"Damn! Them N****rs are just like US!"

[dbt]

I was all of twelve years old when Dr. King gave his "I Have A Dream" speech in August of 1963. To this day, I cannot remember why I happened to be watching ABC news in glorious black-and-white just outside the small town of Friendship, Arkansas (population 206, not counting dogs), but I somehow was.

Of course, I already knew that I was supposed to hate N****rs. Though neither of my parents EVER uttered the word in my presence, my peer group had taken great pains with my indoctrination since roughly the age of five. I already knew the Important Shit about N****rs, that they were:

Inferior in every way to "Us"
Slow
Backward
Unintelligent
Stinky
Poisonous
Sneaky
Treacherous
Subversive
Submissive
Lustfully covetous of White Women
Probably all Communists
Probably all followers of Malcom X who wanted US dead
And on and on and on and ON!

The thing that compelled my attention to the broadcast was the amount of people who had turned out in such force to hear this N****r give a speech. What were they all doing in our nation's capital, why had they all taken off from work to go hundreds of miles, just to listen to a N****r?!?!

As the cameras panned across the throng, my indoctrination was challenged in the WORST way: I saw WHITE FACES in that crowd! WHITE PEOPLE WHO WERE LISTENING TO WHAT A N****r had to say!! Then I had my Moment.

Those inferior, dark-skinned, BACKWARD people in their overalls and plowshoes with their mules and wagons looked a WHOLE LOT like the superior white-skinned people in my neighborhood, with their overalls and plowshoes and mules and wagons! What the fuck was THIS?!?! I wasn't even old enough to grow a BEARD, for cryinoutloud, but it already looked like my own people were LYING to me!

EXCEPT FOR THEIR SKIN COLOR, them N****rs were just like the White people around Friendship who told me I was supposed to HATE ALL N****RS! But I couldn't, anymore. Not when my child's eyes saw "them" looking just like "us." And probably wanting the same things that "we" wanted!

I didn't know that this "King" N****r was a preacher, not did I hear the bit about children being judged not on the color of their skin, but on the content of their character. All I could tell in that summer of 1963 was: Them N****rs are just like us!

Thank you, Doctor King! I fear we will never see the likes of you again.

:freak:
dbt
Remember New Orleans

[Surya Gayatri]

1. My eyes teared up and my

aging, bleeding-liberal heart was uplifted for a brief moment, remembering that great men and their great ideas really can change the world.
The struggle goes on. Thank you dbt. SG

Edit: A big K & R

[mcg]

33. same here, good post, I remember...

the first time I saw black people. I was quite young, I wasn't really aware there were 'other' people. I was standing near a school bus stop, there were two young black children passing through the neighborhood. White kids were saying things like 'Get out of here you n*s.' I found it interesting but not surprising that there were people whose skin was dark, I didn't think much of it. What I found puzzling was why these kids were being yelled, why the anger? I figured it had something to do with the kids skin being dark, but that didn't make much sense, why be angry at someone just because their skin is dark?

[malaise]

2. Lovely post

K & R

[illinoisprogressive]

3. What a wonderful story.

When I was something like 5, we were visiting my grandparents. They lived by a park in a somewhat mixed neighborhood. I came from suburbia of the 60s. My brother and I were playing alone when a child about my age came along and we played with him. He was black. We were not exposed to prejudice yet and so, we played as kids do. When he left my brother and I said to each other how nice he was and that we thought his skin was brown because black people (we knew about blacks) were dark because they came from a hot place like Africa and so, maybe their skin burned and then, the rest had burned skin as well.
We were lucky in that the word and the racial rants were not allowed in our house as we grew older but, this I will never forget. Such are children.

[Catfight]

4. I think the story would have been fine without the reference to the "N"

word, I found it offensive. Try substituting the reference and just put Dr. King in it and it still has a good meaning. As long as people allow themselves to even 'think' of the "N" word, they allow themselves to be separate but equal. Just like reference 'gays' or using the 'F' word. When the labels come off and people stop referring to 'them' and 'us' nothings really progressed except their clever pronoun use.

[dbt]

5. There would have been no story without the N word.

I also find it offensive now, especially in the light of the alleged differences I did not discover all those years ago.

dbt

[11 Bravo]

7. I agree. There was nothing gratuitous about your use of the word.

It was a powerful story, related through the eyes of a child, and told in the words that child had been taught.

on edit: K&R (forgot to recommend the 1st time)

[dbt]

8. Thank you, 11 Bravo.

n/t

[BlooInBloo]

23. I criticize the opposite way: If you're gonna use it, USE it. Wuss.

Don't pussyfoot around it with faux-sharp language. Say what the ugliness is.

[AspenRose]

25. But then, there would have been someone here who wouldn't have

"gotten it" and would have tried to get the whole post banned.

You should KNOW that by now, sheesh! :rofl:

[BlooInBloo]

36. I suspect my stance on that "issue" is predictable... :)

[tavalon]

10. But that's the whole story there

The child who overcame the prejudice. It's all there, in the word and in the epiphany. I hate the word too, and it's clear that the OP does too because despite the necessity of that awful word to the telling of the story, he/she refused to spell it out. It's just too ugly and the poster knew that.

[dbt]

13. I am NOT worthy.

Thank you, tavalon!

[bluerum]

15. Catfight raises an interesting aside - the use of symbols and stand ins

to convey a message. An observation on the evolution of language in group consciousness.

I think the use of the stand in symbol (N*****) adds significantly to the meaning of the post. The use of the stand in symbol implicitly declares that the original word was so offensive and tainted that its use in the post could not be obliged or tolerated.

This use of "stand in" symbols to substitute for an offensive word or idea in our language is interesting. The conundrum is that even when we try to avoid using offensive words, ideas, and symbols in this way, the stand in words still connect us to the original meaning of the offensive words. The distinction to be made is that the use of the stand in word implicitly adds meaning to the language. In this case part of that meaning it is that the original word is something corrosive and evil and it must not be uttered openly.

The important thing to note is that the connection to the meanings of the original word is made in a context intended to objectify its offensiveness rather than use it in its traditional manner. It is an attempt to detach the original dehumanizing intent from the word, and add new contextual meaning to it.

The new contextual meaning includes the acknowledgment that the original words, ideas, and symbols were evil, corrosive, and dehumanizing. That cannot be avoided. It also adds significant meaning by saying that the use of this word is so offensive that not only shall it not be uttered, but it shall also be altered in a way that hides it's face in shame and disgust.

on edit: Language. Duh.

[chiffon]

16. I agree wholeheartedly.

Although this post is climbing in recommendations, I wonder if any African-American DUers are voting it up.

As I read it, I did not sense that the OP meant to be offensive, BUT, I believe it would have been less offensive if the OP used this racial epithet less and particularly not as part of the moniker conjoined with "King".

The N-word is also an attention-getter when used in the Subject header; just look at the number of times it has been viewed.

Still, not trying to start a GRAND debate, just my .02.




edit (to include the term racial epithet)

[Totallybushed]

20. So true, and

what is really frustrating is that African-Americans, themselves, freely use the word. Of course, one can say that the meaning is different, depending on who uses it.

That may, or may not, be so. I don't think so. It is always a disparaging word. But even if it is so, it is still used to divide us. Some people can use a word, and others cannot?! How can anyone expect awareness of a difference to disappear if we have to constantly remember rules like that?

Just my thoughts.

[AspenRose]

26. Not all blacks use it freely.

There are plenty who do not approve of its use, EVER.

[Totallybushed]

29. That's true.

Just like there are plenty of white folks who never use the word.

But that doesn't do anything about the ones who do, does it?

[La Lioness Priyanka]

28. in group honorifics. you take a word your enemies use and make it lose power.

its a tool a lot of oppressed minorities have used.

[Totallybushed]

30. Still sucks,

in my opinion. All the efforts toward eliminating prejudice cannot come from just one side. Why give your opponents that ammunition?

[La Lioness Priyanka]

31. prejudice doesnt exist in words. its reflected in words.

[Totallybushed]

32. A true statement, that

completely misses the point.

[Little Wing]

21. That was the whole point

*sigh*

[roody]

22. The story is about growing up in Arkansas. Please do not

change the story.

[La Lioness Priyanka]

27. if you are mentioning a story about gays and said faggot..because you thought of them as faggots

till you had an epiphany and realized they were just like you and deserving of the same rights etc..i dont think there is any problem.

[minkyboodle]

35. I thought the OP was right to post this way

I think honest posts like this from white people
who grew up in the South during that era are rare
and needed. The way people in the South of that
generation act now concerning MLK and race, you'd
think that MLK was hugely popular in the South with
the revisionist bullshit that some people spew. We
need to remember how hugely unpopular he was at that time and
even up to his eventual murder. People like OP who had a genuine
awakening moment or a gradual change of views from the ones that they
were kind of born into need to tell more stories like this.
And as honestly as the OP did.

[Hissyspit]

38. I grew up in this area of Arkansas. The OP is using the conversational conventions of the time.

The word flowed freely as if it was the word that SHOULD be used and dbt is trying to give you a sense of it. He is being honest in his representation of the culture and the peer influence. I was called a "nigger-lover" by my relatives, another term thrown around freely, in the late 1970s just because I questioned the conventional attitudes of my relatives in regards to human relations. The ignorance was oppressive and often overwhelming.

My parents were from the area dbt is discussing, Arkadelphia, Malvern, Bismarck, and my uncle lived in Friendship for a time - did some of you not catch the irony of his repeated use of "N****r" contrasted with the name of the town? - and if you did not grow in this kind of background, you may not realise he is giving you a sense of how bad and absurd it was.

There is nothing wrong with discussing the use of the word and words and context and the impact of the word. It is a healthy discussion about complex things. But keep in mind leftist authoritarianistic social censorship is not necessarily any better than rightist authoritarianistic social censorship.

[Beelzebud]

47. Why sugar-coat it? Some of us can deal with the sick reality.

[La Coliniere]

6. I'll never forget

the day after MLK Jr. was assasinated. As a member of the 30% white minority in the inner city Jr. high I attended in Buffalo, NY. I felt as bad as my black majority peers, I too felt like bashing and breaking things. The loss of hope was devastating. (Thanks Dad for instilling in me the ability to identify with the plight of black folk, a plight he saw in terms of economics and justice, not simply "race". He knew that the struggle for economic and social justice was the struggle of ALL working class people in this country).

[quickesst]

9. I used to....

run around Friendship, Arkadelphia, and Gurdon when I was a teenager in high school. The bunch I ran with were not exactly typical of the local residents, because back then, if your hair was over your ears, and you listened to rock music, you were a hippy. Of course we were labeled by the "elite" in school as "hoods", a label we carried proudly I might add. Some good people spread out over that stretch of Arkansas, but your experience was pretty much the norm for a lot of people back then. If you go back to friendship now, I believe they have expanded. I thought I saw a new streetlamp on my way through last time, and it's gotten up to a blink and a half to miss it.:toast: Thanks.
quickesst

[dbt]

11. YO, Arkie!!!

Thank you for the reply AND the perspective on Friendship that I failed to mention: it grew up OUT of its racist ways. After 30-odd years (some odder than others) of living in Little Rock, I moved back here in the winter of 03-04 and I wouldn't live anywhere else except the west coast of Ireland.

SIDEBAR: I am still amused at how the N****r-haters back in 1966 all had Wilson Pickett tapes in their car 8-track players.

FYI: Friendship is now one of the most notorious speed traps in the state. Best to go 5 mph under the posted limited if you are ever passing through again.

:hi:
dbt
Remember the 350 Chevrolet

[quickesst]

46. Well....

"
SIDEBAR: I am still amused at how the N****r-haters back in 1966 all had Wilson Pickett tapes in their car 8-track players."



wouldn't that be pretty much the norm for racists to view blacks as "help" or "entertainers"? Good for only limited endeavors because of the misconception that blacks were inferior because they were not capable of taking advantage of opportunities in life, remaining poor, and in poor neighborhoods, and whites, racists in particular, never having entertained the thought that black people were shunned, discouraged, and in most cases, never given the opportunity to achieve a better quality of life that would lift them out of that poverty. The almost classic case of Catch-22.

On a side-note, it's been awhile since I've traveled old 67. May have to make a run through this weekend for old-time's sake, maybe look up a couple of old hoods, er, I mean buddies I used to run with. Only problem is I'll have to put the Ram SS/T in reverse, and stand on the brakes to go through at five miles an hour.(Yeah, I know, and I care. Just can't help myself) Thanks.
quickesst

"If I could rest anywhere, it would be in Arkansas, where the men are of the real half-horse, half-alligator breed such as grows nowhere else on the face of the universal earth." (Davey Crockett)

[AwakeAtLast]

12. Thank you for that glimpse into the past

For those of us born 1970 and after, we have no idea what it was like. Your story gives us a sample of the impact of those great leaders of the Civil Rights Movement. Thanks again! :hi:

[The Backlash Cometh]

14. I had the same eye-awakening with the Communist Red scourge we were

suppose to hate. It came during a special Phil Donahue show, where he had an American audience linked to a Russian audience. For the first time in my known life, the two groups were blinking at each other across trans-atlantic pixels and checking each other out, reminding me of a dad who picks up his new born child to count the fingers and toes just to make sure there were no surprises.

That's when I realized that there had been a lot of lying going on during the Cold War, because their regular people wanted the same things that our regular people wanted. To live in peace. It was the leaders of the countries who were manipulating all of us.

[Joe Chi Minh]

17. That reminds me of a similar show on the TV here in the UK, a good few

years ago now. However, the teams on both sides were schoolchildren - teenagers, and the character fronting the show here was a Scottish, journalistic low-life of the first water. Far-right Scots are more like their latin counterpats, i.e extreme... in the extreme.

Our journalists are held in only slightly less regard here in the UK than our politicians, but this creep was the pits, contributing only snide, far right-wing, propagandist drivel, in response to the earnest, idealistic (and not surprisingly, extremely puzzled) questions and comments of the Russian youngsters. You couldn't help but feel sorry for them and anger at the malign neanderthal "hosting" the programme.

[IndyOp]

18. And that night people went to bed sensing the world had changed, but

weren't so sure. But it had. You were just one. There must've been millions.

Thank you for sharing your enlightenment.

[knitter4democracy]

19. That's the power of mass-communication.

We can see things for how they are if the journalists do their jobs right.

I wonder what we would really see if we could see past all our bigotry for Third World nations or the Middle East.

[badgerpup]

24. "Keep moving forward!"

"If you can't run, walk. If you can't walk, crawl. But keep moving forward!"
:patriot::applause:
Not sure I got the words exactly right, but that part was what really spoke...and speaks yet...to me.

[Blue_Tires]

34. kick

thanks for posting your memories

[Manifestor_of_Light]

37. I did a book report on Coretta's book

This was in high school English, 9th grade, 1969. All white school district. Absolutely no black people in the town of 60,000.
So I did a book report on "My Life with Martin Luther King, Jr." by Coretta Scott King.

When I went back to my desk and sat down, some little snot called me a N*****-lover.

I thought it was something to be proud of. Like my dad saying that he figured he was doing something right whenever he got called a Communist. He was a union organizer.



On another day, some little snotty brat picked on me and I called her "White trash". She called me "N***** trash". This is in an all white school district. And I'm so white I can't get a tan.
What idiots.

[Major Hogwash]

39. His dream has still not come true, yet to this day.

And it won't, until we all have the same dream.

[roguevalley]

40. his death and RFK's was the end of hope.

[NEOBuckeye]

42. Not the end of hope, unless we all stop hoping.

I wasn't even alive when King and the Kennedys were shot dead. But I learned about them when I was pretty young.

By the time that "His Majesty, King George Herbert Walker Bush I" became President, I had more or less figured out that something wasn't quite right in my country. And that somewhere back in the late 1960s, we made a wrong turn. A very wrong turn.

It made me sad then, to think of the hope that King embodied and inspired within so many people, and how it was all taken away in an instant. And then again with Bobby Kennedy's murder. After that, it's like so many people got scared and gave up, rather than to stop and really examine and ask what people or interests would want King and the Kennedys gone, and then continue King and Kennedy's fight for the greater common good, and against those interests.

Four decades have passed, and the people who murdered King and the Kennedys are still at large. We know them as the corporatists, the military-industrial complex, the Bush Family, the Saudi Royal family, and everyone else who has profited from the status quo.

THEY do collectively wield quite a bit of power, but not so much as WE the people, when we unite together and stand against them. That's why they were so afraid of King, especially after his march on Washington and the hundreds of thousands of common, everyday people who gathered peacefully on that day. That's why they feared a President Robert F. Kennedy, a man who very near the end of his truncated life, seemed to have awakened to the real cause of so much misery and suffering in this country and the world, and sought to put an end to it.

Yes, those great men and leaders are gone, but the spirit of what they were trying to achieve can and must live on within those of us who were inspired and changed by their message. We must continue to hope, and we must continue to fight for what King and the Kennedys were trying to achieve. The only way we can truly lose, is when we give up all hope.

I still have my hope, so I will hope for the both of us that we can still make a difference in this world. :-)

[eridani]

41. A favorite and underappreciated quote of his--

Love is not the answer--it is the assignment.

[Hekate]

43. dbt, thank you for a powerful message. Many never achieve the enlightenment you had at 12

Although my mother would have lectured me severely if I'd ever used that word as a California/Hawaii child, I am not at all offended by your use of it in context of your experience. As someone said upthread: "Without it, there's no story."

It's amazing. "They" are "just like us." Enormous numbers of people in this world never make that leap, even those who are never consciously cruel.

Thanks for sharing tonight.

Hekate

[LynneSin]

44. Sounds like the area where I was born and raised in Pennsylvania

Watching Barbara Jordan speak at the 1976 democratic convention (I wasn't born when MLK was around) made me realize that all that crap people in my home county and at my school was pretty much full of crap.

[dbt]

45. The N-word In The Arkansas Of 1963

Upon reading the replies to my orginal post, it dawns on me that people who grew up outide of the South may well not have the historical (also read: age-related) perspective to realize how utterly COMMON the use of this ugly word really WAS. I daresay that it was used about ten times more often than the word God, tossed about casually, effortlessly by even the youngest of children--who had learned it from their parents, who had learned it from their parents and so on.

Perhaps I should not have used the word so (wait for it!) LIBERALLY in the post. But it was a fact of life back then. It was everywhere, all the time. You could not go a day without hearing it, not even a few hours.

This was the Arkansas of Orval Eugene Faubus, the son of a SOCIALIST for Chrissakes, who USED white Arkies' fear and hatred of Black people to close down Central High School in Little Rock and thus ride to many re-elections as Governor. You may rest assured that the N-word was used freely in the halls and meeting chambers of the State Capitol during the turmoil of 1957, 1958 and many years succeeding those. Faubus and his sorry kind made tons of political hay off of the N-word. Though they were exceedingly careful not to utter it in public, they were slave traders just as surely as those people who bought and sold the actual living bodies of Black people in preceding centuries.

We've gotten over a hell of a lot in Arkansas during roughly the half century (Jesus! How OLD does that make me now!) since Dr. King spoke about the content of character. But sadly, I can still hear the N-word within a quarter-mile of my house. Sadder still is the fact that gay people have become the New N-word of the 21st Century.

THIS, in part, is why the murder of Martin Luther King, Junior, stands as such an abomination upon this country nearly forty years later: I do believe that Dr. King, the African-American, was trying to tell us that it wasn't just a Black Thing or a White Thing. It was a JUSTICE THING and Justice wears a blindfold so She can't see what color we are or who we sleep with or how much money we make or how we vote.

I believe Dr. King wanted the same set of rules to apply to everybody, is all. And I still fear we will never see the like of him again.

dbt
Remember New Orleans.
Remember Selma.