The problem is that we live in an age where that minority, no matter how small, can get their way. It really is time to push back, and publicly, not passive aggressively in the ballot box. This culture led directly to Donald Trump.
The only thing wrong with that display is the price–that’s what, a buck worth of cotton stalks, at the very most?
I’ve long kind of wanted to grow a few cotton plants (and even bought a few bowls once) just as a connection to my (very white) ancestors. I’m the first member of my family in who knows how many generations who* isn’t *connected to cotton. My mother picked it some as a child–my grandmother and all her siblings were heavy child labor for their sharecropper father. Who knows how many generations before that were cotton farmers, too. (If any of them owned any slaves, there is no surviving family lore about it.)
Sometimes an apology is owed for an accidental offense. But sometimes the proper response is a roll of the eyes and a very heartfelt “oh, shove it up your ass, you nitwit.”
NM
Thing is, it is never a single person anymore, social media has ensured that any person out there (tens of millions) can be exposed instantly to any potential source of offence (too numerous to count).
You can therefore guarantee that pretty much any subject will be picked up as a source of offence for someone…As these harmless twigs prove.
A “measured response” in the current toxic social media environment is a rare beast indeed. A “measured response” in this specific case would be to point out to the offended student that they are a fucking idiot.
If someone tells me they are offended I’m not obliged to make it so that they aren’t nor to apologise for it. I might if I feel they have a good point, but it shouldn’t be expected.
One person complaining about something and an overwhelming majority of people disagreeing with her constitutes “taking serious heat”? Man, someone is way too oversensitive if they can’t stand the existence of one single crazy person in the whole country.
THat’s how the media works though. One crazy lady saying something racist in a department store was considered worthy of high level CNN coverage not too long ago.
While looking at things on Ebay the other day, I found a listing for a book from 1893, Ten Little Ni**ers. I remember seeing a similar book back in my youth titled Ten Little Indians. Yesterday I showed the listing to an African American friend of mine, he is a avid collector of blackiana from the 1800’s. I asked him if he was offended, he said no, the N word is used in the title of a book. He is also very interested in buying it too but he thought $400 was a bit steep.
For a value of “the media” which includes “ExTank starting this thread”.
I have a Christmas ornament we picked up in Helen, Georgia. It’s an angel made out of a boll of cotton.
I guess I’m racist now.
Sometimes I truly doubt the sincerity of the purported offense taken.
If the subject of this report were trolling, would we know the difference? Especially if they were trolling for a reason besides the lulz: e.g., keeping awareness of latent racism up and alive in the world, “for the cause”.
Especially since the alternative is “yes, they truly were triggered.” In which case the world is even more batshit insane than I want to acknowledge.
What a fucked-up conclusion.
CAN cotton be racist? CAN watermelon and fried chicken be racist? Sure. I’m familiar with racists who’ve made extremely offensive jokes or memes involving those things. It doesn’t follow that cotton, watermelon and fried chicken are inherently racist.
So… it depends on the context. You can USUALLY tell whether people are deliberately being provocative or whether they had no idea someone might take offense to what they’re doing. If I see some drunk frat boy in blackface eating watermelon, he’s obviously TRYING to be insulting. If I see a church picnic where EVERYBODY of EVERY race is eating fried chicken and watermelon, I don’t think twice about it.
There are oversensitive black people who get offended over nothing, but I can’t and won’t assume that’s the case here.
Some people are too easily offended at the way other people are too easily offended.
Cuz only slaves picked cotton??? If the protestor wants to be offended, she needs to be offended that Hobby Lobby’s employee health insurance doesn’t cover female contraception. Get an effin’ life. What an attention whore.
Nice.
My wild ass guess is relations between these two groups have not always been sweet. The invite was to help calm the waters. This attendee saw something they thought bordered on a kind of little dig from the mighty to the weak. Based on the quick and frothy apology I’m gonna guess they were right. I’d bet quiet, humorous, remarks upon the cotton blossoms may well have been shared before the others arrived. Those remarks may have bordered on the ragged fringes of racist, though spoken in private. Hence the swift and frothy apology.
So sneaky micro aggression, subtle or unintended, caught, named and retracted. As it should be.
(Got no evidence just my wild ass guess is all! Have at it!)
And the person who caught it now looks like a complete loser trying to gin up offense over nothing. Perfect tactical move from the University, if that was the intent.
The biggest problem with all of this isn’t the racism, real or imagined, it’s the denial of context, accidental or enforced: “Hello” can be a cheery greeting or a pointed insult, and deserved or not, depending entirely on context, which gets shorn quite effectively depending on who’s telling the story.
I’m reminded of a high-end dinner I once heard of. It’s apparently fashionable to use ashes as garnish these days, which leads to people being served plates of charred remains. This is utterly innocuous (unless you want to get off on a rant about how horrible culinary fashion and any meal other than meat-and-three is, in which case you can start a thread somewhere else) unless you’re like me, and your mind goes sideways far enough to bust a gut laughing at the semiotics of serving a plateful of ashes to a Jewish couple, in which case that meal is a joke even Don Rickles would have steered clear of. (If you don’t quite get it, imagine finding a few fake teeth in the dish.)
Is the dish now a Holocaust joke? Of course not, unless context makes it so.
Therefore, depriving the interaction of context is the most dishonest thing possible. It can turn sugar into venom, and make justified outrage into the most idiotic species of whining.
What strikes me is the utter stupidity of trying to sell dried cotton bolls in Lubbock for $30 a stem. The fields surrounding Lubbock (and believe me, I mean right up to the city and inside the limits in some places. Are chock full of cotton (if the hail didn’t get them this weekend). With farmers selling at under $1/lb, I can’t imagine anyone would be parting with $30 or $15 for a single stem.
Cotton still grows the same way. Still ginned the same way, though more automated. But no one has picked cotton by hand for well over fifty years. It’s stripped from the fields in an air conditioned tractor. Unless you’re some buyer for hobby lobby and you’re out in the field pruning the stuff by hand.
$.05 cotton + $29.95 glass vase.
(Not true that no one has picked it by hand in 50 years though. Convict labor still picked cotton at least into the 1980s.)
It’s counterproductive for society to reward a subset’s insanity with obsequiousness. Shifting power to the professionally offended leads to more and more absurdity. People aren’t owed a damn thing when they are offended when none is meant. Their emotional state is on them.