Remembering hearing wildly racist stuff from regular folks

[Samson's Wig 3167]

[RollLeft 5039]

No one is saying that there isn't an original meaning for the term thug.  Its just that there are terms that in our current racial climate have been used as acceptable softened / veiled words that more often implies blacks.  Thugs, urban, ghetto etc. are a few that come to mind.  

Edited September 12, 2018 by RollLeft

[hayden_horn 11358]

yeah, it's become one of the code words. it was 2pac's fault, as he made it cool to embrace the thug life.

but it's got the coolest origin story:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thuggee

Quote

Thugs were a secret cult which worshipped the goddess Kali. They travelled in groups across the Indian sub-continent for six hundred years,[2] operating as gangs of highway robbers, tricking and later strangling their victims.[3] Her worship by both Muslims and Hindus, was emphasised by the British.[4] They viewed Thuggee as nothing more than a ritual-murder by her worshippers.[5] Some other scholars instead have claimed Thuggee to be an invention of the British administration.[6]

 

Edited September 12, 2018 by hayden_horn

[Brisketexan 104226]

2 minutes ago, RollLeft said:

No one is saying that there isn't an original meaning for the term thug.  Its just that there are terms that in our current racial climate have been used as acceptable as softened / veiled words that more often implies blacks.  Thugs, urban, ghetto etc. are a few that come to mind.  

And this.  Words have shifting meaning over time.

"Gay" used to just mean happy.  "Hood" used to just mean the part of your jacket that covers your head.

Thug has generally been co-opted -- both by African American culture, and racist culture to follow -- to refer almost exclusively to young black males perceived to be  up to no good.  Yes, it did used to have a much broader meaning -- and those of us of a certain age remember that broad meaning.  But that's not really its meaning anymore.  Language moves and changes.

[Onboard 2.0 9083]

12 minutes ago, El Diablo said:

Young and obnoxiously loud? The word doesn't mean to everyone what you want it to mean.

Forget it, you're not gonna make people unsee the boogeyman.

 

[Onboard 2.0 9083]

6 minutes ago, RollLeft said:

No one is saying that there isn't an original meaning for the term thug.  Its just that there are terms that in our current racial climate have been used as acceptable softened / veiled words that more often implies blacks.  Thugs, urban, ghetto etc. are a few that come to mind.  

Yeah they're saying if you use it you mean a black guy and yer racist. Fuck that noise.

[Huckleberry 32660]

I'm pretty sure what they're saying is that there are a lot of people who use it to mean a black guy and are racist. The poster's father is one of those people. She knows him and you don't.

Stop taking it personally, your little fee-fees are going to be okay.

[Onboard 2.0 9083]

2 minutes ago, Huckleberry said:

I'm pretty sure what they're saying is that there are a lot of people who use it to mean a black guy and are racist. The poster's father is one of those people. She knows him and you don't.

Stop taking it personally, your little fee-fees are going to be okay.

Not talking it personally, but there are posters trying to make blanket statements  about the meanings of things and racist leanings by the use of them.

[El Diablo 4232]

Where'd the term "thug life" even come from? FOX? Is that a boogeyman they invented?

[hayden_horn 11358]

1 minute ago, Onboard 2.0 said:

Not talking it personally, but there are posters trying to make blanket statements  about the meanings of things and racist leanings by the use of them.

it has become a code word. you can use that information how you like. you can go ahead and keep using it, just know that a significant ratio of your audience will assume you are racist.

[Onboard 2.0 9083]

Just now, hayden_horn said:

it has become a code word. you can use that information how you like. you can go ahead and keep using it, just know that a significant ratio of your audience will assume you are racist.

Doubtful. I don't hang with 25 year olds often

[hayden_horn 11358]

1 minute ago, El Diablo said:

Where'd the term "thug life" even come from? FOX? Is that a boogeyman they invented?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thug_Life

if that was an honest question, this is how it became popularized, though the concept of thug life had been around before tupac.

[Pato del Muerto 52232]

1 minute ago, El Diablo said:

Where'd the term "thug life" even come from? FOX? Is that a boogeyman they invented?

[hayden_horn 11358]

Just now, Onboard 2.0 said:

Doubtful. I don't hang with 25 year olds often

it's obvious you are comfortable being out of touch. i'm a man, i'm 40, and i know the code words. because while my dad used every single possible racial epithet within the four walls of our homes, he deployed the code words outside the house to ascertain if he was around a "friendly" audience.

[Coyote 269]

Both my father and FIL still say it often. Both from rural Texas towns that were/are all white. My wife and I have a hard time with it but just leave the room/conversation when the word is spoken. We’ve both expressed to each of them how embarrassed they should be with themselves. It’s not allowed to be said in my house, and I’ll lose my shit if I hear it around my children. Probably my favorite defense of the word - “I’m not racist, there are n—s in every race!!”

[El Diablo 4232]

3 minutes ago, hayden_horn said:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thug_Life

if that was an honest question, this is how it became popularized, though the concept of thug life had been around before tupac.

It was an honest question. Tupac and I travelled in different circles. So it was appropriated and now its use taboo by the "out" crowd? Is that right?

[WBT 20376]

Elmore Leonard called them gun thugs, I'm gonna call them gun thugs

[Art Vandelay 1710]

I'm trying to think of an acceptable non-racial alternative for thug. Hooligan? Ruffian?

[Underdog 28391]

Punk

[Onboard 2.0 9083]

30 minutes ago, hayden_horn said:

it's obvious you are comfortable being out of touch. i'm a man, i'm 40, and i know the code words. because while my dad used every single possible racial epithet within the four walls of our homes, he deployed the code words outside the house to ascertain if he was around a "friendly" audience.

Out of touch? hardly I simply refuse to buy into every little cultural whim that comes down the pike and is gone the next day.

[Onboard 2.0 9083]

28 minutes ago, El Diablo said:

It was an honest question. Tupac and I travelled in different circles. So it was appropriated and now its use taboo by the "out" crowd? Is that right?

Unless yer cool like Hayden and co.

[El Diablo 4232]

1 hour ago, Art Vandelay said:

I'm trying to think of an acceptable non-racial alternative for thug. Hooligan? Ruffian?

Eh, one sounds Irish and the other one's a redheaded nurse. What else ya got?

[El Diablo 4232]

1 hour ago, Underdog said:

Punk

I don't know. Clint Eastwood owned that one but I think he sold it to Demi Moore's boy toy who changed the meaning. It might be up for sale though, I don't know if he retained rights to it or not.

[Pato del Muerto 52232]

Miscreant

[El Diablo 4232]

3 minutes ago, Pato del Muerto said:

Miscreant

Look, name calling isn't productive here, I'm trying to be helpful.

[Pato del Muerto 52232]

Rabble rouser 

 

[Onboard 2.0 9083]

Bad sport

Non racially specific not very nice at all person....

[TriStone 1724]

4 hours ago, Huckleberry said:

Stop taking it personally, your little fee-fees are going to be okay.

Dude, just say feelings.

[Nice Guy Eddie 13388]

4 hours ago, hayden_horn said:

yeah, it's become one of the code words. it was 2pac's fault, as he made it cool to embrace the thug life.

but it's got the coolest origin story:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thuggee

 

Indiana jones and the temple of doom 

[David Dennison 18485]

5 hours ago, Onboard 2.0 said:

Yeah they're saying if you use it you mean a black guy and yer racist. Fuck that noise.

White people are often uncomfortable when they are confronted with their racism.

 

[ChuckNorrisActionJeans 2654]

4 hours ago, Onboard 2.0 said:

Out of touch? hardly I simply refuse to buy into every little cultural whim that comes down the pike and is gone the next day.

My dad says "ungrateful thugs" to refer to the NFL kneelers. It's such a pithy and perfectly acceptable way to refer to uppity negroes these days, as our dear leader has now shown. 

He knows what it means. So do you. 

[SimonBolivar 10890]

I like all these stories from 20 years ago. I hear this shit on a weekly basis from poor over 50 whites in the North Waco area (a very diverse neighborhood too).

I'm white near 30 but look about 20 and have heard the following from clients in the past year

"What do you think all them blacks are doing in that building across the highway? (A call center)"

"I went down to the water building to complain but you know it's just blacks that work down there"

"I had placed my purse on the scooter in the walmart and next thing I know I look down and it's gone. There was a big ole black guy on the same aisle as me, but it turns out someone else turned it in"

"That employee of yours is pretty good for a black girl"

 

I'm actually pretty surprised I havent heard a hard n dropped yet. 

Edited September 13, 2018 by SimonBolivar

[Brisketexan 104226]

I like all these stories from 20 years ago. I hear this shit on a weekly basis from poor over 50 whites in the North Waco area (a very diverse neighborhood too).
I'm white near 30 but look about 20 and have heard the following from clients in the past year
"What do you think all them blacks are doing in the building? (A call center)"
"I went down to the water building to complain but you know it's just blacks that work down there"
"I had placed my purse on the scooter in the walmart and next thing I know I look down and it's gone. There was a big ole black guy on the same aisle as me, but it turns out someone else turned it in"
"That employee of yours is pretty good for a black girl"
 
I'm actually pretty surprised I havent heard a hard n dropped yet. 

Sigh....yeah, I believe that. My FIL is from that area. His whole side of the family....yeah.

[Stunns38 3349]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thug_Life
if that was an honest question, this is how it became popularized, though the concept of thug life had been around before tupac.

And as you all may know, Tupac wasn’t a true thug. Actually, a pretty high IQ rapper and actor. He trying to be a thug and hanging with true thugs got him killed but that’s another thread.

[Stunns38 3349]

N-word knocking and rigging was pretty commonly used in the all-Black neighborhoods I grew up in Chicago. The worst I’ve heard from my family was that Puerto Ricans drive like shit...and they did. Plus, you Southerners haven’t seen Yankee racism like Chicago, Boston, Philly, and Brooklyn racism.

[fattyflattie 4636]

WRT “thug”.  Didn’t that all stem from Richard Sherman’s rant on Erin Andrews?     I fully understand there are some folks that use it with racial connotation but I don’t watch Fox. I don’t really watch anything that discusses criminals. Thug means the same shit it always has to me, I’m 35.  It means a criminal POS. I guess I’ll have to remove it from vocabulary, even though I’ve probably pointed out or conversed about “thugs” (actual criminal element types) 10 times over the last 20 years  

Now, if someone says “Mondays”, there’s your lingo. I’m sure there are 50 others.   I’ve heard that one quite often though.  

[austingirl 2180]

My beloved grandpa, god rest his soul, was a yellow-dog democrat. He was also terribly racist. In 2007 he told me that if his choices in the presidential election were a Republican and a black man, he just wouldn't vote. 

When I was a kid in Port Arthur my dad sat me down to talk to me about why black people and white people could be friends at school but nothing more than that. (A black friend of mind from school had walked by our house and stopped to talk to me from the other side of our chain-link fence.) He said it was like cats and dogs mixing. I should note that he has dramatically changed his ways since then, in a rare case of an old dog learning new tricks.

[MaybeACoordinator 8349]

On 9/10/2018 at 9:53 AM, Brisketexan said:

I was in elementary and middle school in the 70s and 80s.  Catholic school in Houston, among mostly white, relatively well-off (generally upper middle class) folks.  Good people.  Fine upstanding members of the community.  Regular churchgoers.  Mr. and Mrs. America, as it were.

But this weekend, seeing a scene of a fight on teh news brought back a memory.  When two kids got in a fight in the school yard, what did the crowd chant?  Yep.  "Fight, fight!  A n_____r and a white!"  Or maybe you knocked on someone's door and ran away before they answered?  That was "n_____r knocking."  And those fireworks, the ones that shot off sideways, screaming?  Those were "n_____r chasers."

This was not back in the white hood and lynchin' old days.  This was 1970s and 80s, decent and honorable neighborhoods of Houston.

Now, I WILL say that we had obviously progressed beyond SOME of the racist verbiage -- for example, I never knew the rhyme as anything BUT "eenie meenie miney moe, catch a TIGER by his toe" (yeah, I didn't know of the previous version with "n_____r" instead of "tiger" until a few years ago -- still learnin' stuff).

So, my black peers -- great guys, all-american types, etc.  Hell, Snacks on this board -- remember that they grew up where these terms were casually bandied about as if they were no big deal. Because, to the group using them, they WEREN'T a big deal.  I think it's important to try to step outside our own perspective, and do our best to imagine what our neighbor's perspective is like.  And for your black neighbor, his perspective includes growing up in an America where, while MAYBE folks were circumspect enough not to call him n_____r to his face, they used the term around him quite casually.  The signs of relegating black folks to clear second-class citizenship, and you'd better not forget it, boy, were all over.  That seems like something to take into account when we say "hey, folks make too big a deal out of racism.  Sure, there's a few racists still out there, but they don't count for much."  That's just not true.  The folks who were chanting those things in the school yard are now business owners, lawyers, politicians, doctors, CEOs, etc.  And yes, some of them are mortified by the memory of the things they may have said as kids.  But plenty of them shrug their shoulders and say "well, that's just how it was."

Anyway, it just struck me this weekend.  We tend to think of open racism as something belonging in the 50s and 60s, and lunch counters in the deep south and Arkansas schools being integrated.  But it was alive and well in hardworking Houston in the 70s and 80s, too.  I hadn't really thought of that in a long time.  But I'm thinking about it now.

The worst part of the "Fight! Fight!" chant was the second line: "If the n****** starts to win, we'll all jump in!"

Do you remember how casually anti-Semitic we were at our school? I remember if you'd ask a buddy for a dollar, and he refused, we'd put our fist to our forehead and crook our arms to simulate a huge nose and say something like "Man you are such a Jew." 

On 9/10/2018 at 11:23 AM, 'stache said:

I knew it as "n-word" rigging before Jerry rigging.  It then turned to "redneck engineering."

I was talking about this with some friends once and one said his grandma used to call Brazillian Nuts "n-word toes."  I had never heard that one.  Said she wasn't hateful, it's just what they were called to her.

Yep to the nuts. I think that was the only time I ever heard my grandmother use that word. 

On 9/10/2018 at 1:17 PM, Incredulity said:

I was looking at an old recorded plat map of a relatives out of state property years ago.

Right on the back of the property was a creek named "N-word Jack Creek".

From a different time obviously.

There is still a "3 K's Road" in San Leon, a historically all-white (and more recently brown and Vietnamese) town in Galveston County. Still about zero blacks there though -- mainland Galveston County still is starkly divided by Highway 3 -- whites to the east, blacks to the west.  

[MaybeACoordinator 8349]

A couple of anecdotes involving cops, one in Nashville, one in Houston, back in the '80s.

Houston story: a few of us were taking batting practice in the cages at our Little League complex in West U. Suddenly we heard sirens and we saw virtually the entire police forces of Bellaire, Southside, and West U go by, lights blazing, along with a few HPD cars. We walked across to the street to the West U police station to see what was going on. "Nothin' much," said the desk cop. "N****** stole a car."

A few years later a HS classmate of mine -- Mexican and dark, with thick hair -- drove from Houston to Nashville, stopping off in New Orleans on the way. We got to Nashville very late at night and I got lost, even though it was my other home town. Anyway, we were driving along aimlessly a long way from my dad's house where were gonna stay, and all of a sudden all hell breaks loose. Blue lights everywhere. We got the full COPS treatment -- the popos hollering at is, hands over heads, guns drawn, etc. We got put in the back of a squad car, and then one of them comes back and apologizes. "We had a report of a robbery in the area -- suspects were one white dude and a n******. And we thought you were a n******," he told my friend. 

[WhatTheBuck 28696]

15 hours ago, Huckleberry said:

I'm going to go out on a limb and assume that she knows her father better than y'all. Seems pretty clear that he uses that term to obliquely reference black people, and you'd have to be a pretty major idiot not to understand that from the story.

Nothing you said was wrong or incorrect. 

[WhatTheBuck 28696]

12 hours ago, hayden_horn said:

it has become a code word. you can use that information how you like. you can go ahead and keep using it, just know that a significant ratio of your audience will assume you are racist.

And they'd be right. 

[GringoSalado 1649]

18 hours ago, Huckleberry said:

I'm pretty sure what they're saying is that there are a lot of people who use it to mean a black guy and are racist. The poster's father is one of those people. She knows him and you don't.

Stop taking it personally, your little fee-fees are going to be okay.

Bama chick thinks everybody that uses the term is a racist.

[Onboard 2.0 9083]

2 minutes ago, GringoSalado said:

Bama chick thinks everybody that uses the term is a racist.

This right here ^^. The group think of dumb asses everywhere....and especially the dumb asses here.

[Huckleberry 32660]

15 minutes ago, GringoSalado said:

Bama chick thinks everybody that uses the term is a racist.

I suppose the hypocrisy of your post is lost on you, so I'll try to help you out.

You are upset that Bama Chick presupposes to know what other people are thinking when they say something; this is because you are presupposing what Bama Chick is thinking when she said something.

[GringoSalado 1649]

49 minutes ago, Huckleberry said:

I suppose the hypocrisy of your post is lost on you, so I'll try to help you out.

You are upset that Bama Chick presupposes to know what other people are thinking when they say something; this is because you are presupposing what Bama Chick is thinking when she said something.

Umm:

 

21 hours ago, Bama Chick said:

And stop being coy about the word “thug” - y’all know exactly what that word is code for.

 

[Onboard 2.0 9083]

46 minutes ago, Huckleberry said:

I suppose the hypocrisy of your post is lost on you, so I'll try to help you out.

You are upset that Bama Chick presupposes to know what other people are thinking when they say something; this is because you are presupposing what Bama Chick is thinking when she said something.

Bama chick said it herself, it's a racist code word, and we're being coy denying it.

D. Dennison cums all over himself just uttering the phrase you're racist for anyone Daring to say it's not racist.

So who's actually presupposing here ?

[Pato del Muerto 52232]

What is this called?

[GringoSalado 1649]

Thug knob?

[Bat Guano 359]

When I was 5 or 6 or thereabouts, I was roasting marshmallows with the family. I lit one on fire, let it burn for a while, and announced I'd created a '(n-word) marshmallow.' My father gently but firmly told me that we don't use that word in our house.

So where did I get it from? School, other kids, obviously, but I honestly don't remember any specific instances of hearing it prior to that incident. After that I became attuned to it, and tended to avoid people who used it. But it must have been common enough for me to have absorbed it and to use it casually. Pervasive and ubiquitous, that is.

[deadshank 24648]

1 hour ago, Pato del Muerto said:

What is this called?

Brodie knob