New racist etymology

[Wilson Gray]

On Thu, Mar 14, 2013 at 10:56 PM, Jonathan Lighter
<wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com> wrote:
> I guar-on-tee you that "buck Negro" is a "literary" confection.
>
> I never heard "buck (nigger)" in NY, but I've read them many, many times in
> stories about the South and, to a lesser degree, West.
>
> There's an old sea shanty verse from the 19th C. that goes,
>
> Who's been here since I been gone?
> Big buck nigger with his sea boots on.
>
> When sung nowadays by (99 44/100 % white) harmonizin' folkies, it's altered
> to the culturally-insipid-but-not-offending-anybody "Arkansas farmer with
> his sea boots on."

I think, as also in the case of Huckleberry Finn and such very
enjoyable writings, the un-Bowdlerized original is the way to go. The
truth leads to more breakthroughs than the lie. One of the reasons
that I consider Äfrican-American"as a replacement for "black" is that
I *clearly* remember when the absolute, very worst thing that you
could do to a black American was to call him "black."Sure, on a
drive-by insulting, you could upset a any colored fellow by shouting
"Nigger!", if you really wanted to tear the the heart right out of his
bosom, then the way to go was to call him simply "Black!" My first
letter-to-the-editor was motivated by the common practice of using
"African *blacks*" and not "African *Negroes*." What a gratuitous,
entirely uncalled-for, unnecessary, embarrassing "racist" insult!!

That _black_ is no longer regarded as the most degrading, humiliating
epithet that anyone, regardless of his own race, creed, color, sexual
orientation, or previous condition of servitude can apply to a person
of any degree of sub-Saharan ancestry and has become simply another
word, as innocuous as "white" as a racial denominator, is no less than
a there-is-really-no-possible-way-to-characterize-it, phenomenal
sea-change in the psychology of Black America.

That _black_ is now being rendered "insulting" all over again by the
loud mouths of random "African-American" assholes and their p.c.
running dogs for the sheer assholery of it and "Negro" and "colored"
are deemed even more insulting than "darky"and "coon," as though the
history of the use of _black_ were empty of content and despite the
emergence of large number of *genuine* Americans of immediate African
ancestry into all aspects of American life - cf. e.g. the lical law
firm of Krasno, Krasno & Onwudinjo - well, what can I say?

EBONY and Jet went from "Negro" to "Black" - because "Negro" has a
capital? - and from "white" to "White" - because "Black" has a
capital? - but, as the oldsters retire, more and more
"African-American" is beginning to creep into their pages.

Sigh!

--
-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

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org