White musicians and "artistic" use of the N-word: A Discussion and Social History

Like, a lot of punk and indie kind of aggressively went out of its way to alienate black people; I give Jello and The Dead Kennedys a lot of credit for not going that route and for doing songs like "Nazi Punks (Fuck Off)".

er, and Bad Brains too. (lol)

"bitch" is also not ok imo but that's a lost cause I fear

I don't disagree, but at least he is drawing a genuine correct equivalency between "bitch" and "nigger" in his stupid argument; wtf is "jock" doing there?

Oh right, it's there because Ian McKaye is a useless moron.

I kind of wish there was a de-humanizing word for jocks on the level of bitch even.

money over jocks

I don't think being strong and athletic is a bad thing.

Signed, someone who used to be strong and athletic. ;_;

"jock" at some schools means "the rich white kids who beat you up and call you fag"

"jock" is basically another failed attempt at coming up with an abusive term for the people who have all the privilege; such attempts are doomed to failure, because racist terms are there to remind their targets of their less-than status, whereas aimed-at-the-privileged terms can easily be rebutted "yup, I'm a jock asshole, guess what, I get all the good jobs & am allowed past the velvet rope"

this use certainly wasn't "artistic" but there was that old eminem track from when he was like 18 that said iirc that he wouldn't date n-words anymore

OK, I don't know why I'm even getting into this facepalm of a quote, but...

"I say 'bitch', and that means a girl asshole. I might say 'jock', which means an athletic asshole. But you say 'n*gger', which means black asshole, everyone flies off the handle. That's where the racism thing is kind of fucked."

McKaye you're a fucking idiot. The reason it's OK to say "jock" meaning "athletic asshole" but it's not OK to say "Bitch" or "N*****" is because people can *choose* to be the kind of person who values athletic prowess or to be indifferent to it. You cannot *choose* to be female or to be black.

Someone may be an "asshole" for the choices that they make. They are *not* an asshole for the things that they were born as.

"Jock" in this case is specific that the assholedom is reliant on a lifestyle choice. The assholeness of a person has nothing to do with their gender or race, and to flag them up as being somehow reliant upon or qualified by that is a dick move.

that mackaye quote is pretty O_O... like it's okay to call a woman an asshole if you want, you don't need a new word

i don't think i've ever heard the word "jock" used in a derogatory way

guys i don't disagree at all but he was 19 and had a public forum and said some dumb bullshit (which is utterly non-shocking except i guess the content of the bullshit)--not sure why a pile-on is needed.

Although some kind-hearted scholar athletes will definitely be collateral damage under my new, scorching jock-epithet, there is probably no worse mentality than the macho bullshit it targets, so please consider yourselves martyrs for the cause.

McKaye you're a fucking idiot. The reason it's OK to say "jock" meaning "athletic asshole" but it's not OK to say "Bitch" or "N*****" is because people can *choose* to be the kind of person who values athletic prowess or to be indifferent to it. You cannot *choose* to be female or to be black.

I actually kind of hate this reasoning. It smacks of a certain condescension, the same reason gays have this weird vested interest in proving we were "born this way." We deserve rights and respect not because we were born this way, and who would choose that. It thus destroys the logic of for eg. gay pride, black history month, etc.

i don't think i've ever heard the word "jock" used in a derogatory way

― لوووووووووووووووووووول (lex pretend), Tuesday, June 22, 2010 1:27 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark

it's pretty outdated tbh

the last time i remember hearing "jock" as an insult was like... columbine, but i think the idea that they wanted to kill only jocks was a rumor that the press ran with, which tells you at which point in american history the term "jock" was a legit insult

"jock" is basically another failed attempt at coming up with an abusive term for the people who have all the privilege; such attempts are doomed to failure, because racist terms are there to remind their targets of their less-than status, whereas aimed-at-the-privileged terms can easily be rebutted "yup, I'm a jock asshole, guess what, I get all the good jobs & am allowed past the velvet rope"

Chris Rock* did a great bit in Kill The Messenger about that privilege gap: "Okay, let's trade; you get to say 'nigger', I get to set interest rates."

* btw sorry for being the guy who brings Chris Rock into the race relations

this is all secondhand, and maybe i'm getting this wrong a little, but my understanding of DC punk in the 80s was there was a culture of extreme hostility to "jocks" which didn't really mean the guys on the team or whatever, it was georgetown kids, suburbanites, children of the actual! ruling class, etc.

add in the straightedge thing bleeding into the skinhead bootboy thing... a gang of punks descending on a bunch of drunk fratboys and kicking the shit out of them was not unheard of.

so, as far as that quote is concerned, "jock" had a kind of DC-specific meaning (i think) and not a larger every-highschool-in-america kind of meaning.

not that it makes it any better

In Ian's defense, his horseshit is a natural product of the same naive utopianism that built the DIY network of people making business and culture in a non-assholish way.
It's a different species of obtuseness than Axl's, which is the natural product of assholism.

Shit, Tim Allen beat Chris Rock to that logic by a decade; summed it all up with "Yeah, men are pigs. [Grunting noise] Just too bad we own everything, huh?"

Yeah I think if I was writing a song and really really needed to use that word I'd make damn sure I knew why I was doing it and could explain myself beyond the old holding up a mirror shit.

guess I'll throw in my own personal story in here. around the mid-90s I wrote a poem/performance piece from the point the view of colin ferguson (the jamaican who killed a bunch of ppl on the LIRR in '93). I was usually nervous doing it in front of black audiences since at one point colin invokes the devil by saying "rise up papa legba, you old coon/you will defend me". even though I felt like the line worked in context and the black poets I was hanging with at the time were supportive, I felt hyper-aware of the sensitivity some audience members could have.

around this time I was invited to a one-on-one slam at a maximum security prison in tennessee. the opposing poet was black, the audience was (sadly, predictably) 95% black. I bravely/stupidly went ahead and performed the piece, and the reaction was super positive. after the slam we were socializing with the inmates, when a straight-backed fierce-faced nation of islam guy approached me. I braced myself for a confrontation. he handed me a pen and paper, asked for my autograph, giving me his koran to steady the paper. it was an emotional moment for me, still is tbh, and from then on I gave up on second-guessing myself about the piece.

I never had a problem performing it in the south, but when I moved up north there was at least one time when I suspected a poet was being cold to me afterwards because she was bothered by the piece. or maybe it wasn't that at all, maybe she thought I was trying to pick her up?

I'm still not sure what to make of it all. if we don't talk about this stuff it never gets worked out, and I do, rightfully or wrongfully, believe art is a valid forum for working through the intractables of life.

ugh so many many bad grammars in that post

i've always heard "jock" as referring to a certain type of athlete - the kind who seems seems completely at ease in the no-nonsense world of sport, who isn't a diva or a rebel, who just gets on with the job - kind of like the sporting equivalent of "model professional". someone like lindsay davenport.

ALSO HE WAS 19

so glad no one was interested in publishing my opinions when I was 19, it would have been a very compelling article about how turntablism is the future of music and believing in a christian god is for mindless cretins

so glad i never published my opinions when i was 19

i'm saddened that jocks have been the most successful group at reclaiming their word.

guys i don't disagree at all but he was 19 and had a public forum and said some dumb bullshit (which is utterly non-shocking except i guess the content of the bullshit)--not sure why a pile-on is needed.

The pile-on is happening because this guy is a successful, well-known pillar of the punk scene and he never should have been (imo) because of bullshit like this.

I think the dumbest opinion I held when I was 19 was "I would like to abolish equal opportunity because I would like to take an argument away from white racists who don't actually understand that yes, I am that much smarter than them, I always have been, and I always will be"; personalized bravado arrogance > being a racist dick.

I'm just not clear where a person of any age, at any point, would get the idea that a racial slur only refers to people of that race who are jerks. The fact that it was in the early 80s just makes it sound worse to me, because you can't pretend it was some kind of post-racial world where he got confused by that one Chris Rock routine. (OMG THIS IS AN XPOST) Surely anyone with any glimmer of any kind of awareness about what racial slurs are would be aware that they do not work that way. ESPECIALLY IF YOU ARE WHINING ABOUT BEING PIGEONHOLED AS "WHITE."

(I said stupid shit when I was young, too, some of it preserved on this very message board, but if someone brought it up I would offer much stronger apologies than McKaye ever does about this stuff; I've seen him do a lot of explaining about why he might have thought stupid things, but not much acknowledging that his stupidity might have been important for reasons beyond just himself.)

I've seen him do a lot of explaining about why he might have thought stupid things, but not much acknowledging that his stupidity might have been important for reasons beyond just himself.

see this makes mackaye much more of a dick than having the opinion in the first place.

I agree.

finding eiiis post super awesome atm

also speaks to the insularity of many scenes and that scene in particular--i can't fuckin stand people with no appreciation for history and wider context and maybe this is why i don't really like "punk" as a concept and blah blah blah

I'm just not clear where a person of any age, at any point, would get the idea that a racial slur only refers to people of that race who are jerks.

In my experience with white racists (the kind who get angry when you call them out for being racists, not the kind who are proud of it), claiming that they call everybody who meets a certain set of vaguely defined characteristics n----r, regardless of their race, is a pretty common justification for calling black people n----r. The fact that these people never seem to find a reason to call anybody white a n----r just means that to them, white people rarely embody these vague characteristics, which in and of itself is pretty racist.

I mean, one of the central points of racial/ethnic (and gender) slurs is how they are used to tell people that no matter what they do, how they behave, or what they accomplish, they will always be Less Than someone else, less than an equal participant in humanity.

(Even the idea that it's just part of a spectrum of identity insults is a huge part of how you have a society where a certain ideal of straight/white/male/etc. is always dominant. You have broad racial and gender slurs, you have things about class or religion, you have things about people's appearance or weight or ability or age, on and on and on. So when someone cuts you off in traffic you say "fuck you, you $IDENTITY INSULT." And some people seem to imagine this is somehow equal opportunity, but there is always some ideal for whom there is no major identity insult with any cultural force behind it. The fact that very few people 100% fit this ideal is totally meaningless; the point is it exists and has force.)

the loveliest thing about the Ian MacKaye quote is that his bands attracted that jockiest fanbase in the punk/hc scene.

pretty sure ian would smh at himself right now

shh

("I HATE JOCKS" patches were very popular with punk rock kids when I was in high school. Big athletic dudes were also pretty happy to refer to themselves as "jocks", mind you.)

It's probably a reflection of how outdated the term is now that I can't even find one of those patches with a GIS.

And where does this fit in?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=upvZdVK913I&feature=player_embedded

Seems to fit a certain "hip" '70s attempted defanging of the word. But I guess comedy is different. Or maybe not. The only way the word's use seems close to being excused is in satirical context, a la Newman.

and that movie was co-written by Richard Pryor iirc

the loveliest thing about the Ian MacKaye quote is that his bands attracted that jockiest fanbase in the punk/hc scene.

― _▂▅▇█▓▒░◕‿‿◕░▒▓█▇▅▂_ (Steve Shasta), Tuesday, June 22, 2010 5:56 PM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

nah what about those crazies that followed TSOL?

or like boston in general

I went through a mini "I HATE JOCKS" phase that lasted maybe a week; stepping back and looking at my family (which includes a great-uncle who played in the Negro Leagues, several uncles who played college football, my dad who still holds a college track record, my older brother who was a hair's-breadth away from being on the US Ski Team and got his picture on the cover of Powder magazine, and my oldest brother who was a bodybuilder, high school and college football player for the Air Force and still holds a high school track record) cured me of that pretty quickly; also it kind of didn't make sense for me to be all "I HATE JOCKS" when I was on the basketball, soccer and track teams, and consistently lettering in track.

not all sports are were jock sports though, like tennis and cross country

IF YOU CAN'T HACK IT
GRAB A RACKET

i was only on the practice squad in 7th grade tennis, none of my matches counted ;_;

one time i played a "7th grader" that had a moustache and looked about 17, he was wearing boat shoes and cut off jeans shorts

also no lie i swear to god i played a guy with one arm once, i almost blew it too, i was so scared of being the guy that lost to a guy with one arm i melted down early on, but rallied for a less than triumphant victory

wait, there was a MN school where cross-country wasn't a jock sport???? what happened, I am confused