I totally agree with you about everything you say about these Republican dicks, but I have one question. I’ve been looking around the internet a while (maybe I should be more studious, I don’t know) to find someone claiming we are in a post-racial society. All I can ever find is people saying “Just because we have a black president doesn’t mean we are in a post-racial society.” I wanted to see some arguments that say “we are in a post-racial society,” because, though I love your rants it almost looks like a strawman at times.

If it makes somebody laugh I don’t see anything wrong with it.”

Comedy is often used as a cover for overt racism.  It allows the speaker to accuse the person being “othered” of being to sensitive.  Just because racism is wrapped in a so-called joke does not mean that it does not have real and lasting effects.  It is privilege to assume that you have the right to demean another for your entertainment and yet it is so pervasive that many prominent White people have no problem doing so.  Recently Clint Eastwood publicly decried that he was disciplined because he could not make race based jokes in peace. 

What these people will never understand is that even when Whiteness is the butt of the joke, because no commentary ever reduces their social power; it does not have the same effect.  Comparing Obama to murderer when Black males are routinely viewed as violent only upholds racist stereotypes and reasserts white privilege.

They’ll be the first against the wall when the revolution isn’t televised.

We know who they are.  We know where they live.

Sasha Obama crip walks to school every day

That makes a pretty funny image.

Of course, nobody who received these e-mails remembers a single thing about ever having received them, and just deleted them without even reading them.

Well, after getting a couple of these kinds of crappy emails from a colleague, fellow employees might be concerned about most organizations’ policies regarding the use of email to disseminate materials with sexual or racist content.  If the subject headline reads “FW: FW: Obama poses for Playboy”, alot of people would just delete that message rather than open it and possibly be caught by fellow employees with sexual images on the screen.

Recently Clint Eastwood publicly decried that he was disciplined because he could not make race based jokes in peace.

Not that you don’t have a very good point in general, but I wouldn’t count on those Der Spiegel quotes being accurate.  They’re pretty notorious for claiming that famous people said things they didn’t actually say.

I wanted to see some arguments that say “we are in a post-racial society,”

The thing is that they don’t argue it, they assume it.

Stupid foreigner has to ask: what’s a “nigger rig”?

A term used to describe a temporary fix or quick fix for an object using any tools at hand. Derived from the ingenuity of early African-Americans who did not have the means to fix every day objects and had to come up with these temporary fixes.

I had to look it up in Urban Dictionary.

I wanted to see some arguments that say “we are in a post-racial society,” because, though I love your rants it almost looks like a strawman at times.

TB’s right - there’s no argument necessary that we are in a post-racial society, it’s just assumed that we are by virtue of (insert achievement here).  Post-racialism doesn’t exist because of some measurable progress, it exists because if it doesn’t, then how can black people vote or have the presidency or be managers at the local Burger King?

And Jesse’s “post-racial” concern mirrors (evidently) the “post-feminist” concerns a lot of feminists have.  Same effect, different target.

BTW Linc, I don’t know about recently, but when Obama was running for prez/got elected, I did see quite a few editorials, blogs and pundit exercises that celebrated the “post-racial” moment the US was in, or queried it with a headline, sometimes with a positive answer, sometimes ambivalence, and sometimes (less often) followed by a critical Not In Your Wildest Dreams analysis.  It’s almost a waste of bit space to reiterate how racists and sexists will clasp onto anything that might silence the other side’s rhetoric and stop poking at the comfy bubble they’ve built for themselves.

Thanks, Pablo.  And: yuck.

A term used to describe a temporary fix or quick fix for an object using any tools at hand. Derived from the ingenuity of early African-Americans who did not have the means to fix every day objects and had to come up with these temporary fixes.

“jerry-rig” or “jury-rig” is the more common (at least in my circles) term for this.

Sadly, I grew up in a milieu where the term “nigger rig” was common parlance, and I have to point out that the Urban Dictionary definition puts a slightly revisionist spin on the meaning (if not the derivation) of the term.  Yes, it’s a term used to refer to temporary or unconventional fixes, but don’t get the idea that it was ever used by white folks in a way that was meant to acknowledge anyone’s ingenuity.  It was always meant to indicate that the speaker thought there was something rickety, f**ked up or flat-out ignorant about the way the problem had been addressed.  It’s insulting all the way down.

“Jury-rig” is a term with a legitimate nautical provenance—it’s a term for a replacement mast and rigging on a sailing ship, used when shipboard repair is necessary.  It connotes a temporary fix, but it’s not usually used to indicate that the temporary fix (or the person responsible for the fix) was ignorant or stupid.

The only positive connotation that I’ve ever found using the N-word, oddly enough, what the phrase “Worked like a N-word” where the idea was that the work that was done was hard and strenuous in some way.  It was used to describe how my grandmothers’ family worked in the cotton fields in Texas after my great-grandfather committed suicide and it was all they could do to keep the household together.

Even then, the “positive” connotation isn’t that positive.  Kind of like “worked like a dog,” don’t you think?

TY you Pablo.  I didn’t want to Google it and I’d never heard the term either.

BTW, am I the only one who heard the children’s counting rhyme go “eenie meenie minie mo, catch a TIGER by the toe”???  I never (or rarely) heard the n**** version until i was grown…

Woodrowfan: I only knew it as “catch a tiger.” It’s a rare area in which I’m willing to say “we fixed that and the problem is a historical one”: that the other version used to be common doesn’t make it not ok to use the “tiger” version.

I never heard the phrase in the e-mail before. I’m from Brooklyn, so I don’t think I’m a foreigner.

And now I’m sitting here trying to figure out what the <cite>National Geographic</cite> line could possibly, possibly mean if it were applied to Jill Biden. So far the conclusion I’ve reached is, nothing, and thus there is no possible non-racist interpretation of it.

BTW, am I the only one who heard the children’s counting rhyme go “eenie meenie minie mo, catch a TIGER by the toe”???

I only ever heard “tiger,” too, but I grew up in the 1970s so I think it was outdated by then.

Fun fact:  Agatha Christie’s book And Then There Were None was titled Ten Little Niggers in England, and then Ten Little Indians.  Even in 1940s America, you couldn’t put “nigger” in the title of a book.

Rieger said that he is not a racist.

Well, I can say I’m not a lesbian.

Objective reality proves otherwise.

I was born in 1962, and I heard the N version of “eenie meenie” at least as often as the tiger version when I was a little kid.  There were other instances of the N word showing up in childhood games and songs as well—there was a version of parody lyrics to the theme song for the “Daniel Boone” tv show that used the word in an insulting way that I will not repeat, for instance.  Not to mention how common it was for the adults and children around me to refer to Brazil nuts as “N toes.”

And no, there’s no non-racist way to interpret the National Geographic reference at all, and that’s even if it were applied to Jill Biden.  National Geographic’s history of publishing pictures of nude and nearly-nude indigenous people (and the fact they could run them without being accused of publishing erotica) has been culturally interesting for all sorts of reasons, not all of which say very nice things about the dominant culture in the U.S.  Bluntly put, one reason National Geographic historically could get away with running pictures of indigenous women’s bare breasts is because indigenous women were not seen as racial equals, but instead more like exotic animals, by many ordinary subscribers to the magazine, and thus the pictures could not be considered truly “erotic.”  If the remark were made with respect to Jill Biden, it would have been a lot like Rush Limbaugh’s famous reference to Chelsea Clinton as the family dog—but only possible as an insult because of the racist way in which National Geographic photo subjects are in some ways marginalized as less than human, and thus neither beautiful nor properly eroticized.

IIRC the rhyme about “Ten Little Monkeys Jumping on the Bed” didn’t use to be “monkeys,” either.

Nolo, thank you.

There is no non-racist way to tell the joke that his joke is a play on. It basically has to do with the idea that naked white women are pornography and naked black women are anthropology. The fact that NG published the pictures as exotic curiosities didn’t mean generations of little boys didn’t stare anyway.

We still have a copy of Little Black Sambo, which my mom used to read to me as a child.  I, of course, had no idea about the racist caricatures in the story—I only knew that it had pancakes in it, which I liked.  In fact, I remember “Sambo’s” pancake restaurants—they were everywhere in the 70s. 

I’ve decided to keep the book as a relic of a bygone age, but I don’t intend to read it to my kids.

Rieger said the jokes he sent had no racial meaning.

As Nolo pointed out, without racial meaning, what exactly is the joke? I really want someone to pin these folks down and make them explain these “not racial” jokes to rest of us.

“If it makes somebody laugh I don’t see anything wrong with it.”

Which is why he completely supported David Letterman in the recent “inappropriate joke about Sarah Palin’s daughter” controversy. I mean, I assume he did…I’m sure there’s emails….

Sorry—language digression:
“Jury-rig” is a term with a legitimate nautical provenance—it’s a term for a replacement mast and rigging on a sailing ship, used when shipboard repair is necessary.  It connotes a temporary fix, but it’s not usually used to indicate that the temporary fix (or the person responsible for the fix) was ignorant or stupid.

I’ve seen the etymology of this as “de joure”, French for “for the day”, which also doesn’t carry any kind of negative connotation.

In British books, I’ve also seen “jerry rigged”, which might be a combination of “jury rigged” with “German made” (e.g., “crappy”) by means of “Jerry” as the derogatory term for Germans. “Jerry rigged” seems to have more of a “hastily thrown together” or “poorly constructed” connotation than “jury rigged”. It would be kind of amusing if “nigger rigged” is drawn from “Jerry rigged”, and the Aryan white supremacist types just don’t realize that another looked-down-upon group was substituted for, well, them.

(Of course, I generally prefer the term “MacGuyverred” these days.)

Woodrow:

I heard it as “monkey”, which might be considered something of a transitional form.

Bathrobe:

Wasn’t Sambo originally Indian? Although I’m inclined to think it’s no better that way—just racism translated across cultures.

As I’ve lived in the Ozarks nearly all my life, in older houses with highly idiosyncratic repairs/modifications made by generations of underskilled and underfunded occupants, I and my cohorts refer to such localized jury-rigging as “Ozarks ingenuity.”

Brian:

In the book I have, he’s very definitely of African descent—though he runs from a tiger, I believe, which is very definitely not African.  In any event “Sambo” has been a racist caricature of people of African descent in the U.S. for quite some time.  I remember a quote from Elizabeth Cady Stanton lamenting that “Sambo” got the vote before white women.

nigger rig: A term used to describe a temporary fix or quick fix for an object using any tools at hand. Derived from the ingenuity of early African-Americans who did not have the means to fix every day objects and had to come up with these temporary fixes.

Or in finer terms, it’s what you call bricolage when a subaltern does it.

Kind of like “worked like a dog,” don’t you think?

It can be said admiringly of others, here’s what I found that seems accurate:

“When a white man said he worked like a N-word, it meant that he engaged in dirty, back-breaking labor to the point of collapse.”

sacundim is my hero.  And Angelia Sparrow, you’re welcome.  Glad I’m not the only one who sees it.

Golden Books now publishes an updated version called something like “The Little Indian Boy and the Tigers”.  Very very strange to read.

I will guarantee you that at some point since these e-mails were discovered, Frago thought to himself that the real racists here are the black people making this about race.

Absolutely.  You see it in the comments about the racists’ swim club.  Why did the camp have to SUE?  Why are THEY making it all about race?  What a horrible example they’re giving those kids—teaching them to play the race card to try to win a frivolous law suit.

The concept that the club violated civil rights law, and that the proper course of action is to prosecute them, and that the punishment for civil wrongs is fines not jail, totally escapes them.

As for eeny meenie miny moe?  Born in 1967 and I only heard “tiger” until my 30s, when I was scandalized.  I didn’t teach my kids, but they learned it in school, of course, b/c small children have their own way of passing on lessons to each new generation.

I’m upset to hear the monkeys jumping on the bed rhyme might have the same sort of origins.  That’s on BARNEY.  and THE WIGGLES.  I think we’ll stick to the duck version (same song, same ideas, just ducklings vanishing instead of falling off of a bed)

All these people who act like they’re so put upon that they can’t make racist (or sexist, or anti-Semitic) jokes anymore?  F’ em.  And for those who continue to make those jokes?  F’ em twice over.  I’m sick of hearing these throwbacks to the 18th century complaining about how oppressed they are because they can’t use the n word anymore.  They need to grow the hell up.  What century do they think they’re living in, anyway?

My dad has stopped using the term “cotton-picking hands” since I explained its racist origins with him.

It’s amazing how many racist phrases we use in our language, most without any realization of its racist implications.

Wasn’t Sambo originally Indian? Although I’m inclined to think it’s no better that way—just racism translated across cultures.

Then we get into the problem where, for Europeans in the 18th and 19th centuries, anyone with dark skin was “African.”  Indians?  Africans.  Australian Aborigines and other Pacific Islanders?  Africans.  So it actually makes sense that “Sambo” would be both African and in Asia since it’s all the same thing.

(Of course, if you go far enough back, we’re all Africans since the entire frickin’ human race originated there, but that’s not what people meant.)

Then we get into the problem where, for Europeans in the 18th and 19th centuries, anyone with dark skin was “African.”

Or, in some British pundit’s infamous lines, “the w*gs start at Calais.” (When I was just learning to read by myself, I treasured Enid Blyton’s Noddy books. Then I became terribly embarassed by them.)
And the term itself illustrates Mnemosyne’s point, because it’s slang for both blacks and asians…

To this day, my 80 year-old mother still refers to Brazil nuts as ni##er-toes. I’m sure she says it unconsciously but I cringe every time she says it. Forty years of correcting her reference to Brazil nuts has not erased the over sixty years of incorrect usage.

“I got black friends that I would tell these jokes to and they would roll on the floor in laughter.”

Ah yes, those mythical “black friends” whose only purpose in life seems to be rolling on the floor in laughter at racist jokes.  Why do these white guys always feel so confident that they know exactly how their friends feel about any given subject, especially one as potentially offensive as ethnic jokes?

I’m a white guy, and yes, I do have some friends who are black.  And if someone was to ask me how my friend Ken or Mark or whomever felt about some of these jokes, I could certainly hazard a guess, but ultimately my answer would be that you’d need to ask my friends themselves if you wanted their opinion on the subject. 

Of course, that’s because I tend to value my friends as actual human beings instead of as rhetorical tools that allow me to speak for other races.

I certainly don’t know how my black friends (if I had any) would react to racist jokes (if I trafficked in such) when I’m not around (if I ... er, never mind)

For that matter, why is it that all these idiots are still racist despite all their black friends when all my friends are white and I manage not to be intentionallly or indifferently racist?