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

[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.