Yet more problematic stuff

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Sean Hayden
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Re: Yet more problematic stuff

Post by Sean Hayden » Thu Sep 16, 2021 9:34 pm

Your opinion on the toxicity of the term has absolutely no bearing on whether or not I used the term correctly. I used the term correctly even according to the author of the article that you totally didn't quote mine.
It's incredible that you of all people can't see a problem with calling a black political opponent a house negro. :nono:

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Re: Yet more problematic stuff

Post by Seabass » Thu Sep 16, 2021 9:41 pm

Sean Hayden wrote:
Thu Sep 16, 2021 8:45 pm
House negro is a racial slur.

It questions one's racial "authenticity" if they refuse to embrace a pseudo-intellectual worldview which is based on grievance and resentment.

Solidarity with all those who reject your toxic identity politics which is a threat to social cohesion.
Dr Rakib Ehsan

It's a twitter thread. Important to my point which you insist I used a quote mine to support are the many people who understand the term in exactly the way you've literally never heard it used e.g.
The idea that when one black person calls another a “house negro” they mean it as a political critique is insane. It’s alway meant as a personal insult ( at least in America).
-Brandon

https://twitter.com/rakibehsan/status/1 ... 8862531585
So a British conservative has an opinion on the matter. That's nice. I'll go with what I've read in numerous books written by African American authors about history and racism in the US.

Again, the fact that some people misuse the term doesn't mean that I should also misuse it, and doesn't mean that I'm wrong for using it correctly.
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Re: Yet more problematic stuff

Post by Seabass » Thu Sep 16, 2021 9:51 pm

Sean Hayden wrote:
Thu Sep 16, 2021 9:34 pm
Your opinion on the toxicity of the term has absolutely no bearing on whether or not I used the term correctly. I used the term correctly even according to the author of the article that you totally didn't quote mine.
It's incredible that you of all people can't see a problem with calling a black political opponent a house negro. :nono:
What I said was that he is every American racist's favorite house negro.

Did you even bother to read the whole article that you didn't quote mine? Or did you stop reading at the paragraph that you found useful?

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Re: Yet more problematic stuff

Post by Sean Hayden » Thu Sep 16, 2021 9:56 pm

You've got a nasty habit of dismissing people on flimsy grounds. If all your reading were that valuable you'd think you'd have a better understanding of how insults are commonly used and understood, especially in the communities you'd have us believe you most care about.

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Re: Yet more problematic stuff

Post by Sean Hayden » Thu Sep 16, 2021 10:01 pm

Did you even bother to read the whole article that you didn't quote mine? Or did you stop reading at the paragraph that you found useful?
Really, you're still going to run with that? Did you understand the quote mine definition you posted? Okay, so how was my use of his quote --to support a common understanding you denied ever seeing-- undermined by the rest of his piece? Did he later say people don't use it this way, or, understand it this way? No, so, not a quote mine then.

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Re: Yet more problematic stuff

Post by Seabass » Thu Sep 16, 2021 11:23 pm

Sean Hayden wrote:
Thu Sep 16, 2021 9:56 pm
You've got a nasty habit of dismissing people on flimsy grounds.
You've got a nasty habit of citing far-right nutjobs in discussions about racism. Why should I take far-right nutjobs seriously?
Sean Hayden wrote:
Thu Sep 16, 2021 9:56 pm
If all your reading were that valuable you'd think you'd have a better understanding of how insults are commonly used and understood, especially in the communities you'd have us believe you most care about.
I'm not using the term as a schoolyard insult. I'm using it the way that I have seen it used in books written by black authors who write about racism and the black experience throughout US history. But you don't read African American authors, so you're apparently not familiar with that usage of the term. That's fine. I don't expect everyone to know everything. So I have subsequently explained to you what I meant by it, and I have presented you with the correct meaning, along with some background and history of term. Why isn't that enough?

A lot of people misuse a lot of words. A lot of people say "could care less" when they really mean "couldn't care less". Does that mean I should also start using the incorrect version?

In many households, treatment of slaves varied with the slave's skin color. Darker-skinned slaves worked in the fields, while lighter-skinned house servants had comparatively better clothing, food and housing.[11] Referred to as "house negroes", they had a higher status and standard of living than a field slave or "field negro" who worked outdoors, often in harsh conditions.

As in President Thomas Jefferson's household, the presence of lighter-skinned slaves as household servants was not merely an issue of skin color. Sometimes planters used mixed-race slaves as house servants or favored artisans because they were their children or other relatives. Several of Jefferson's household slaves were possibly children of his father-in-law John Wayles and the enslaved woman Betty Hemings, who were inherited by Jefferson's wife upon her father's death. In turn Jefferson himself raped Betty and John Wayles's daughter Sally Hemings, the half-sister to Thomas Jefferson's wife. The Hemings children grew up to be closely involved in Jefferson's household staff activities. Two sons trained as carpenters. Three of his four surviving mixed-race children with Sally Hemings passed into white society as adults.[12]

The term "house negro" appears in print by 1711. On May 21 of that year, The Boston News-Letter ran an advertisement that "A Young House-Negro Wench of 19 Years of Age that speaks English to be Sold."[13] In a 1771 letter, a Maryland slave-owner compared the lives of his slaves to those of "house negroes" and "plantation negroes", refuting an accusation that his slaves were poorly fed by saying they were fed as well as "plantation negroes", though not as well as the "house negroes".[13][14] In 1807, a report of the African Institution of London described an incident in which an old woman was required to work in the field after she refused to throw salt-water and gunpowder on the wounds of other slaves who had been whipped. According to the report, she had previously enjoyed a favored status as a "house negro".[15]

Margaret Mitchell made use of the term to describe a slave named Pork in her famed 1936 Southern plantation fiction, Gone With the Wind.[16]

African-American activist Malcolm X commented on the cultural connotations and consequences of the term in his 1963 speech "Message to the Grass Roots", wherein he explained that during slavery there were two types of slaves: "house negroes" who worked in the master's house, and "field negroes" who performed outdoor manual labor. He characterized the house negro as having a better life than the field negro, and thus being unwilling to leave the plantation and potentially more likely to support existing power structures that favored whites over blacks. Malcolm X identified with the field negro.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_slave#United_States
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Re: Yet more problematic stuff

Post by Sean Hayden » Thu Sep 16, 2021 11:32 pm

No, it means in this case you should have an understanding of the term beyond what you've encountered in your reading. House negro is an insult, that clearly seeks to hurt by exclusion those it is directed at.

Sowell is the wrong kind of black, a traitor to his race.

I'm not sure why you think hiding behind Malcolm X makes the term any less insulting. It wasn't better when he used it either.

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Re: Yet more problematic stuff

Post by Brian Peacock » Thu Sep 16, 2021 11:34 pm

Sowell engages in a classic neoliberal argument, one that ignores the material conditions of people and seats their social status and standing almost entirely on character, which is a matter of individual responsibility and choice. It's strikes me a culturally naive. The video reviewer doesn't mention that the presumed British progenitors of Redneck culture (Scots, Irish, and Northern Englanders of 'the borders') were displaced by force from their common lands by the aristocracy: a period know as the clearances or the enclosures. Many were transported to what are now the Eastern Canadian and North-Eastern American provinces as indentured and slave labour. At the same time the French were trying to build up their territories on the North American continent by similar means. During the New World's theatre of the Seven Years war in the mid-1700s the British rounded up anyone it suspected might sympathise with the French, British and French settlers and labourers alike, and forcefully deported them and their families again, some back to Europe but the majority down the Eastern seaboard to the British plantation colonies, again as labour: the so-called Great Expulsion. Many of those displaced to Europe wanted nothing to do with with either the British or the French and were recruited by the Spanish as seamen and labours who plied the trade roots between Europe, West Africa and the Spanish pocket colonies in modern-day Louisiana and Mississippi. After they lost the Seven Years war France ceded their New World territories to Spain, who then gained control of the land west of the Mississippi river with the British controlling the land to the east. This is the short version of course.

The connections between Scots-Irish and the New World can still be seen today in the folk music and food traditions of rural Newfoundland down through Kentucky, Virginia and North Carolina etc, and in similar connections through the Cajun culture to it's Franco-Spanish roots - and just as we can still see the cultural connections between US Black culture and African traditions.

All I'm saying is that what passes for 'Redneck' today (a culture typical of the Southern poor) is the result of a brutal historical period of displacement, forced labour and servitude - not a matter of the moral failings and the character flaws of individual Rednecks as much as the inevitable legacy of colonialism: violence, displacement, oppression, exploitation, and poverty.

Doc Watson. Traditional US interpretation of the British 'Border Ballad' Matty Groves...

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Re: Yet more problematic stuff

Post by Seabass » Thu Sep 16, 2021 11:34 pm

Sean Hayden wrote:
Thu Sep 16, 2021 10:01 pm
Did you even bother to read the whole article that you didn't quote mine? Or did you stop reading at the paragraph that you found useful?
Really, you're still going to run with that? Did you understand the quote mine definition you posted? Okay, so how was my use of his quote --to support a common understanding you denied ever seeing-- undermined by the rest of his piece? Did he later say people don't use it this way, or, understand it this way? No, so, not a quote mine then.
So did you read the whole article or not?

It's a quote mine because you presented only the one paragraph that would support your position, and omitted all the rest of it that showed that I was in fact using the term correctly, the way that it has been used since the time of slavery. And you didn't provide a link to it so there was no way to know the broader context around that one paragraph. I only found out about that context because I happen to find the article during my own internet search.
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Re: Yet more problematic stuff

Post by Sean Hayden » Thu Sep 16, 2021 11:45 pm

That's not a quote mine. :sigh: I only wanted to show how a common understanding of the term you'd never encountered was in fact well established. If I had instead tried to use it to say that your use of the term was unknown, or innaccurate, that would be a quote mine.

Of course I think he's also wrong to ignore the toxicity of the term, but I was already satisfied with your explanation and only hoped to broaden your understanding of its use outside such a narrow focus.

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Re: Yet more problematic stuff

Post by Sean Hayden » Thu Sep 16, 2021 11:54 pm

Brian Peacock wrote:
Thu Sep 16, 2021 11:34 pm
Sowell engages in a classic neoliberal argument, one that ignores the material conditions of people and seats their social status and standing almost entirely on character, which is a matter of individual responsibility and choice. It's strikes me a culturally naive. The video reviewer doesn't mention that the presumed British progenitors of Redneck culture (Scots, Irish, and Northern Englanders of 'the borders') were displaced by force from their common lands by the aristocracy: a period know as the clearances or the enclosures. Many were transported to what are now the Eastern Canadian and North-Eastern American provinces as indentured and slave labour. At the same time the French were trying to build up their territories on the North American continent by similar means. During the New World's theatre of the Seven Years war in the mid-1700s the British rounded up anyone it suspected might sympathise with the French, British and French settlers and labourers alike, and forcefully deported them and their families again, some back to Europe but the majority down the Eastern seaboard to the British plantation colonies, again as labour: the so-called Great Expulsion. Many of those displaced to Europe wanted nothing to do with with either the British or the French and were recruited by the Spanish as seamen and labours who plied the trade roots between Europe, West Africa and the Spanish pocket colonies in modern-day Louisiana and Mississippi. After they lost the Seven Years war France ceded their New World territories to Spain, who then gained control of the land west of the Mississippi river with the British controlling the land to the east. This is the short version of course.

The connections between Scots-Irish and the New World can still be seen today in the folk music and food traditions of rural Newfoundland down through Kentucky, Virginia and North Carolina etc, and in similar connections through the Cajun culture to it's Franco-Spanish roots - and just as we can still see the cultural connections between US Black culture and African traditions.

All I'm saying is that what passes for 'Redneck' today (a culture typical of the Southern poor) is the result of a brutal historical period of displacement, forced labour and servitude - not a matter of the moral failings and the character flaws of individual Rednecks as much as the inevitable legacy of colonialism: violence, displacement, oppression, exploitation, and poverty.

Doc Watson. Traditional US interpretation of the British 'Border Ballad' Matty Groves...

I think Sowell would say you've always got an external factor to blame, and then provide examples of others facing equally crushing external factors without becoming "rednecks".

But why should we punish those that don't, or seek to clone --at great risk-- a single successful culture?

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Re: Yet more problematic stuff

Post by Brian Peacock » Fri Sep 17, 2021 12:31 am

Yes. A single example of social mobility from a poor, Redneck culture, to the more virtuous middle-class culture would undo my argument - if we accepted Sowell's personal character/individual responsibility premise: "The problem with these damn rednecks is that they just don't want to better themselves."
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Re: Yet more problematic stuff

Post by Seabass » Fri Sep 17, 2021 1:01 am

Sean Hayden wrote:
Thu Sep 16, 2021 11:32 pm
No, it means in this case you should have an understanding of the term beyond what you've encountered in your reading. House negro is an insult, that clearly seeks to hurt by exclusion those it is directed at.

Sowell is the wrong kind of black, a traitor to his race.

I'm not sure why you think hiding behind Malcolm X makes the term any less insulting. It wasn't better when he used it either.
Do you think I go to restaurants and supermarkets and blurt that term out at people I don't know? I'm on a bloody atheist forum. I tend to expect people here to know what words mean. Mea culpa, I guess.

I'm not hiding behind Malcolm X. I have merely explained the meaning of the term as it has been used in this country since the time of slavery. If you're more familiar with some alternative slang meaning that is used on high school playgrounds, so be it, but I'm telling you that I didn't use it that way.
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Re: Yet more problematic stuff

Post by laklak » Fri Sep 17, 2021 1:21 am

Brian Peacock wrote:
Fri Sep 17, 2021 12:31 am
Yes. A single example of social mobility from a poor, Redneck culture, to the more virtuous middle-class culture would undo my argument - if we accepted Sowell's personal character/individual responsibility premise: "The problem with these damn rednecks is that they just don't want to better themselves."
Rednecks with money, your worst nightmare.
Yeah well that's just, like, your opinion, man.

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Re: Yet more problematic stuff

Post by Sean Hayden » Fri Sep 17, 2021 2:45 am

Wait, so now you're saying a common understanding of the term is limited to the playground? Again, do you think calling educated blacks "white" is far removed from the term house negro, or that they share a different origin? 'Oh look at x, he's talking like the master now...'
Of course ‘house negro’ is a racial slur
It is incredible that anyone would pretend otherwise.
The divide-and-rule tactic on the plantation – separating the light and dark slaves – was clever. It prevented uprisings. The house slaves didn’t want to lose their privileges and favours. They felt superior for being light and had the master’s ear.

Understandably, the field negroes were resentful of the house negroes and their desirability, however artificial. This dynamic, I stress, still exists today. It is one of the many reasons why being black (of whatever hue) in the West is never straightforward. White people don’t have to think about these things. It comes with the privilege of being white. But I digress.

Make no mistake, house negro can only ever be an insult and it can only be directed at black people. It is a racial slur. How the black academic Kehinde Andrews can now claim that it is anything other than a racial slur is baffling. I can only assume that he dislikes Robinson so much that he is willing to defend an Indian woman throwing a racial slur at a black man. That, or perhaps Kehinde has internalised this dark-skin, light-skin divide. As Bob Marley says, we would all do well to free ourselves from this mental slavery.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/08/2 ... cial-slur/

The argument is less important than who is making it here i.e. not on the playground.

--//--

I had nearly apologized for being unfair to you Seabass. My first thought watching Sowell's interviews with some white guy was christ, these old white fuckers are going to love this guy --and they do, and it's cringe to watch-- but I have to check the temptation to discount Sowell, especially by using his race.

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