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August 08, 2002
Take a deep breath, slowly count to ten
Going ballistic at the slightest provocation gets real old, real fast.
See, very few people do this sort of thing deliberately. Mostly, it's misunderstandings. Little things.
For example, let's say you're quite familiar with The Coon Caricature:
The coon caricature was one of the stock characters among minstrel performers. Minstrel show audiences laughed at the slow-talking fool who avoided work and all adult responsibilities. This transformed the coon into a comic figure, a source of bitter and vulgar comic relief. He was sometimes renamed "Zip Coon" or "Urban Coon." If the minstrel skit had an ante-bellum setting, the coon was portrayed as a free Black; if the skit's setting postdated slavery, he was portrayed as an urban Black. He remained lazy and good-for-little, but the minstrel shows depicted him as a gaudy dressed "Dandy" who "put on airs." Unlike Mammy and Sambo, Coon did not know his place. He thought he was as smart as White people; however, his frequent malapropisms and distorted logic suggested that his attempt to compete intellectually with Whites was pathetic. His use of bastardized English delighted White audiences and reaffirmed the then commonly held beliefs that Blacks were inherently less intelligent. The minstrel coon's goal was leisure, and his leisure was spent strutting, styling, fighting, avoiding real work, eating watermelons, and making a fool of himself. If he was married, his wife dominated him. If he was single, he sought to please the flesh without entanglements.
Emphasis added. That's the bit we're concerned with for now.
Now go read this.
Then, if you've forgotten, see the song intro, and the slightly worrying discussion which followed.
Little things like that. Misunderstandings. I'd say cultural insensitivity, but ah hates when other people talk like that.
np - Scarlet Life (two songs available at mp3.com for streaming/download ), sugar, spice, saccharin & cyanide.
Posted by Aaron at August 8, 2002 10:50 AM
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Tracked on August 13, 2002 04:51 PM