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

A real heart-breaking one for me is The Oblivians' "Nigger Rich" - which I'm sure they did as shock value "punk rock" transgressive bullshit on some level - but they're so much fucking smarter than that. Also - and not to harp on Southerners - but something about that coming from a Memphis band is extra depressing

― brio, Tuesday, June 22, 2010 2:26 PM (11 minutes ago) Bookmark

phil u seem to have this "every one i like isn't a jock everyone i hate is a jock" thang goin on

my bmi is 23.8

i went to the gym this morning

Obama was clearly no nerd

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/photo/2010/06/09/PH2010060903176.jpg

res ilx is relatively but inevitably 'narrow' culturally (as opposed to racially which is a slightly different ish).

a bunch of fat, white, pop culture dorks sitting together organizing some kind of social response plan

new board description

I don't like the idea of a bunch of fat, white, pop culture dorks sitting together organizing some kind of social response plan surrounding the word NIGGER. It would be a masturbatory pursuit that would only serve to emphasize the depth of the racial divide, where people pretend like they understand shit about race relations, but who can only speculate based on their own fears, inherited perception of social tensions, guilt, and overall acculturation processes about how people "should" or "shouldn't" talk. Fuck that. This should be a multicultural discussion.

― Lazarus Niles-Burnham (res), Tuesday, June 22, 2010 2:40 PM (31 seconds ago) Bookmark

hey, some us are really skinny.

(not me though.)

I didn't say that's what ILX was. I said I'd want to know if that was the case. xpost

too many belle and sebastian fans tbh

it's spelled phat btw

' "every one i like isn't a jock everyone i hate is a jock" thang goin on'
ha! pretty much! I'm sure there's some nerds I hate, too though.

I'm neither fat nor do I know much about pop culture and I can't remember where my 'Dear Catastrophe Waitress' CD is.

i'm a lard-carrying member of the phatty club

but yeah, the tendency to excoriate ian mackay kinda sticks in my craw, too. maybe he hasn't sufficiently apologized for his remarks, but he's at least tried, and i'm sure i said equally reprehensible shit in my teens. i get the impression that he was speaking from an ignorance he later outgrew, which doesn't automatically render his youthful remarks harmless, but it does incline me to cut the dude some slack 30 years down the line.

I don't like the idea of a bunch of fat, white, pop culture dorks sitting together organizing some kind of social response plan surrounding the word NIGGER. It would be a masturbatory pursuit that would only serve to emphasize the depth of the racial divide, where people pretend like they understand shit about race relations, but who can only speculate based on their own fears, inherited perception of social tensions, guilt, and overall acculturation processes about how people "should" or "shouldn't" talk. Fuck that. This should be a multicultural discussion.

― Lazarus Niles-Burnham (res), Tuesday, June 22, 2010 2:40 PM (31 seconds ago) Bookmark

One of the all time worst posts. And trust me, I've put a few up there.

many xxxposts @ clemenza, I was specifically talking about the N word, but now that I think about, maybe it wasn't used in Res Dogs..? but you are correct; his character in RD, however obnoxious, is believable. in Pulp he's really excessive and irritating. tbh he could have subbed "Dead Asshole Storage" and it still would have been grating. but at least it wouldn't be pig-ignorant shock tactics.

i'd like to think that people of any sort can have meaningful discussions even about difficult subject

Yeah, I'd like to think that too. But you have to admit that something is severely lacking at a white man's convention about race relations.

I didn't say that's what ILX was. I said I'd want to know if that was the case. xpost

― Lazarus Niles-Burnham (res), Tuesday, June 22, 2010 2:49 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark

Kinda depends on the white dudes, tbf, and this isn't a white man's convention, res.

But you have to admit that something is severely lacking at a white man's convention about race relations.

― Lazarus Niles-Burnham (res), Tuesday, June 22, 2010 2:53 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark

this isn't a "white man's convention about race relations" (argh xpost)

hmmm gee maybe if there was some way we could tag posters' racial characteristics... you could put a little Star of David next to all my posts if that would make you comfortable (whether or not Jews are white people is highly contentious)

ps I am not fat

xp

res has brought a whole new level of energy to thread, kudos

Before res ruins this thread, I just wanted to say this --

As far as the discussion about American children goes: this is a largely white country with ideas about things like beauty and intelligence and normality that privilege white people. Those ideas are encoded into everything around us. The bulk of them are practically invisible to us. They don't have to be malicious or explicit for children to soak them up. They can work by omission or via ideals. They're the culture we live in, the water we swim in. Of course that's what children pick up, whether it's making them think less of someone else or think less of themselves. That's not going to be escapable until our culture has changed way more dramatically than we can sit here and imagine.

In the meantime I think most of the work of correcting that is maybe less about really small children -- like Shakey says, it's immensely complicated, and will involve mistakes and embarrassment, because children can't just suddenly become geniuses about this stuff -- and more about dealing with kids who are old enough to start working through the subtleties and questioning what they've soaked up thus far.

(I mean, it's way more straightforward to explain to a small child how people from different parts of the planet look different, no big deal, than it is to start explaining the whole history of why people who look a particular way all live on the other side of town, or have less money than you, or whatever else.)

nabisco OTM

Plus, babies' conversational abilities are somewhat limited.

I could speak perfect swahili when I was born but forgot it all by my second day out of the womb

(Shit now I'm dissing babies on this thread)

children can't just suddenly become geniuses about this stuff

I think a certain little motion picture called Baby Geniuses begs to differ

But you have to admit that something is severely lacking at a white man's convention about race relations.

― Lazarus Niles-Burnham (res), Tuesday, June 22, 2010 2:53 PM (10 minutes ago)

white men relate about race like this

And for the record, when I say it's encoded into everything, I'm not saying we live in some dystopian racist nightmare (I guess that depends on your standards), just that it's threaded through all the smallest things around us. We've gotten better and better about being aware of the big obvious things, but isn't not like the entire culture can just magically forget the whole deal.

right, and that was more what I was saying, that as disguised and disavowed as it certainly was nowadays, the racial delirium was still prevalent in American culture, and young children were still picking up on it at an alarming rate. Except that I was way more pissed off about it (being a white person, that is...having an unearned head start tends to bruise the pride.)

I don't think I've actually addressed the OP on this so I'll just say that I have never heard a song by a white person that contains the n-word that I found defensible. The Lennon has always made me cringe a little (a tad condesecending to women and a tad insensitive to blacks) but I wonder if Costello's usage in 'Oliver's Army' (the Cromwell reference sounds a little over the top to me, too) doesn't reference the language of a certain kind of British soldier.

In the meantime I think most of the work of correcting that is maybe less about really small children -- like Shakey says, it's immensely complicated, and will involve mistakes and embarrassment, because children can't just suddenly become geniuses about this stuff -- and more about dealing with kids who are old enough to start working through the subtleties and questioning what they've soaked up thus far.

― oɔsıqɐu (nabisco), Tuesday, June 22, 2010 3:00 PM (8 minutes ago) Bookmark

xp I do tend to give MES a pass on The Classical; something about throwing the word "obligatory" in there always implies in my mind that he's saying that certain groups of people need to be marginalized in order for society to structure itself, which along with the rampant misanthropic (twelve ppl in the world, rest r paste) & and anti-national (classic British attention to the wrong detail) vitriol, makes it seem very much like scouring social satire.

One great way to deal with little kids wrt racism is to have lots of friends who are different than you - then your children stand a better chance of hanging out one on one or in small groups w/people of different races even before the positive or negative institutional atmosphere of pre-school or kindergarten.

being straight-up with your kids about the fact that race and racism do exist in the world, even from an early age

look for me the problem is what does "being straight up that race and racism exist in the world" amount to when we're talking about 2-4 year olds, because what these studies show is that by the time they get to kindergarten racist stuff is already getting ingrained in their heads. So how do you talk to someone who can barely talk themselves about things that are really difficult and complicated to talk about...? Like how do you verbally counter stuff that is developing non-verbally?

xp

One great way to deal with little kids wrt racism is to have lots of friends who are different than you - then your children stand a better chance of hanging out one on one or in small groups w/people of different races

the problem is that the studies directly contradict this commonly held liberal belief - kids in integrated classes actually were MORE likely to hold racist predispositions.

I will try to find some links, my wife has been pretty up on this...

In the meantime I think most of the work of correcting that is maybe less about really small children -- like Shakey says, it's immensely complicated, and will involve mistakes and embarrassment, because children can't just suddenly become geniuses about this stuff -- and more about dealing with kids who are old enough to start working through the subtleties and questioning what they've soaked up thus far.

nabisco otm (once again)

http://www.salon.com/life/broadsheet/feature/2009/09/11/colorblind_myth/print.html

This seems like the kind of thing that people of the color-blind school would like to get behind: Just raise a kid in an environment where race is no big deal, and your kids will see race as no big deal. But unfortunately, they say, things don’t often work out that way. Several long-term studies quoted by the authors have shown that the more diverse the school, the more likely it is that kids will self-segregate. As a result, says University of Austin’s Rebecca Bigler, who considers herself a huge supporter of integrated schools, “Going to an integrated school gives you just as many chances to learn stereotypes as to unlearn them.”

wife has a link to actual study somewhere, but I may not get it for a little awhile...

ike how do you verbally counter stuff that is developing non-verbally?

― insert your favorite discriminatory practice here (Shakey Mo Collier), Tuesday, June 22, 2010 3:24 PM (18 seconds ago) Bookmark

Wow you guys are waaaaaaaaaaayyyy off the original thread topic (sorry, just checked back in).

kids in integrated classes actually were MORE likely to hold racist predispositions.

I mean before school/pre-school. My little nephew's best friend is the son of my sister's best friend and they're Korean Americans.

I'm not saying that will preclude him from developing racist attitudes or thoughts but it may be less likely that he develops them about Koreans.

Several long-term studies quoted by the authors have shown that the more diverse the school, the more likely it is that kids will self-segregate. As a result, says University of Austin’s Rebecca Bigler, who considers herself a huge supporter of integrated schools, “Going to an integrated school gives you just as many chances to learn stereotypes as to unlearn them.”

wife has a link to actual study somewhere, but I may not get it for a little awhile...

― insert your favorite discriminatory practice here (Shakey Mo Collier), Tuesday, June 22, 2010 3:29 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark

kids in culturally uniform environments self-segregate anyway. they ostracize one another and form cliques, etc. we just don't worry as much about such behavior as we do about racism.

"...along which to organize their self-segregation."

lol my daughter's half-Korean playmates have (apparently) never been told about their Korean heritage.

yeah I dunno it's just worrisome, I try to make sure she has a range of playmates but it's a social landscape littered with landmines out there, no one wants to feel their kid is being tokenized and whatnot. In a weird way, parents complain about racial disparity on either end - I've heard white parents complain that their kids' playgroups are too white, and latino/black parents complain that their kid is the lone minority, so there is a weird self-segregation that goes on, where the white folks wanna be all integrated and the other minority groups want to keep to themselves (to retain cultural pride/continuity, shelter their kids from racism, who knows what else)

xp

As a non-parent, I am amazed at the amount of landmines you have to negotiate but if you do it in the right spirit, I think it tends to lessen the chance that your kids will turn out to be sociopaths.

This seems like the kind of thing that people of the color-blind school would like to get behind: Just raise a kid in an environment where race is no big deal, and your kids will see race as no big deal. But unfortunately, they say, things don’t often work out that way. Several long-term studies quoted by the authors have shown that the more diverse the school, the more likely it is that kids will self-segregate. As a result, says University of Austin’s Rebecca Bigler, who considers herself a huge supporter of integrated schools, “Going to an integrated school gives you just as many chances to learn stereotypes as to unlearn them.”

I went to a v racially diverse elementary school and I don't feel like I saw that much self-segregation going on. Maybe I just didn't notice it. But I mingled with anyone of any race and didn't really develop conceptions of race beyond what people looked like until later on. (Then again I was an aspie rube who until first grade thought the only difference between genders was hair length. Then I saw a girl with short hair and realized there must be something else going on.)