northern advantage of an industial powerhouse vs. an agricultural one. By making it appear a moral issue they were discouraged from lending support on the world stage. Can you see the British warships challenging the Northern naval blockades to deliver war materials to the Southern ports?
Sorry if I get going. It is a subject I take and interest in. This discussion is not a debate about the Civil War. I only ask that people don’t accept the sound-bite version of the causes of the war and the division between the States and the effects it still has on perceptions to this day. Prejudice is to Pre-Judge without first hand knowledge. Sometimes those who are the loudest accusers have the greatest guilt.
[QUOTE=Nicodemus2004If you have studied the replys as you said surely you noticed that those who live there say “I don’t hear it all the time, practically never.” Those who don’t live there and seek to support their position say “Oh yeah, I can’t leave the house without hearing the N word when in the South”
[/QUOTE]
You have mis-characterized both sides. I have read the thread and see that some Southerners have come in and said, to effect, that they don’t hear racial slurs around town etc. And some non-Southerners have come in to say that while they never hear “nigger” at home, whilst in the South, they have.
Noone said that they couldn’t leave the house w/o hearing “nigger”. Why obfuscate things? I would think that most reasonable people would take the tack that outright, in public racism has lost it’s “charm” and is not widely practiced anywhere, anymore. Incidents like the one in this post belie that conventional comfort. Certainly, the sentencing would have been much harsher elsewhere, IMO.
As to the “prejudice”–I DO have first hand knowledge–I have visited Memphis several times, my parents LIVE there, my grandparents lived in central Florida (where I also lived for a short time as a kid) and yes, the Word was used there, too. There’s no guilt here-just an observation. Jeesh.
How can people have such different experiences? I dunno-maybe that’s life? Or MAYBE, just maybe, it isn’t noticed as much where it occurs more frequently? Just a thought.
That is not to say that we up here don’t have problems with race and prejudice or that there aren’t many many people in the South that find it as abhorrent as many Northerners do. But that wasn’t what the thread was about.
Thank you so much for attempting to draw the conversation down into personal invective.
From the tone and location of your post, I definitely got the impression that your post was a knee-jerk defense of the confederate flag via attempting to draw false equivalencies. If it was in fact just a purely innocent question with no pre-judging, then I apologize for misreading, although it’s sure as hell unusual to find purely innocent questions in threads about this topic.
So, you tell me: what position DO you take on the issue?
I rarely knee-jerk, and I try not to be snide. I do not post drivebys, neither do I ignore rebuttals. Now what were you saying about personal invectives?
Anyway, my thoughts on the display of the Confederate flag are complex. The various state and local governments should not display it because it is a symbol of an attempt to dissolve the Union, because it is a symbol of slavery, and because whatever way of life it represents is long gone (and is largely a romantic dream that never actually existed.) There are exceptions to that, of course. Teachers should be able to display the Stars and Bars during lessons on the Civil War, just as they might display a Union Jack during a lesson on the American Revolution. A teacher should not be able to display one during a lesson on economics or in Health class without a darn good reason. I can see no reason for having one fly over a state capitol, and the only reason for flying one over a county courthouse is if it’s part of some tourist or historical setting.
Individuals, however, who wish to display it should be allowed to. Everyone who displays it probably has their own reasons for doing so – many use it as a racist symbol, yes, but others use it as a reminder of their heritage from a time of Southern Belles and Gentlemen Scholars, good manners, and personal honor. Some use it as a sign of their own rebellion, and others just think it looks cool. Some display it for purely historical reasons – eleven states did indeed fly the flags of the Confederacy in the 1860s – while others might display it because they desire another civil war. Some theme restaurants display it because, well, y’all Yankees can’t cook for shit .
It’s easy to see that when the KKK flies one during their activities, they are sending a clear message: Blacks are inferior to Whites. But there’s no way that a reasonable person could view the roof of Bo and Luke’s General Lee as being the network’s opinion that Blacks are inferior to Whites.
A woman at work brought in a graduation notice from her cousin. In the notice was the graduates senior picture. It was him standing in front of a confederate flag, wearing a baseball cap with “Got Beer?” on the front. He was in jeans, wearing a nice blue flannel shirt.
Now, I dont think this makes him a racist by any stretch but it amazed me that a public school actually used a confederate flag as a backdrop for school pictures. This was in W.VA.
.