I know this is a few days old, but CNN decided to have a segment N Word Vs ‘Cracker’: Which Is Worse? Presumably, there was a pitch meeting at some point.
Producer 1: Did you hear that Trayvon Martin may have called George Zimmerman a cracker?
Producer 2: Are you pitching me a segment?
Producer 1: Yeah. Let’s make it a debate between that and the N-word.
Producer 2: What?!
Producer 1: You know. We’ll have LeVar Burton, and we’ll ask him when it’s OK to use that word.
Producer 2: I’m sorry. I must have heard you wrong. I thought you just pitched me that we would have the actor who played Kunta Kinte on our news show and ask him if it’s OK to use the N-word.
Producer 1: Yeah, that’s a good idea. But we’ll make it a debate about if that is as bad as calling someone who is stalking you a cracker to your friend you’re on the phone with.
Producer 2: Well, does anyone think they’re equivalent?
Producer 1: Sure!
Producer 2: This is a terrible idea.
Producer 1: This is CNN. Can I do it?
Producer 2: Fine whatever. If you need me I’ll be drinking myself silly and then pissing almost as fast as we piss away any remaining credibility.
Except that Levar Burton and Tim Wise embraced the conversation, and handled it beautifully.
Direct link to the vid.
The reality is, I’ve never been called a “cracker”. I’ve been called a honkey a few times, mostly in jest as it were from my old buddies friends in Oakland back in the early 90s. It didn’t bother me at all really. I thought it was sort of funny actually. The epithet doesn’t hold the same level of venom as the word Nigger does in this country.
Now, when I was a little kid, Bobby Seale and Angela Davis were regulars at my grandmothers dinner table. My grandparents (on moms side) were very strong supporters of the NAACP and Dr. King back in the 1950s and had done a huge amount of work regarding the fights to include black workers in the Unions in San Diego, Berkeley and Oakland all during the 40’s and 50’s. My grandfather was one of the men that stood up to the machinists Unions in the SF Bay Area and helped convince them to accept black folks into the unions for the local aircraft plants and the big railroad engine manufacturers that were located around the Bay there.
Up to the late 1950s, the black folks were excluded from membership by the white union leadership establishment and most of the members, which excluded the black folks from promotions, raises and participation in union political activities and from the apprenticeships and entry-level jobs that were available to the family members of the union workers.
Over all, the CNN show went pretty well. It did create the conversation that the producers were expecting to hear, and left nothing to the imagination. It is what we need more of in this country. Frank, open discussion about the differences in how people are treated by law enforcement and other authorities purely on the basis of skin color. Because there is a major difference.
1 – Tim Wise’s story about the NOPD helping him to break into his car is quite well taken..
Wise has been speaking and writing for years about the reality of racism and white privilege in this county (no silly philandering hypocrite Dinesh D’Souza – it never “ended”) –
and Wise couldn’t have offered up a better example.
After reading OWS Reading Fraggy’s family history above, Puddy is still trying to reconcile this comment above:
and this comment from your fingers on May 25, 2013:
Somehow one of these comments doesn’t ring true. So which one is it OWS Racist Fraggy?
Let Puddy know when you want to go downtown and deal with the “poor ni@@ers” for a Sunday!
Regarding cracker and ni@@er epithets… it all came to a head with the libtard apologists falling all over themselves with Rachel Jeantel! Amazing how libtards react these days.
@ 3
God DAMN you’re a stupid motherfucker.
@3 The fact whites, as well as blacks, gave their lives to end racism in America doesn’t give you a license to be an asshole.
http://www.splcenter.org/civil.....ts-martyrs
The civil rights movement wasn’t a black movement, it was an American movement.
@4
Thank you for writing that, that was exactly what I was thinking as I finished puddycracker’s post @3.
I don’t know if puddybigot…
1. actually believes that there is a dichotomy between the Deathfrogg quotes he posts (ie he’s stupid), or…
2.if he thinks that any use of the word ‘nigger’ is immediately and unquestionably racist (ie he’s a simpleton), or…
3. if he thinks that the term is so loaded that he can get away with some demagoguery without being called on it (ie he’s manifestly dishonest).
As with every right-winger I’ve ever run into, with puddybigot, one inevitably gets to the question, “Stupid, or lying?”
I love that puddybigot writes “ni@@er” just like the white-supremacists and other Republicans do on discussion threads, so as to thwart search engines easily finding their bigotry.
The word ‘nigger’ is a part of the American English lexicon.
As such, it’s etymology, it’s historical usage, and the implications for sociology, exploration of power relationships, impact on democracy, contemporary usage by various people implying various meanings are all topics for open-minded, well-meaning, honest people to openly discuss.
Playing childish games like “the N-word” or “ni@@er” are simply capitulations to fear, and such things imbue the word with power and (when not used as camouflage, as above) allow one to pantomime a ‘sensitivity’ without any real meaning.
I find it the height of hypocrisy that puddybigot, who aligns himself with the worst bigots in America, the Pam Gellers and the mosque-burners, the ‘torture the brown people’ crowd, the Tony Perkins and the Ralph Reeds, all the crackers feverishly working to deprive him of his ability to vote, the Bibul-thumping nitwits who demand that we stupify our kids’ science classes with their sky-daddy fables, the corporate-whores who are desperately trying to drive our society back to the feudal paradise of the 1300s (or Somalia)…would find it possible to whine with a straight face about being called “nigger-hating”.
One, the societal hierarchy being what it is, as we’re all turned into serfs by the policies puddybigot shills for every day around here, the poor – who are obviously enriched for more black and brown people – will get the shaft sooner and harder.
Two, in the grand design of the right-wing that puddybigot loves so much, we’re all going to be ‘niggers’ for the thousand or so mostly white people who will own everything, including all of us.
puddybigot’s self-loathing is manifest.
@ 8, 9
I wonder, is SpittlePuddles one of those alleged “black” men that either refuses to associate with anyone from Central Oakland, Compton or Rainier Beach, or is one of those “black” men that drives down those streets with his doors locked, the windows rolled up tight and looking at the young folks around the neighborhood and mutters “goddamn thugs, they should all be locked up or hanged.”
See, I’ve met guys like this before. Worked with a few over the years. African descent with all the physiological accoutrement of being descended from the slaves that were kidnapped at gunpoint from their homes and brought to North America under some of the most brutal and inhumane conditions possible, then psychologically shattered, castrated, tortured and then forced to work in farm fields until they dropped from exhaustion or thirst. But these guys were rather vocal about their utter contempt for the younger generations. Their hairstyles and the clothes they wore. They talked like white supremacists. They used the same exact language. They spent an incredible amount of energy trying to buddy-up with the hard-core redneck assholes who used the word “nigger” like it was an adjective for everything.
The shop in San Leandro was full of guys like that, and the guys that drove down from Oakland or Emeryville every day acted like they would lick the dogshit off their shoes if told to do so. They didn’t care that they were making $2 or $3 an hour less than the white dudes on the same floor, they didn’t care that their neighbors and grandparents had been tear-gassed, beaten and murdered to exercise their right to vote or just walk down the street in peace.
Me, I ate my lunch with the guys that had been in ‘Nam and had lived through all that and still kept their heads in the right place. A couple of those guys had spent time in the LBJ for refusing to use their weapons on civilians.
To this day it is one of those social constructs I will never be able to wrap my mind around.
@7:
As with just about every right-winger, the answer is “yes”.
“This is CNN?”
Well, it’s the CNN of today, which bears little if any resemblance to the CNN started long, long ago by Ted Turner.