Talk to me in about 400 years and you’ll understand our pain. The pain that we still feel from your fathers, uncles, aunts, mothers, and most people in the heartland of U.S.

Uh, but it says so, right there at the top of the page: “59 Responses to “Lou Dobbs: Cotton Pickin’….”

Now I’m insulted.

Wait, that’s what whipped means? I always thought that referred to the dessert topping.

But what’s more interesting than that is Dobbs railing against that angry Condi Rice for daring to talk such race-baiting trash.

He did, after all, use the term specifically to refer to blacks, which has obvious racial connotations.

And let me posit a devil’s hypothetical along these same lines…

When a man in a relationship is perceived to be dominated by his significant other, they are often referred to as “whipped.”

Can you say the same if the man is black?

Common sense is not somehow immune to political or ideological implications. Common sense, in fact, often reinforces the status quo by laying claim to “received wisdom.” The whole force of a “common sense” statement lies in its presumed claim to summarize established, consensus thought. Here’s what I mean when i refer to common sense:
http://www.units.muohio.edu/englishtech/eng49502/graydobt/Geertz’s Common Sense.htm

[Clifford Geertz] asserts that “common sense” may in fact be something of a misnomer. What we believe are simple and largely unrelated truths deriving from our own personal experiences are in fact “historically constructed and historically defined standards of judgment” (76). Geertz introduces the possibility that common sense is a cultural regime like any other, and consequently a product of historical and cultural specificities. “Common sense is not what the mind cleared of cant spontaneously apprehends,” he claims, but rather “what the mind filled with [historical and cultural] presuppositions�concludes”.

Or, exposed the honest attempt overcome that nature.

I don’t deny that. But Dobbs was attacking people he feels try to censor speech about race, but in his statements, he found it necessary to censor himself. Admirable correction, but it sort of undermines his point that we don’t need to be reminded from time to time what may or may not be offensive by those communities who are affected. Dobbs may not like the way some people go about reminding him and all of us of the need for sensitivity, but that doesn’t refute the need for it as we work out our racial issues as a country.

At the same time, the phrase “wait a cotton-pickin’ minute” is a whole lot different than “cottin-pickin politician” - especially when the politician is black. Like I’ve been saying, context is important.

As to how long we have to keep going over this stuff, catching ourselves, etc. etc., like I said, it’s a life-long process for every individual and so extends from generation to generation. We are never going to achieve, in my opinion, a post-racial utopia. It’s like the phrase “in order to form a more perfect union.” We’ll never form a “perfect union” all we can do, generation to generation is continue striving towards the ideal. Same with race issues in this country.

You counted? Get a life, loser!

Yeah, but here’s where I get confused: What is the actual offense? Are you insulting minutes? Is a cotton-pickin’ minute of a similar length or duration to a New York Minute? If you were to refer to a person as a “cotton-pickin’ so-and-so” I could understand the offense, but I fail to see how offending a measurement of time, even in a pretty colloquial use, is reason for hurt feelings.

Oh, and Sean’s an idiot.
I kid! I kid!

And yet, it still appeals to common sense. Which suggests something about what relative weight should be granted to the deeper masked meaning vs common sense.

fafaroo: In correcting his own speech in the middle of saying it, Dobbs exposed the knee-jerk, unreflective nature of his initial premise.

Or, exposed the honest attempt overcome that nature. A point that is getting overlooked. I’m not familiar with Lou Dobbs much beyond recognizing his name, so I can’t speak to the history Enlightened Liberal mentions. But it seems to me that, in this particular case, the comments being made are really only looking at half of what happened. If one is going to get on his case for having started to say it, then they should equally acknowledge that he tried to correct it.

Beyond this specific case, I do think we’re becoming an overly-sensitive “politically correct” society. Should someone continue to use a phrase which they know others find offensive? Basic manners says no. But should those who would be offended get their umbrage up everytime the phrase is used? Also no.

If I said “wait a cotton-pickin’ minute” I wouldn’t have any problem with someone pointing out to me that some might take offense. I’d still be hard-pressed to see what I always viewed as an offhand idiom as offensive and, never having thought about the phrase in detail before, would again find etymology interesting. But I would acknowledge their point and tend to not use the phrase again without some consideration.

But, OTOH, if they reacted with a “You’re offending me!” response, despite my obvious not planning to, I’d believe they have a large chip on their shoulder and were looking for offense where none was intended.

Might my ignorance of the origins of the phrase be based on deep-seated, embedded racial history? Did I not realize the origins of the phrase because my only exposure to it was from an oversized chicken in a Saturday morning cartoon, and that was because my race led me to have a particular kind of upbringing? Sure. But how long do we harp on the minor, embedded differences there will be between any two people?

There are some who would rather pick continually on what someone said without malice, and ignore the progress that could be made by building on what they tried not to say.

Touche. In a way, yes. It’s from Willie Stark’s “I’m a Hick” speech in All the King’s Men (the Broderick Crawford version).

I may, but I don’t.

So why would one person choose one term over the other, or what significance is of even being able to make that choice? The reasoning behind choosing one over the other can speak volumes about one’s experience of race and racism, as I think that wikipedia article reveals.

After looking into the issues and history that lay behind the terms, you may still feel it’s a distinction without a difference, much ado about nothing, and so smile bemusedly over it but even then you have to ask yourself what you personally have at stake in the terms and if that has any impact on your amusement.

yeah, of course it is. But it goes back to dr4lom’s original comment above: In correcting his own speech in the middle of saying it, Dobbs exposed the knee-jerk, unreflective nature of his initial premise.

I think that’s a sharp observation and you can find more here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colored

The point being is that while it might be easy for someone to smile about what seems like a distinction without a difference, there’s a lot more to the history and experience of the two phrases than a simple “common sense” joke can make sense of. I would go on to say that the seemingly “common sense” humor of the originally quoted observation does more to mask the history and meaning of these two phrases than it reveals — even though it lays claim to some kind of wisdom. Again, that speaks to just how subtle racial privilege and racial attitudes operate. An observation that appeals to “common sense” actually serves to mask a deeper meaning and history that can be felt in the real lives of real people.