The Big Green House

Tuesday, January 21, 2003

 

Do the right thing, pt.2

I finally got that western swing boxed set I�ve been drooling over. I�ve been listening to it in bits and pieces over the last week or so. It�s good, for the most part. The trouble is, I�ll be listening to it, bopping around the house and grooving in my own inimitable style (not that anybody would want to imitate it), when out of the blue a song that I�m enjoying will make a reference to, uh, �darkies� or �niggers�. As in, �Yonder come a nigger with a pack on his back�.

You know how when you�re eating popcorn and you accidentally eat a burnt piece, it will taint the taste of the rest of the popcorn? I get the same response here. It just sorta takes the fun out of it.

I�ve always enjoyed music and film from the 20�s and 30�s, yet I also find them troubling. Just as an example: I�m a huge Marx Bros. fan, as I believe I�ve mentioned in the past, yet they have the same sort of wince-inducing moments of �humor� in many of their movies. As fascinating as I find that time period, it bears keeping in mind that it was rife with casual racism. (Which is very easy for me to point out at this late date, it�s not always fair to judge the actions from previous times by our standards, blah blah blah. Wrong is still wrong, though.)

And, in the interest of full disclosure, I should mention that that same casual racism was in full effect when I was growing up. Which was pretty ironic, seeing as there were maybe three black families in our little suburb. (I can tell you that I didn�t really interact with African-Americans on a daily basis until I was 17, and that was only because I spent a summer working with a couple of guys in the Forest Service.) All we knew of what used to be called The Black Experience was gleaned from Social Studies class in school, various sitcoms, and the bullshit our parents may or may not have fed us. So it was easy for us to bandy the word �nigger� about, mainly because we didn�t really have a context for it. It was just a word we�d been told by our folks not to use, even though many of them used it themselves. It had no more real meaning to us than �damn� or �fuck� did. I�m not trying to excuse our ignorance, just to show how it came about.

So, what�s my point? I�m not really sure. I�ve had this stuff buzzing around my head lately, and the western swing episode just brought it to the forefront. Make of it what you will.

bmarkey 1/21/2003 07:13:00 PM