I just read a few different articles on it, and while I won’t use the term if it’s unpleasant for people, my impression is that “cake walks” have a complex origin that makes it difficult to tease out whether the term itself is racist.
My takeaway:
I think they were a tradition started by enslaved African Americans.
I think they were intended to mock the movements and behavior of White people, and especially their enslavers.
I think White enslavers tried to take control of these dances by judging them, and may not have picked up on the mockery. (this last piece I’m not convinced of: people in positions of absolute power sometimes demonstrate that power by laughing along with their mockery by the people they oppress).
Post-emancipation, Minstrel shows co-opted them.
Post-co-option, Ragtime reclaimed them in some ways.
Referring to something as a cakewalk references the smooth, gliding movements of the dance.
While it’s certainly a bit of history that happened during slavery and is tied up in horrors, I’m not clear on how it would be racist itself.
The expression “Low man on the totem pole” was popularized by radio comedian Fred Allen, referring to his friend, journalist H. Allen Smith. Allen used the phrase in the introduction of Smith’s 1941 book of self-deprecating essays about his humorous adventures
But Fred Allen should have been more careful with his research. According to Canadian naturalist Pat Kramer, an expert on First Nations culture, the lowest figures on the totem pole are often considered the most prestigious. The designs on the bottom six feet of a totem pole are the ones that will be seen at eye level, after all, so they’re the figures that the carver usually decides not to farm out to apprentices. “The helpers do the high up parts and the master finishes the low end of the pole,” explains Kramer. “Higher-up figures are more representational and, if anything, slightly less important.” In other words, the world’s peons, nebbishes, schmucks, and go-fers should more accurately be described as the high men on their respective totem poles.
If it was just Price I would have chalked it up to Price being Price. But a judge stepped in and asked for Mayfield’s apology during the meeting.
That’s kind of where I am. Sometimes changing the words we use is something I see as good, but even if I think it’s silly to change, I recognize that it’s just the natural order of things. So long as you have a living language, it’s going to change, and fighting the change generally isn’t worth the effort.
I did have a conversation several years back where someone asked me to use the words sex worker instead of prostitute. I elected to continue using the word prostitute because sex worker was too vague. A sex worker can be a phone sex operator, an exotic dancer, a model, etc., etc., but prostitution was what we were specifically talking about. To me, sex worker muddies the waters unless we’re talking about sex work in general.
In recent years I’ve learned that an expectation of being on time is a facet of our culture’s white supremacy and western bias. In Spanish class, we were taught that if we invited someone to an event and expected them arrive at the exact time we gave them, we were supposed to say something like, “At 8 PM, business time.”
On the other hand “more common” can also mean “more need to have a name for them” for when the temp drops to freezing and we get snow for about a week, and then it’s back to 60s or even 70s all of a sudden. I suppose we can now have a term for the cold spell that interrupts autumn instead.
This came up recently in a conversation with a friend at work. He commented that those terms ought to go away, and I replied that better still is the current trend of moving from using “Slave” to “Enslaved Person” when speaking of people, which then frees up the other terms for usage in IT and engineering.
This is not without precedent: we speak of crippled software when the word “crippled” hasn’t been used for people in many decades. And I can’t imagine using anything other than “kill -9” to halt a rogue process on Linux.
I remember that there was someone that modified the classic video game of DOOM, instead of typing the kill command you shot at the monsters to stop those rogue processes.
I’d bet that all those “Dutch” as pejorative things were constructs of the 17th and 18th centuries when the English and Dutch were at war frequently, and just haven’t left the language yet, as it’s been a long time since the Dutch have been adversaries of the English, or for that matter, an underprivileged group.
Yeah, not all usages are negative. I had to explain that the relationship between Florida State University and the Seminole people is a positive, collaborative, and respectful one, and that the tribe is officially on board with the whole thing. And that it’s fundamentally different as a result than the other examples like the Atlanta Braves, Cleveland Indians, Washington Redskins, etc…
I’m working on a made up world with multiple religions, each type of religion based on a color (Blue Faith for sky gods, etc.), and I intentionally decided that the Black Faith would not be evil. The actual evil religion is the Red Faith (for blood and fire), and the Black Faith is death, sleep, and dreams.
Yeah, but John Wiley Price is basically a professional race-baiter, and a colossal asshole at the same time. And probably a crook too, but the prosecution botched that, so we may never really know.
I wouldn’t use ANYTHING that guy says as any kind of indication about what is or isn’t racist or offensive.
