UPDATE 12/14 11:43 PM ET
Hello - I posted something to this blog earlier this evening that, unbeknownst to me, is thought to be an offensive racial stereotype. I don't suppose that anyone associated with this blog wishes to have any potentially offensive content on the blog. As I don't immediately see how to delete the entire post, I'm editing it to remove the part that may be offensive. My apologies to the readers.
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Among the lesser pleasures - but still a pleasure - of reading books is encountering new words and phrases.
When I am on top of my game (i.e. probably about half the time), I have two books going at any given time: a book of fiction that I am reading for pleasure, and an instructive book, usually related to my life as a deacon in some way, which I read for continuing development - which can be significantly harder work but often delivers its own distinctive set of satisfactions.
At present, on the fiction front, I am reading Hotbed by Bill James, a nom de plume for Welsh author Bill Tucker. He writes great dialogue, which he peppers with British slang. I ran across the following sentence, spoken by one of the characters:
"I think Manse will be prepared for possible outbursts of stonking."
Manse is a character in the novel; this line is in response to another character worrying that Manse's ex-wife will show up uninvited to disrupt his wedding. "Stonking" was a new one to me. In the context, I took it to be a verb or gerund meaning, roughly, "disruptive or abusive words or actions". I Googled it in its infinitive form ("to stonk"); it turns out to be in Merriam-Webster as a noun, where its definition is, "A heavy concentration of artillery fire." The etymology seems not to be clearly known but may be onomatopoetic. So, a good, representative Bill James dialogue word.
For my self-improvement reading, I'm currently working my way through Catholicism and Health-Care Justice / Problems, Potentials and Solutions by Philip S. Keane, S.S. My diaconal reading usually isn't very methodical; if I run across a book that sounds interesting, I buy and try it. I found this one in a seminary bookshop when I was at a preaching workshop last month. I'm pretty sure it is used as a textbook for one of the seminary classes. It's pretty good. I wish someone had recommended it to me about nine years ago. Its copyright year is 2002, so it is pre-Obamacare (but still pertinent), and the problems and range of solutions it discusses would have left me much better prepared for the titanic debates on dotCommonweal during the saga of that legislation.
(The remainder of this original post is the part that pertained to a phrase in the Keane book, the meaning of which I didn't know, but that turns out to be offensive. I've deleted it.)
To grow like Topsy comes from this exchange between the white Yankee, Miss Ophelia, and the enslaved Topsy in "Uncle Tom's Cabin":
ReplyDelete"Tell me where were you born, and who your father and mother were."
"Never was born," re-iterated the creature more emphatically. "Never had no father, nor mother nor nothin'"
"...Have you ever heard anything about God, Topsy?" The child looked bewildered, but grinned as usual.
"Do you know who made you?"
"Nobody, as I knows on," said the child, with a short laugh. The idea appeared to amuse her considerably; for her eyes twinkled, and she added, "I spect I grow'd. Don't think nobody never made me."
To "grow like Topsy" means to spring up and grow in some unbridled and undisciplined fashion. The character Topsy represented the ugly side of Stowe's view of black people who were not of mixed race--as ignorant, good with their hands, and needing white supervision.
It gives offense in some quarters, and I'm surprised an editor let it through.
I read "Uncle Tom's Cabin", though it has been a lot of years ago. It was a period piece, written pre- Civil War. An editor wouldn't let about 80% of it through today. But I'm not at all surprised that Topsy, Miss Ophelia, and the whole cast made the cut 165 years ago. Even though some parts are cringe-worthy to modern sensibilities, the book was instrumental in moving a lot of hearts against slavery.
DeleteNot knocking the book for its time. It's still in our college lit curriculum. It's simply that African Americans often resent Topsy as a stereotype, and dragging her out for folksy analogies bothers some people.
DeleteI'm a little slow tonight, I see now you were talking about Keane's editor letting it slip by rather than Harriet Beecher Stowe's.
DeleteJean, many thanks for the explanation. And ugh, I'm so sorry for putting a racially offensive stereotype on this blog. I'll see if I can delete it.
ReplyDeleteJim, no one here thinks you were trying to be offensive. And it started a good discussion. My vote (for what it's worth) is to not delete.
DeleteKatherine, thank you, I appreciate it - especially because your note indicates that you have some trust in my good faith.
DeleteThis is a public forum, I'm a public minister of the church, and I can't assume that all readers will give me that same benefit of the doubt. I'm also known to be politically conservative, and some wings of American conservatism, to my abhorrence, have become more rather than less tainted with racism in recent years. On the whole, it just seems prudent to make the content go away.
Isn't it a lovely world we live in? :-)
Great Caesar's ghost! No, that may be offensive. Great Banquo's ghost! Better. Did anyone expect slaves in America (when, according to Roy Moore, it was great before) to talk like characters in Henry James? Hasn't anyone read Alex Haley's Roots, or is that offensive, too? Read, if you can, Hammerstein's dialogue in Oklahoma! or Carousel. Yeah, we don't write like that anymore: Can't offend the snowflakes.
ReplyDeleteYeah, it seems that some people think Huckleberry Finn doesn't belong in a high school curriculum because of some words that are used. I've got news for them, the kids know the words anyway. Seeing how the words were in rather casual use 160 years or so ago showcases why they are offensive now. "Huck Finn" was actually and subtly anti slavery. Period pieces are instructive; besides, Mark Twain was a heck of a good writer.
DeleteThe parish school that most of my siblings attended (I didn't; we moved to the town after I was high school age) had its 15 minutes of fame, or infamy, a number of years ago for banning the Harry Potter books from the school library. Admirably (not), the principal banned the books despite not having actually read them.
Deletehttps://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/harry-potter-books-banned-in-rockford-catholic-school/
My own experience with Catholic elementary school libraries is that removing two books reduces the size of its collection by about a third. :-)
My son's Catholic school took the kids to the local public library once a month. They could check out whatever they wanted. They had Harry Potter movie day, showing the first movie in DVD just before movie #2 came out. Harry was extolled as an ordinary boy who was brave, loyal, and celebrated Christmas.
DeleteBrings back a memory; the public library when I was a kid had a "young people's" section, and an adult section. If you were a young people you had to have a parent sign for it to check out an adult book. I was about 12 when I wanted to check out Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, because I liked the cover art. It was from the adult section, so the librarian said I had to get my mom to sign for it. She did, and said, "You'll hate it!" She was right, I did. But the cover was neat.
Delete"Snowflakes"?. I think a bit of nuance and context in the use of that particular pejorative might be considered. In my view, there are times when cleaning up racist language in classics is appropriate - at least in books for young children. I am opposed to removing such language from literature studied by high school and college students however, assuming the teachers will provide the proper context and nuance (is that too optimistic an assumption?)and that parents too will be part of the discussion (more optimism).
DeleteI have three bi-racial grandchildren - one is an African American boy, two are Asian-American (boy and girl. Their Mom is Viet Namese.) I have been looking for books for them for Christmas. They are young - preschool and toddler age - and even some books for that age group have racist elements, including some of my favorite children's books. As they get older, even more classic children's literature may have some racist language and ideas. For example, The Secret Garden is a book I loved that I have saved for grandchildren, but have not read for decades. In looking at review sites for children's literature, I came across several that address racism in classic children's books. For example, this is commentary on a passage from The Secret Garden -
In the book, on the first morning after Mary moves into her uncle's mansion, she is awakened by a straight-talking maidservant named Martha. It's the sort of character who would be played by a sassy black lady in a modern American movie, but this is England, so Martha is just sassy and poor. She's so sassy, in fact, that she tells her child-boss Mary that she thought she was going to be black because she came from India. Mary... throws a temper tantrum, exclaims that blacks "are not people," and bursts into tears." Surely, the wise Martha will correct her, and Mary's racism will be just another part of the person she will leave behind as her face becomes less punchable.
Nope! Unlike Mark Twain's controversial Huck Finn, where the racially insensitive language is offset by Huck and Jim's tender, buddy cop dynamic, Mary's virulent racism is never corrected by anyone ... In fact, Martha uses her role as the voice of reason ... to blame Mary's awful behavior on the fact that she is from India, where there are "a lot of blacks there instead of respectable white people."
I was surprised at the racism that exists in some of the books I loved as a child. I give books instead of toys to my grandchildren, but as they get older, and more aware that some people won't like them because of the color of their skin or the shape of their eyes, I will be vigilant in the selection. It is OK for them to be snowflakes at this time in their lives.
Anne, I know what you mean about a childhood favorite book not being quite the way you remembered it. I don't know if you ever read The Adventures of Perrine, by Hector Malot. I remembered it as a story of a resourceful, plucky orphan girl who had more survival skills than an Eagle Scout. I was thinking to get it for my oldest granddaughter until I re-read it. I had forgotten the awful old racist grandfather who had rejected his son for marrying a Gypsy woman. Decided Wonder Woman Barbie would make a better gift.
DeleteKatherine, I do not know that particular book. I loved the Little House on the Prairie books, but I now know that they contain racist references towards Native Americans that went over my head when I was reading them to my sons. Maybe most here don't buy books for younger children. But for those who do, the following links go to articles on the subject. The Daily Beast article also addresses some of the complexities involved in dealing with racism in children's classics. The New Yorker article is written by a woman of Turkish heritage, who teaches non-fiction writing at Baruch College, part of City College of New York. Her article deals with adult literature.
Deletehttps://www.vox.com/2015/7/10/8901109/childrens-books-racist-sexist
https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-unbelievably-racist-world-of-classic-childrens-literature
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/reading-racist-literature
Elif Batuman, the author of your third linked article, has a hilarious novel, The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Novels and the People Who Read Them." She is Turkish-American...
DeleteHere is a brief description:
"No one who read Elif Batuman’s first article (in the journal n+1) will ever forget it. “Babel in California” told the true story of various human destinies intersecting at Stanford University during a conference about the enigmatic writer Isaac Babel. Over the course of several pages, Batuman managed to misplace Babel’s last living relatives at the San Francisco airport, uncover Babel’s secret influence on the making of King Kong, and introduce her readers to a new voice that was unpredictable, comic, humane, ironic, charming, poignant, and completely, unpretentiously full of love for literature." https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6763627-the-possessed
Her latest "novel," a kind of roman a clef (The Idiot), might be said to touch on ethnic stereotypes, in this case, Hungarian....and perhaps even American-Turkish stereotypes!
Just read the New Yorker piece posted by Anne C and written by Elif Batuman....definitely worth a read and NOT very long...A lot of humor and smarts goes into why maybe we should think about "incorrect" literature.
DeleteContext matters.
ReplyDeleteJim pointed out an odd expression in a book about American health care that a) most people don't get and b) might seem offensive to some people. Someone trying to explain healthcare should use a clearer phrase such as "unbridled and exponential growth." If colorful language was desired, analogies to fire, weeds, or cancer might have been more apt and readily understood. The writer needed more humanities classes, clearly. :-)
"Huckleberry Finn" has, indeed been bowdlerized so that "nigger" has been replaced with "slave." But the offensive word is essential to understanding Twain's views and the theme of the book. It signaled Jim's place in society and society's attitude toward him. Once Huck and Jim escape to the river, the word is rarely used and never by Huck. They are just Huck and Jim, and their friendship becomes so strong that Huck is willing to go to hell rather than betray him. At the end of the book, when Huck and Jim are restored to the roles society imposes on them, the word appears again.
The clear message is that society is the problem, and its outcasts have more dignity than those making "civilized" rules. "Nigger" reflects the scorn toward a particular race of people in a way that "slave" does not.
If we try to eradicate not only the use of but all knowledge of the word "nigger," we lose sight of who we have been. We paper over an ugly part of ourselves when we expunge that word from a book that, with cutting bitter irony, lives on precisely because it forces us to confront our past. The fact that, when I have taught this book, students become uncomfortable and wince, shows the power the book still holds. It SHOULD be painful to read that book.
Jim is guilty of nothing for having brought up this topic.
Jean, thank you.
DeleteI can tell, from these comments: you're one helluva teacher. I think you're retiring early next year? That's a loss to your community.
That's nice if you to say.
DeleteMy last day in the classroom was yesterday. I had a nice send-off from the students. We had "picture day" last week, so I have photos of them. Great class to go out in.
I may stay in for another year or two in the tutoring center. Playing it by ear.
I will, of course, continue to be an insufferable know-it-all as long as I can force air past my vocal chords and work the key pad with my thumbs.
Clearly I need to learn to hit "o" instead of "i" so my "ons" don't become "ins" all the time .
DeleteJim, I didn't think you were guilty of anything when I stoked the snowflakes. Nor was I mad at Jean. I am not impressed with the snowflakes, though.
DeleteThat said, and keeping a long story short, I send out an email to a men's group after a weekly meeting to keep those who couldn't make it up to date. We make a pass at using a text, but for most of 2015 we were on page 139, and this year we hit page 146 in January and have been there ever since. I remembered The New Yorker running Joyce's Ulysses one sentence at a time each week in the space where the description of The Fantasticks would have been, so I decided to do that in the newsletter. And I chose, stupidly, to use Huckleberry Finn. I dropped that the first time we hit the n-word. Shoulda chosen Augustine's Confessions.
Tom, that is hilarious :-). I appreciate your words of support, too.
DeleteJEAN! Now that you've retired, why not spend more time in this classroom?
DeleteI think I'm probably on here enough. I have more "doctoring" in January, and some dental work I've procrastinated on. I hate dentists. Not the pain, but they're always shilling for whitening, brightening, straightening, and scaring the crap out of you about gum disease and pericarditis.
DeleteAfter that, I need to figure out what I'm supposed to do next.
I hate going to the dentist too. Especially when the endodontist I got sent to for a non-routine root canal heaves a sigh, an hour into the job, and says, "Man, this is turning out to be a bear!"
DeleteI didn't know that "beyond the pale" was a putdown of the Irish until twenty years ago. Didn't use it much anyway. Any of you folks know of other phrases with racist origins lost in the fog of the past?
ReplyDelete"No comments from the peanut gallery." Said by my dad when kids were whining about something. Later I found out it was an allusion to Jim Crow laws. I don't think he knew it either.
DeleteWasn't the "peanut gallery" also a Howdy Doody allusion? That show was before my time so I'm not going to swear by it.
DeleteStanley - I've got to think "paddy wagon" had an Irish reference. I suppose that one isn't even very obscure.
DeleteThe "paddy wagon," a term my brother and I found inexplicably hilarious as children. We would sometimes see how many kids we could cram into our "paddy wagon" and take off to "jail" in a giant hole we dug in a vacant lot.
DeleteMy Protestant Irish side had a lot of derisive terms for the Catholic side: fish eaters, mackerel snappers, and papes. The Catholic side had one word for Protestants: heretics.
Jim, we only got 2 channels back then, so I didn't watch Howdy Doody either.
DeleteYes, the peanut gallery was where the kiddies sat on Howdy Doody. It's time to start them show, so kids, let's GO! Here: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pnUGAe0yqz4
DeleteBeyond the Pale: I've always thought that referred to Jewish efforts (in Russia) to move beyond the Pale of Settlement, a territory set aside for legal Jewish residence. Permission was required to live elsewhere.
Deletehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pale_of_Settlement
I got this from wiktionary.
Deletehttps://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/beyond_the_pale
Related to England but doesn't sound explicitly anti-Irish as I thought.
Stanley, a more complete description of its meaning in Ireland can be found at another wiki site
Deletehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pale
Long ago I read somewhere that Catholics in Ireland were not allowed to live within parts of the Pale, especially in Dublin, which, under Cromwell, was home only to English settlers and Irish who converted to Protestantism. Irish Catholics who refused to convert mostly lived "beyond the pale" during certain parts of Irish history.
I watched Howdy Doody but we had local kiddy shows in Philadelphia. There was Willy the Worm. And there was Bertie the Bunyip. The puppeteer was from Australia and Bertie had a pleasant accent. Finally, we had Uncle Pete, who was the father of actor Pete Boyle. Looked just like him with a big cubical bald head.
ReplyDeleteWasn't Mr. Rogers a local, Stanley.
DeleteAfter my time, Margaret. Not sure.
DeleteI think Mr. Rogers was out of Pittsburgh.
DeleteWhen I was a kid, I thought his show was pretty lame (I don't think I knew about it until I was older than his target audience). My kids never cottoned to it, either. ("Cottoned to it" - possibly another phrase with racist roots?).
But Fred Rogers had a great - and I mean *great* jazz piano player on that show. Adult jazz musicians would watch that show just for the piano.
Check this out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DjEnvwRfgj0
Mr. Rogers did a number on how you can't go down the drain in the bathtub as the water is going out. Naturally the child who loved his show immediately decided you could... a lot of explaining about size of drain and size of child.
DeleteWe had a local kiddie show out of (I think) Lansing called Alley Cat. Jean, ring any bells with you?
ReplyDeleteWe also had Bozo, which I think was sort of a syndicated concept: many local television markets had their own Bozo the Clown, which would be interspersed with content like Bozo animated cartoons (with Butchie Boy?) Man, those Bozo cartoons would top my list of Worst Animated Series Ever.
Kids in Chicago were blessed and edified to have "Kukla, Fran, and Ollie"!!!
DeleteMargaret - we had them, too, even when I wasn't living in Chicago, so they must have figured out a way to syndicate that content, too. Although I don't think it was a daily show by the time I came along - it was more like they were occasionally hosting the equivalent of after-school-special movies.
DeleteI remember "Kukla, Fran, and Ollie." We didn't get the Lansing station, so no "Alley Cat." There were several frightful local kiddie shows out of Saginaw and Flint:
DeleteRae Dean and Friends--a knock-off of Kukla, etc.
Captain Muddy--hosted by the weatherman who apparently needed extra income. He dressed up like a tugboat captain, and basically showed cartoons and interviewed cub scouts in the audience.
Mr. Hot Dog: Another weatherman in a hot dog costume who drew pictures on an easel between cartoons.
There was also Ranger Jim, whom my brother watched every morning. He would read birthdays, so my mom sent in my brother's name and date. On Paulie's birthday he was jabbering so much about whether Ranger Jim would read his name that he missed it, pretty much one of my brother's defining moments.
The best local show was "Lunch with Soupy Sales" out of Detroit. Man, that guy was great! Every kid in Michigan watched it: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NNv3rVV1mfs
We had a local station kiddie cartoon hour emceed by Jungle Tom and His Swampland Buddies. It was a guy in a pith helmnet with some puppets, Alberta the Alligator and Freddie the Lion. I remember it being mostly Popeye cartoons. Talk about not PC. Especially the old WWII era ones. Then after cartoons Jungle Tom would take off the hat, put on a tie, and be Tom the weather guy.
DeleteThis theme of weather guy doubling as kiddie show emcee seems to be a common pattern. Come to think of it, I'm pretty sure the so-called Ringmaster on the Bozo show in Chicago was also a weather guy or station announcer or some such. I guess the meteorology profession wasn't held in high esteem in the early days of television :-).
DeleteThese guys were primo multi-taskers!
DeleteRaber remembers Bozo out of Grand Rapids. He was, thankfully, not part of our landscape.
DeleteJungle Tom and his Swampland Buddies! Warning! Do not google this if you don't have porn filters on, especially if you are at work.
Pretty sure what I saw was not what Katherine was talking about.
Huh - I just spent a couple of minutes looking for more information on the old Lansing, MI kiddie show I mentioned, which turned out to be, not Alley Cat but rather Al E. Katt (what can I say, those were my pre-literate days).
DeleteUsually, there is an inverse relationship between a subject's triviality and the volume of its web content, such that, for Al E. Katt, I'd expect homage websites, fan Facebook pages, Youtube videos of old episodes, scholarly dissertations by communication studies grad students, etc. But no - this show was so marginal and obscure, searching for it is practically an exercise in Google Whacking. Ah well, the detritus of our memories ...
"But no - this show was so marginal and obscure, searching for it is practically an exercise in Google Whacking. Ah well, the detritus of our memories ..."
DeleteNo! No! Our memories are greater than Google.
Peggy, what an intriguing proposition! I hope you turn it into a post ...
DeleteKatherine! What did your parents let you watch?!
ReplyDeleteWe could watch cartoons, but only for half an hour on a school day, and then it was homework time. We watched the old sitcoms like I Love Lucy and Danny Thomas. My younger brother wanted to watch Man From Uncle, but Mom said no, it was too violent. There wasn't too much sexual content back then, but violence was a no-go. Mom pulled us out of school the day the K of C sponsored a movie, it was Ben Hur. She and Dad had gone to it at the theater, and she was shocked at the violence.
DeleteOn Fridays, my dad took my mom out to dinner. Then the baby sitter would let us watch "Love, American Style". That was the extent of racy content during my childhood.
DeleteSome of Mom's dislike of violence must have rubbed off on me. I'm probably the only Catholic who has not seen The Passion of the Christ in its entirety. I figure if you go to Holy Week services and Stations of the Cross, you've read all four Gospel accounts, not to mention the Suffering Servant from Isaiah, and that's good enough.
DeleteTV Scifi was rare in those days. Science Fiction Theater was good. I remember one episode in which they had a machine which could replay the last thoughts of a dead brain. They used it on the brain of a dead scientist, hoping to get a secret formula. What they got was "Our Father, who art in heaven....." Then came the Twilight Zone and Outer Limits. At that time however, I also watched every episode of National Velvet, because I was totally crushed out on Lori Martin, the young actress who played Velvet Brown.
DeleteKatherine, I refused to go to Passion of the Christ after reading about it. I abhor graphic violence in movies, and often even in books. My sons censor my TV watching these days. They have told me that I should not watch Game of Thrones because it is too violent. We dont subscribe to HBO anyway. They also told me not to watch Saving Private Ryan.
DeleteOooh! The Babysitter. Ours was GREAT! Fats Domino just died and I remembered her teaching us how to Stroll to "I Hear You Knocking." Not to be confused with "Keep a'Knockin'" by Little Richard. Or "The Locomotion" by Little Eva. She had all that stuff in her little box of 45 records and would bring it over. We'd twist with Chubby Checker, eat popcorn, and watch the Twilight Zone that re-aired late Friday nights. "Submitted for your consideration."
DeleteDid you ever watch General Electric Theater? One of the sisters at school wanted everyone to watch a certain episode because her niece had a starring role. Well we watched it, and the niece did very well playing a bad girl who was involved with some shady occult stuff. We laughed about it, and wondered if "Aunt Sister" had known that ahead of time!
DeleteI watched one episode of GOT and that was it. It was the sadism of it. I can take physical violence, being a guy, I guess. what I can't take is emotional violence. I watched Mr. Robot until the protagonist needed to humiliate a totally nice security guard to break security. I turned it off and never watched another episode. Decapitation, no big deal.
DeleteAnne C, my sons gave me the same advice about Game of Thrones. I was wondering what it was like since it is really popular. Of course they like it, so the dislike of violence didn't carry through to the third generation.
DeleteAnybody remember "Andy's Gang" with Andy Devine and that horrible puppet Froggy the Gremlin?
ReplyDeleteDevine would say "Plunk your magic twanger, Froggy" and Froggy would appear in a puff of smoke.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H35odPm7b3w
I found Froggy deeply disturbing. He could make adults say things they didn't want to say and I think he could make them do things they didn't want to do, sometimes tormenting Andy to the delight of the little cretins in the audience. To me, I think he could have been an inspiration for Stephen King's "It". I'd be surprised if he hasn't made an appearance in some horror author's novel or short story.
Must have been CBS, that was the one we didn't get.
DeleteYeah, Froggy, yeesh. I just remember Andy Devine as Jingles from Wild Bill Hickock.
DeleteStanley, you had me at "Plunk your magic twanger". :-)
ReplyDeleteBefore your time, Jim. Lucky for you.
ReplyDeleteThe Passion of the Christ has some good parts in it too, besides all the gory stuff ... Jesus has flashbacks of him and his mother, him and Mary M, the last supper, etc.
ReplyDeleteI haven't watched Game of Thrones either because it has such a bad reputation about rape scenes.
What I remember watching as a little kid: Captain Kangaroo, Rocky and Bulwinkle, Felix the cat, the wonderful, wonderful cat :) and a whole lot of westerns.
I liked Captain Kangaroo, and Rocky and Bullwinkle. My kids enjoyed Rocky and Bullwinkle too. Of course it was reruns by then. One year they named our Christmas tree Bullwinkle. Not quite sure why. Yes, Felix the Cat! I always wanted one of those Felix clocks with the tail that went back and forth.
DeleteAnd the eyes too :)
Delete