But Ford doesn’t come on to white women in the ad. The white woman comes on to him. Don’t vote for Ford because your daughter will want to sleep with him! It’s just. . . dumb.
I loved Fords answer to the “charges” that he went to the Playboy football party. “I like football and I like girls.” OOooooh watch your daughters white people, he’s single!
Doesn’t that make it even worse, especially if you’re some ignorant insecure white dude who has, hint hint, nudge nudge, heard rumors.
I didn’t see peg it as racist either (questionable but not racist), and I said so in the thread that was started on it. On another board I go to that is predominately black and female, several posters also said they couldn’t see it. But interestingly enough, a lot of posters here said they saw it as such. Perhaps we can’t see it because we’re not white men with racial insecurities to exploit. I don’t know.
Gah, I keep cross-posting!
It reminds me a little of the way homophobes seem to think that innocent straight people will be unable to resist the wiles of gays.
But he’s already come on to her, in the wink wink nudge nudge of the ad. Just associating him, sex, and white women, does the work of the ad. I agree it’s dumb. I’m not apologizing for it, just explaining how it’s supposed to work.
Well, if it is in code, which I believe, then you aren’t supposed to get it. It’s supposed to stay encoded until the intended recipient hears/sees it.
It’s true that me saying, “Honey, watch this” to my husband meant that he didn’t come into completely neutrally (we watched it online, since we aren’t in or from Tennessee). He knew that he was looking for something, though I didn’t say what. But when he gets the same message that others were getting, it makes me think that it really was there.
Count me in the number of Dopers who have this feeling about you, Biggirl. I respect your posts but think I am certainly in the perceived Angry Black Doper Posse with monstro. So this OP fascinated me because I thought you would be very, very forgiving before you leveled a charge of racism.
I suppose some of the other people who voiced suspicion about the veracity of Biggirl’s claim must not know her posting history.
I also agree with Rilchiam’s post. DrDeth mentions that part of The Pit experience is having it thrown back in your face. I don’t see it that way. I treat it the same way as all of the other sections of the SDMB, except you can cuss people out when they piss you off. Threadshitting, or posting nonsense to a thread you have no real interest participating in, is jerkish behavior wherever you do it. Intentionally coming to a thread to “turn it around” on the OP is jerkish as well. Having a legitimate complaint or objection to an OP is fine, but it’s still possible to behave like a jerk even though some jerk-type behaviors are tolerated, and I still think it shows class when you apologize or admit to mistakes, even in a Pit thread.
To the Harold Ford issue: if you follow US history you know that the fear of the hypersexualized Black male deflowering the virginal White female is one of the ugliest rationales for lynchings, miscegenation laws, and the desire to emasculate Black men. It’s what motivated the racists who murdered Emmitt Till. The ad subtly revisits such fears - Harold Ford is a hypersexualized Mandingo that is taking the innocence of innocent White girls! Sure, there’s a slight twist - she’s chasing Ford, not the other way around, but I don’t think this was an accidental insertion. I am sure there are plenty of Tennesseans who got the message. It’s right out of the Lee Atwater/Karl Rove playbook. (Somewhat off-topic, but just my two cents.)
My take on it precisely. I might have used the phrase “validity of Biggirl’s fury over the incident” in place of “veracity of Biggirl’s claim”. But, as has been shown, the first can have a tendency to morph into the second. And IME, that can happen through instances of inattentive reading or imprecise posting (as well as covert hostility).
I like to think that Dopers give one another the benefit of the doubt wrt the reliability of their own perceptions (pretty callow and starry-eyed for a man of fifty, I suppose :dubious: ). ISTM that a dearth of detail should trigger that benefit of the doubt more often than the recounting that contains gobs of minutiae (more opportunities for inconsistencies and mitigating details to show themselves). If you feel the need for more detail, by all means, ask! The OP who’s too delicate to relive the experience probably isn’t posting the incident in the first place. But, absent a reason to look with skepticism on anything an individual poster submits, there’s rarely any call to make requests for more information in a tone that calls to mind an investigator assembling a case against the OP, right from the get-go.
And offering speculations in that vein without even going through the motions of requesting more information strikes me as a little ill-bred.
FWIW, I never saw you as unreasonable and angry, Biggirl. At most, you strike me as someone who doesn’t take shit from anyone-which is pretty cool.
Great timing on this cartoon:Candorville for December 8th
I got both yall beat. In a thread that shall not be mentioned by name I was practically crowned the president of the Hysterical and Shrill Black Doper Posse. It’s a very exclusive club with a ridiculously high membership fee, but our annual convention is always off the chizzy.
Oh, I understood that the Ford spot was supposed to foster some sort of sexual fear in white people, what I don’t get is how it possibly could from the way it was constructed.
I think this may very well be it.
We have a Hysterical and Shrill Black Doper Posse?
You know, one of the wonderful things about the Dope is that even after six years here, and ‘knowing’ some people quite well, I still say “yeah, that’s right, monstro is a black woman - I’d forgotten.” I spent years thinking both Kimstu and wring were men. If it isn’t specifically a thread about race, I tend to forget the race of other Dopers (well, to be HONEST about it - I suspect you all are white like me - which is probably sort of racist in itself - but I need a default).
And frankly, as a white woman with just a slightly greater than average white person clue on race (Korean son, took a class in college on African American Literature where I was the token white - eye opening), you guys don’t seem to be hysterical at all - there is a LOT of this shit going on - and while obvious is bad, subtle is more insideous because people can always claim innocence.
(And Kalhoun, I agree, the world is not against you. My reaction was "WTF, why is KALHOUN coming off as this insenstive (and not racist, just insensitive) - this didn’t seem to be the normal you.)
I think somewhere in the beginning of this thread Kalhoun thought I called her a racist and was really offended by it and decided to be a bitch to me and, in my opinion, continues to be so. But plenty of posters who I admire insist she really isn’t a bitch so I’m willing to conceed that she isn’t really a bitch most of the time.
Which is not to say I cannot be a bitch. I’m actually pretty good at it.
I think Kalhoun got you confused with lissener. It’s easy to not notice who said what when one’s dander is up.
Either that or her sarcasmeter was malfunctioning.
I thought Biggirl was white till this thread. :smack: I kind of even had a mental image of a slightly heavy white chick with sort of long brown hair. UHHHH
Well, this is kind of interesting. I’m a white guy who is prone to percieve racism in most all of these types of situations. (See for example the discussion about the Harold Ford ad. By the way, the very point is that she is talking about, nay, begging for sex with him. His “pursuit” of white women would just make him a typical hypersexualized black man who is desperate to get a white woman. We would be angry but not surprised. His ability to have white women begging for him is damn scary! It makes him powerful and not desperate, and it threatens us. Our wives probably are secretly longing for some big black… sexual prowess as well! Desperate versus powerful. Anger versus fear. And if we’ve seen anything lately, fear brings out voters even better than outrage.
And I don’t strongly dispute the likelihood of racist motivations on the part of the woman described in the OP. But I do allow for some possibility that she was ignorant but not racist. I’ve had several people, white and black, use the phrase “you people” towards me. Once it was in reference to us psychologists. A Dutch woman uses it to describe us Americans. Yeah, it isn’t used in an especially nice way, and it doesn’t feel good, but it is not strictly a racist code word.
Being from and living in Chicago, if I, a white person, used the term “you people” while speaking to a black employee, I would have to be completely unaware of my world not to think the term would be taken as a racial slur.
Put it this way, “you people” can be used in a non-racial way here in Chicago. But my first instinct, upon hearing that phrase, is to assume it’s used in racially motivated way, since that’s my most frequent experience with that phrase. A similar phrase I sometimes hear is “your kind.” That’s even less ambiguous to my ears.