Ah jeez, they will find anything offensive these days. what pisses me off is that older generations climb on their high horse about things they now find offensive but 10 or 15 years ago would have and happily did use my view wussies and hypocrites. Oh by the way, my first labrador was named after Guy Gibsons dog.
That’s a fucking outrageous slur!
@james If that’s what we can now expect from Team members then I’m out of here
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I dont see any harm. So sue me.
In the innocence of childhood and to this day… I have always thought of piccaninnies as delightful little children with a dark/black skin and curly hair. I have not thought of the word meaning anything offensive… but I have never heard the word used except in a somewhat gentle tone… until BoJo !!!
[quote=“smw, post:44, topic:28061”]
I have always thought of piccaninnies as delightful little children with a dark/black skin and curly hair.
And I expect they have a great sense of rhythm too.
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I think you are misunderstanding my comment.
As a child, I might hear (albeit not often) the word piccaninnie but never used (as I understood it) in a derogatory manner… merely to point out what appeared to me to be a delightful little child, sometimes around my own age.
I have not heard the term in recent years so have not had any reason to change my original understanding…
Boris ‘I’m not a racist or a dismal apology for a human being’ Johnson used it not so long ago. “Picaninnies with watermelon smiles”, I think was the phrase.
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No. Not acceptable then, not acceptable now. Not acceptable 45 years ago, when I was 10, either.
Just for information:
Pickaninny
This article is about the ethnic slur. For the mountain in California, see Pickaninny Buttes. For the impact structure in Western Australia, see Piccaninny crater.
Not to be confused with Picatinny, a US arms research base and a type of fitting for firearms.
Pickaninny (also picaninny , piccaninny or pickinninie ) is a North American historical racial slur which refers to a dark-skinned child of African descent. It is a pidgin word form, which may be derived from the Portuguese pequenino [1] (a diminutive version of the word pequeno , “little”). In modern sensibility, the term implies an archaic depiction or a caricature used in a derogatory and racist sense.[2] According to the scholar Robin Bernstein, who describes the meaning in the context of the United States, the pickaninny is characterized by three qualities: “the figure is always juvenile, always of color, and always resistant if not immune to pain”.[3]strong text
Back in the 70’s when my (mixed race) brother learned to walk, my grandfather (born in 1912) referred to him (with great pride) as a ‘clever little Sambo’.
He didn’t mean any harm at the time. But, times change, language and what is deemed acceptable changes and today, in 2019, uppity (when referring to anyone of mixed race) , n*igger, picanninny and come to that, golliwog, are simply not OK for general consumption.
That’s just the way it is. You might disagree but the majority of people and what they deem acceptable are what drives the use of language.
Please don’t turn this thread into a row or an attack on our admins. They do a sterling job and need your love and support. And virtual hobnobs!
Xx
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I did mention earlier that I had never heard it used in the way that BoJo did recently.
Again, this is pointing up the difficulty, and taking us away from the original point (which was about “uppity”).
Many of us will remember the use of the word “piccaninny” with something like affection, a bit like “golliwog” and the figure on the jam jars. We probably didn’t link it to any black person we might have known. Indeed, it was only when the hysteria started that any of us might have raised an eyebrow.
If a black person was offended then s/he is entitled to that opinion and I doubt any of us would want deliberately to offend anyone.
But in the real world, people with an agenda create grievances to further their sociological or political aims. So an innocent remark becomes loaded with a meaning the speaker never intended, and the woke and the snowflakes egg the process on (because woe betide anyone being offended. Free speech anyone?) and create spaces so “safe” that their ability to argue a point withers away. If they don’t like your viewpoint, they “no-platform” you. Whether that’s because they are unable to argue, or that is what leads to an inability to argue is beside the point.
The fact that it’s a majority decision doesn’t mean it’s right!
And so we end up with two sides shouting at each other, whether it’s about Brexit or the GE or a word which was, a century or more ago, linked to disobliging remarks about social climbing.
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Either which way, it is no longer acceptable to use any of the terms you have referenced.
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From my perspective at a similar age to Vero. There were always words that were a bit ‘off ‘ that you knew were marginal but you could use them. Then ( as I have stated )my employment and hobby meant that I risked sacking/ dismissal if I were to use them, so you don’t use them in a workplace environment then I found I wouldn’t have dreamed of using them away from that environment ,even without risk of censure . Now I find them insulting and offensive, it doesn’t make me a snowflake
I do find it amusing that ‘fuck’ is considered acceptable when someone of my mums generation would have found that as offensive or more so than the words we are discussing here
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Once again, when racism (deliberate or inadvertant) is raised, white interlocutors argue strongly that a word, phrase, or behaviour is self-evidently not racist.
Two arguments are raised in support of their assertion:
The first is that they had no racist intention when they used the word or phrase, because they have no racist bone in their body, they are self-declared non-racists, and have overwhelming peer support from other white people for their self-assessment.
The second reason is that, in their judgement, non-whites are unreasonably sensitive to perceived slurs or offensive terms, because no offence was intended: words like ‘uppity’ can be used about anyone, white or non-white, in an inoffensive way. To refer to a non-white as uppity, especially as to a third party, has no racial connotation.
It could be as easily applied face-to-face to a white person by a black one (Don’t get uppity with me now) as the other way round. No offence could be caused thereby, and none should be inferred.
As in all illustrations of this kind, whether a term is racist or not always relies on the opinions of white interlocutors.
It should be assumed, as a matter of highest probability, that the opinions of white interlocutors on matters of racism or racist intent, should always be privileged over the opinions of non-whites. And that white opinion, when expressed sincerely, should always end the debate definitively.
Anything else is unthinkable, and unsayable. Like racism itself, racist words are always and only in the eyes of the beholder, and defy any credibility or examination. The struggle is over, and non-whites everywhere should learn to get over it.
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I have used the word uppity many times, I remember it being used towards me many times in my childhood and beyond but this is the first time I have heard that is a racist term. Can’t the meanings of words change over the years?
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Nor for your Team members to accuse members of being racist without a shred of evidence.
I do find it a shame when differences between English speakers of different nationalities ends up with people coming to blows and trying to establish the moral high ground. I was told a long time ago that it was foolish to think about language as being right or wrong and to think about it as being appropriate or inappropriate. In the good old days we lived in little bubbles that were kept apart from eachother, these days news, trends and language move from one continent to another in seconds. When I first met my wife she was working in an American school in Germany. Many a time we had a good laugh at how different our native languages were and in those conversations she explained how she had had to move some simple everyday words from the appropriate columns into the inappropriate section of her brain and vice versa. Overnight she found herself working in an environment where fanny was an acceptable word to use when talking to children but rubber was not. I personally would never use uppity in the way that it might have been used by some of my fellow countrymen in the past but I would be quite happy to use it when talking to Stella if it’s use suited the situation. Neither of us would be using it to have anything to do with skin colour or race and it’s use would be perfectly acceptable and appropriate. The word itself is harmless. I find it sad that one complaint might be responsible for introducing a new racist phrase into everyday British English while at the same time removing a perfectly harmless word that has been used throughout time.
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Surely though one can allow that excuse precisely once and once only (and that is one more time than deserved a lot of the time I suspect).
If one has “no racist bone in one’s body” then once the racist overtones of a word are known it won’t be used again.
As you know I am a firm believer that the targeted group gets first dibs on whether it is offensive (is “yid” offensive to Jews? - the Urban Dictionary says not; not totally sure about that, Wikipedia claims it is all in the pronunciation).
Does your wife have a view, Peter?
These words have a fairly well trodden path - they start out more-or-less as a descriptive term, not (yet) recognised as offensive, but definitely applied to an identifiable group - the “N” word is a variant of Negro, originally associated purely with the colour of a person’s skin. I’d argue that, at their root, such terms are racist although the offence was not recognised because the attitudes were just so endemic at the time.
For instance I don’t think that most whites in the late 18th or early 19th century were racist in a conventional sense. They were, of course, but it was more just that they accepted unquestioningly the prevailing wisdom that it was the natural order of things that blacks were slaves and whites masters.
Clearly some were out and out racist at the time and despised all people of colour - uppity or not. Thankfully some were more enlightened and realised that all humans deserve to be treated equally otherwise things probably would not have changed much(we’re still working on that one, even today).
The word might be used by the first sort of individual as an insult, possibly to people outside the original group (spastic is a good example here). Eventually use as an insult spreads to be fairly commonplace.
Finally we recognise the word for what it is, or has become - a discriminatory slur.
I’m not sure that “uppity” has trodden this path - it was generally applicable to anyone who was viewed as having ideas above their station and I have never heard it used in any other context. It does not, inherently identify a specific group based on skin colour, religion or anything else - this is why I find it a bit strange.
But use does drift, the language would not develop over time otherwise and even if the word has not acquired racist overtones in the UK I can see that it could in the US.
But either way, and even though I’m a bit baffled, I plan on being careful when tempted to use the word from now on - on present evidence I’m not sure I need to avoid all use though.
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I have questioned here and elsewhere the suggestion that this ‘prevailing wisdom’ has been much challenged in practice. It has, I submit, categorically not been overthrown. Not at all, ask any non- white person you trust, and who trusts you.
Very recent and frequent exposure of the disproportionately high number of non-white Britons detained under the Mental Health Act, imprisoned for non-violent offenses, subject to Stop-and- Search, or put through unjust disciplinary processes or arrests show this.
And continued powerful evidence of systematic discrimination against non-white personnel in the NHS, Police, and the armed Forces shows that institutional racism is still pervasive, and very resistant to change.
White actors continue to deny it, while their non-white colleagues are labelled as chip-on-the-shoulder malcontents, who can:t accept that their performance doesn’t measure up to the standards of the more developed white race. But not in so many words.
It’s my long experience that many white nurses resent being managed by an ‘ethnic’ manager, supervised by a black colleague, or disciplined by a non-white individual of any rank. It’s seen as an affront to their innate superiority: it’s just intolerably “uppity” and they won’t have it.
Not all, not perhaps the majority, but many.
The conversation will no doubt continue, as it should, as it must IMO.
My wife, and our children, won’t lay themselves open to being wrangled with. They know their experience will fall on deaf and incredulous ears. They say the typical English will never learn to recognise the equal worth of other human créatures. They realise that a non-white person born in England can never claim to be English, or have their Englishness acknowledged by the whites. England’s white, innit?!
They “know their station” in the scheme of things, a phrase that you, Paul, have just reminded me of! 
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