Potential racism of "auction block"

[Baker, John]

        Actually, I'm in complete agreement with what Dave Wilton is saying here and didn't mean to suggest otherwise.  I looked back at 19th-century uses of "picnic" and they invariably were innocuous, so I'm extremely skeptical of the theory that "picnic" ever meant "lynching" (even if some people may have had picnics at lynchings).

John Baker


-----Original Message-----
From: Dave Wilton [mailto:dave at WILTON.NET]
Sent: Friday, August 02, 2002 12:38 AM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: Re: Potential racism of "auction block"


> A second reason that "auction block" is not a taboo term is
> that its use does not necessarily have racist overtones.  If
> you say "We're going on a picnic," and it's understood that
> "picnic" can be a synonym for "lynching," the problems are
> self-evident.  "Spade" is a well-known racial insult, as is
> the supposed root of "niggardly."  "The company has been put
> on the auction block" does not necessarily share these
> overtones, although it could if the company in question were
> perceived to be a primarily African-American institution.

I don't know about supposed overtones. It certainly is possible that
somewhere, sometime back in the 19th century someone used "picnic" as a
synonym for lynching. But no one uses it with racist overtones today and it
was never widely used as a racist term. Those who object to it don't even
claim that people are using it in an offensive manner; rather they claim
that the (supposed) origin is what makes it offensive, that people are
innocently using an evil word.