Quote of The Day

[andrewducker]

So a canvasser goes to a woman's door in Washington, Pennsylvania. Knocks. Woman answers. Knocker asks who she's planning to vote for. She isn't sure, has to ask her husband who she's voting for. Husband is off in another room watching some game. Canvasser hears him yell back, "We're votin' for the n***er!"

Woman turns back to canvasser, and says brightly and matter of factly: "We're voting for the n***er."

Cheers to miss_s_b for passing on the quote and the link to its origin.

Edit:
What I find particularly interesting is that (a)there are people still out there who will use the word 'nigger' without even thinking whether it might be offensive and (b) those people are actually perfectly happy to vote for Barack Obama. Which means that American attitudes towards race are altogether more complex than you might have thought...

Comments

[pisica.livejournal.com]

Heh, I was about to send you to fivethirtyeight.com but I see that's where it comes from. :)

[bohemiancoast.livejournal.com]

General truth: people who don't learn quickly and who aren't particularly adaptable, will continue to use the language they used as a child, even where those words are considered offensive. They often aren't using them with any offensive or racist intent whatsoever.

Because the chattering classes are used to adapting quickly to all sorts of fashions, in language as in other things, there is a snobbery here; you will see people's slightly outdated language used as a code for 'this person is contemptible' in reportage. It's reasonable to assume that politicians can be expected to keep up to date in this sort of way. But for everyone else? Not really.

[andrewducker]

Absolutely. It does annoy me when people interpret sexism, racism, homophobia, etc. as necessarily being signs of eeeevil, rather than just being because their society has always been that way, and questioning things that society takes for granted is both bloody hard and unlikely.

It's a way of thinking that assumes that 99.9% of people born before 1900 were evil people, which is something that baffles me whenever I encounter it.

[endless-psych.livejournal.com]

It's also highly likely that people are like that because thats the way our brains work. We all operate on stereotypes of one sort or another.

[heron61.livejournal.com]

That particular term has has been seriously unacceptable, in the US at least, for more than 35 years. For at least the last 15-20, it's been a marker of hardcore racism. Failure for someone in the US to recognize this change and alter their language accordingly means they are either woefully ignorant or willfully blind.

I'd have bought your argument with that term in 1978 & even in 1988, but not now. The people who said it are nothing more or less than utterly unashamed racists.

[andrewducker]

I'm fairly sure there are parts of the US where it's not been nearly as seriously unacceptable as it is in, say, California or New York.

[heron61.livejournal.com]

True, but we all have the same network TV and while it's less common today, from the early 1970s to the late 1980s (and the earlier part of this was before cable TV was widespread, meaning everyone watched network TV) the only references to that particular term & the people who used it ranged from scolding to highly derisive.

I've lived all over the US, including the rust belt, and the northern portions of the South, and even in the mid to late 1980s quite literally no one used that term in public except people who didn't mind being considered bigots - even back then it was essentially a term meaning "I'm a bigot and proud (or at least utterly unashamed) of it". teaotter grew up in Arkansas in the 1980s and early 1990s, and down there it was even less acceptable in any sort of remotely public setting (such a stranger coming to your door).

I definitely read that interchange being the people involved openly announcing to the pollster both that they were racists and that they were voting for Obama.

[heron61.livejournal.com]

I can think of one exception to my idea that they were announcing that they were racists - if the couple involved was old, as in 65+ If that was the case, then they grew up in an era when that language was acceptable and they hadn't changed. If they were any younger, then I'm fairly certain that they were making a statement.

[d-c-m.livejournal.com]

Yup. Same thing was said about Jesse Jackson in the 80s. Just proving that it's a funny old world.

[cdave]

Until I got to the edit, I read that as nutter and assumed they were voting for Mccain/Palin.

[khbrown.livejournal.com]

The quote doesn't specify the ethnicity of the woman and her husband. We're only assuming they are white.

[johncoxon.livejournal.com]

Very good point - amongst some black people that isn't actually a racist comment. I remember Reginald D. Hunter talking about it on HIGNFY which was absolutely hilarious.

[seph-hazard.livejournal.com]

Yes, that's a good point. Hell, I go on about 'bloody greedy bisexuals' all the time [grin]

[darkoshi]

The way that quote is worded, it sounds like it was made up just to illustrate a point. I doubt it actually occurred. "So a ..." is how jokes are often started. And nothing on that page says that it was an actual occurrence.

What gets me about it though, is why does the woman ask her *husband* who *she* is going to vote for?

[andrewducker]

Very good point.

Of course, it used to be usual to act in that way - certainly 30 years ago in the UK most people acted that way.

[daisyflip.livejournal.com]

My mum basically votes for who my dad votes for, same with older generations of women in my family.

As for the dreaded 'n' word, I don't think it shows race hate, as others seem to suggest. Again, to cite my family and their friends, many use words which I'm sure lots of people who read this would be offended by - paki, poof, nigger, etc. They seem to use them because they really don't see why they're offensive. Yes, they're not used on tv, but they're used among their contemporaries and they see people being offended by language alone as a soft, middle-class affectation.

I ain't saying it's right, but I am saying it happens. It depends which circles you move in, I suppose.