It's a class marker more than anything else, people of the upper classes (or social climbers) don't (or didn't) use the word in polite conversation, and its use was sharply proscribed, it marked you out as white trash. Mind you, those same classes were deeply racist in practice - my grandmother was a segregationist as much as any white nationalist today, she was an ardent believer in white supremacy, and joined Planned Parenthood in 1923 partially as a solution to the "Negro Problem". The same could be said for nearly all of my extended family - one of my uncles was the 1955 chairman of the Kansas City White Citizens Council. I guess I didn't pick it up by osmosis since I was pretty much brought up by the black servants, owing to parental incompetence, one of whom read everything that Grandmother threw away - the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, Proceeds of the Naval Institute, and the like - and we'd talk about it doing errands and suchlike. We traded off the NYT Sunday Crossword, I'd get it on alternate weeks. So after he'd died, I mentioned this to a cousin who had a Masters in Education from Columbia University, and she said "Oh, you're just full of nonsense, you're silly, you know very well that Walter couldn't read, he's black" and that was the end of my conversation with her. Such ignorant people, even though they'd gone to Ivy League schools... and so forth and so on. I doubt they've changed in the 40 years since.
I'm seriously thinking about it, have been since yesterday, the memories come back in a flood, and it's kind of eating at me, since I have an opinion about this "woke" stuff - and I think most of it is contrived and fake - and it teaches people to be "racially aware" - and that's what comes before racism itself. And we could end up resegregating society with people in the different categories unable to converse honestly and forthrightly with one another. And this might serve another group's purpose - in the words of Sun Tzu, "if your opponent is united, divide him." I think it's no coincidence that this came out of the elite universities and has major corporate support - and then there's Fannie Kemble, writing on the construction of the Brunswick Canal in the 1830s... Lots to think about, it's going to come out in a confused jumble and the job will be to organize it in a coherent whole.
Maybe I'll put something on my substack page, there's a lot more, and I'm either blessed or cursed with a photographic memory, the scenes play back like movies...
It's a class marker more than anything else, people of the upper classes (or social climbers) don't (or didn't) use the word in polite conversation, and its use was sharply proscribed, it marked you out as white trash. Mind you, those same classes were deeply racist in practice - my grandmother was a segregationist as much as any white nationalist today, she was an ardent believer in white supremacy, and joined Planned Parenthood in 1923 partially as a solution to the "Negro Problem". The same could be said for nearly all of my extended family - one of my uncles was the 1955 chairman of the Kansas City White Citizens Council. I guess I didn't pick it up by osmosis since I was pretty much brought up by the black servants, owing to parental incompetence, one of whom read everything that Grandmother threw away - the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, Proceeds of the Naval Institute, and the like - and we'd talk about it doing errands and suchlike. We traded off the NYT Sunday Crossword, I'd get it on alternate weeks. So after he'd died, I mentioned this to a cousin who had a Masters in Education from Columbia University, and she said "Oh, you're just full of nonsense, you're silly, you know very well that Walter couldn't read, he's black" and that was the end of my conversation with her. Such ignorant people, even though they'd gone to Ivy League schools... and so forth and so on. I doubt they've changed in the 40 years since.
Wow. Sounds like you have a book swirling around in you, stream.
I'm seriously thinking about it, have been since yesterday, the memories come back in a flood, and it's kind of eating at me, since I have an opinion about this "woke" stuff - and I think most of it is contrived and fake - and it teaches people to be "racially aware" - and that's what comes before racism itself. And we could end up resegregating society with people in the different categories unable to converse honestly and forthrightly with one another. And this might serve another group's purpose - in the words of Sun Tzu, "if your opponent is united, divide him." I think it's no coincidence that this came out of the elite universities and has major corporate support - and then there's Fannie Kemble, writing on the construction of the Brunswick Canal in the 1830s... Lots to think about, it's going to come out in a confused jumble and the job will be to organize it in a coherent whole.
Maybe I'll put something on my substack page, there's a lot more, and I'm either blessed or cursed with a photographic memory, the scenes play back like movies...