very minor note on "lady"

Wilson Gray hwgray at GMAIL.COM
Sun Apr 17 23:50:57 UTC 2011


On Sun, Apr 17, 2011 at 6:41 PM, Jonathan Lighter
<wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com> wrote:
> aunty

This form of address later came to be regarded as insulting, when
addressed by a white person to a (usually-elder) black
woman/female/lady/chick. Back in the day, EBONY made a big to-do about
the following riposte, purportedly made by the sainted African-Scot,
Mary McLead Bethune.

White bus-driver:
"All aboard, aunty!"
MMcLB:
"And which one of my nephews are you?"

That was a stunning public display of uppitiness for its day, to the
extent that a lot of black people regarded the story as apocryphal,
given that MMcLB had lived to tell it.

--
-Wilson
-----
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"---a strange complaint
to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-Mark Twain

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