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Historically, people have invented work songs. Whether or not people actually sang while they worked is up to interpretation, but I suspect at least some people did. It sets a nice rhythm, and it keeps you from being bored stiff while doing boring, repetitive tasks.
So I'm sitting here trying to figure out why a song invented and sung by black slaves is now offensive to black people. Yes, it's talking about slavery - that's what the people were doing when they sang it.
Of course, the comments to the story are enough to make me weep. Sure, white males, they're the most discriminated group in America. Uh-huh. Go tell me another one, why don't you?
Or how about "As far as the 81 year old aunt who has a bad back due to cotton picking, she had a choice to pick the cotton, slavery was banished long before she was born." Riiiiiight. And what else, pray tell, was she to do? Are we to believe she chose that job because she prefered it to the other options? Or maybe her option was to have no job, not pay the bills, starve.... Great. That's a choice, all right!
It's like people just turned off their brains....
Oh, and on the subject of "things Connie doesn't get", when we're in class reading an excerpt from "Kaffir boy", and somebody asks what the word "kaffir" means, and we've been using that damn word all class, and I define it, correctly as the Afrikaner equivilant of "nigger", don't tell me not to use the word "nigger" unless you're saying to everybody else "don't use the word kaffir". I'm not calling you a nigger, or any other sort of slur. I'm using the word as a definition, because that's what the damn word means. I know it's a charged word, but I'll be damned if I'm going to revert to childhood and start calling things "the n-word". I guarantee you that I'm never going to use the word in anything other than a quotative (or, apparently, definitive) fashion, and you know that, so....
So I'm sitting here trying to figure out why a song invented and sung by black slaves is now offensive to black people. Yes, it's talking about slavery - that's what the people were doing when they sang it.
Of course, the comments to the story are enough to make me weep. Sure, white males, they're the most discriminated group in America. Uh-huh. Go tell me another one, why don't you?
Or how about "As far as the 81 year old aunt who has a bad back due to cotton picking, she had a choice to pick the cotton, slavery was banished long before she was born." Riiiiiight. And what else, pray tell, was she to do? Are we to believe she chose that job because she prefered it to the other options? Or maybe her option was to have no job, not pay the bills, starve.... Great. That's a choice, all right!
It's like people just turned off their brains....
Oh, and on the subject of "things Connie doesn't get", when we're in class reading an excerpt from "Kaffir boy", and somebody asks what the word "kaffir" means, and we've been using that damn word all class, and I define it, correctly as the Afrikaner equivilant of "nigger", don't tell me not to use the word "nigger" unless you're saying to everybody else "don't use the word kaffir". I'm not calling you a nigger, or any other sort of slur. I'm using the word as a definition, because that's what the damn word means. I know it's a charged word, but I'll be damned if I'm going to revert to childhood and start calling things "the n-word". I guarantee you that I'm never going to use the word in anything other than a quotative (or, apparently, definitive) fashion, and you know that, so....
