Um. This is beyond weird.

[xiphias]

Esquire Magazine did an article interviewing several leaders of White Supremacist movements in the United States about who they were voting for for President.

I'm using the same pull-quote that swan_tower used.

White people are faced with either a negro or a total nutter who happens to have a pale face. Personally I’d prefer the negro.

-- Rocky Suhayda, Chairman, American Nazi Party

Comments

[ron_newman]

"We're voting for the nigger" (and another, from the same site)

[thnidu.livejournal.com]

talvinamarich posted this link back on Oct. 18. Here's the comment I posted there:

I can say something somewhat different -- in fact, very different from the impression that this anecdote gives. They say Pennsylvania has Philadelphia in the southeast, Pittsburgh in the northwest, and Appalachia in between, and that's what I see here. Please bear with me for some context-setting so I can make my point.

First, I am a language scientist by profession. In my business we talk about words, including taboo words, all the time. Think of a forensic chemist, who works with poisons and drugs, but never uses them on himself or others. Similarly, in my line of work we have to clearly distinguish between mentioning a word and using it. I have never used the word "nigger" [and that was a mention] since my stupid early teens, and I'm not going to start now, but that's the word we're talking about here.

Second, I have to set the scene. In the summer of 1967 I was part of a project in Kentucky coal country run by the youth branch of the Ethical Culture Society. Some of the (white) people around there didn't like our project. We not only talked with and met with some of the black people in the area, there were black people in our group! One of our meetings was cut short when the counselors told us to go back out to the buses without interacting with the crowd that had gathered outside. As we passed between them there were no outright threats, but we sure heard the word "nigger-lovers".

As part of that project I lived for a week with a family there. The man of the house, who I guess was in his fifties, had been away from the area only twice in his life: once in the Army and once doing construction work in Chicago. Other than those two periods he had never worn shoes. He did not read or write. But he had no problem at all with our project or with us.

Yet he used the word nigger as casually and without rancor as my parents would use "Negro" or as I today use "black" or "African-American". He used it while talking about the black and white Americans he'd met in Chicago and in the Army, and how the black people were no worse than the white people and often better. In the dialect of his part of the country, that simply was the word for a black person.

And that's what I see in this news story. Don't read any contradiction or craziness into it. Hard as it may be to believe it, I think that's simply their word, their basic and unloaded word, for a black person.

[rosefox]

The other day, I met a British woman Of A Certain Age who was talking about being mugged in London. At one point, she said, "Some nice Negress found my wallet and turned it in to the police."

I was rather taken aback, but it was clearly just part of her vocabulary and not meant to be insulting in any way. I'd think a bit more highly of her if she were aware that different terms are presently in vogue, but I wasn't about to brand her a racist because of her old-fashioned lingo.

(The other woman who was complaining about how all Thais are whiny and she wants to slap them, however, was proof positive that one can demonstrate prejudice without ever using overtly prejudiced terminology.)