As stupid as it may sound, I've realized that a decent amount of people I've met in my life actually believe that "black people" are dumb. (It goes without saying that these people are idiots but I'm talking A LOT!)
This of course comes from all the crack pot television we grew up on. And all the crack pot television our parents grew up on and so on...
...all the shows that subtly feature a black actor as the dummy, the goof ball, the comic relief, the dodo!
And that is how ideas get passed along. Straight through your subconscious mind.
St. Louis kind of freaked me out a little bit.
"St. Louis gives young men the fear." -Hunter S. Thompson, The Rum Diary
I got to see a word I was told to love turn into a word I was told to hate. I heard people using the term "hoosier" in a derogatory way (like "hick"). In Indiana, we're raised as "Hoosiers" and use it as a term of pride. In St. Louis, that isn't the case.
Wikipedia told me:
Thomas E. Murray carefully analyzed the use of "hoosier" in St. Louis, Missouri, where it is the favorite epithet of abuse.
"When asked what a Hoosier is," Murray writes, "St. Louisans readily list a number of defining characteristics, among which are 'lazy,' 'slow-moving,' 'derelict,' and 'irresponsible.'" He continues, "Few epithets in St. Louis carry the pejorative connotations or the potential for eliciting negative responses that hoosier does."
I remember reading something about the unions going on strike and the scabs being from Indiana but can't find any of that now.
It does say this though:
In the mid-1950s, Fenton, Missouri was at the then-rural southwest rim of the county. It was during this time that Chrysler Corporation built a large automobile assembly plant in the city of Fenton and closed a plant it had been operating in Evansville, Indiana. Many former employees of the closed Indiana plant moved to Fenton for employment; so many, in fact, that entire subdivisions of new homes (with streets named after Chrysler models such as "Fury" and "Belvidere") sprang up south of the plant, near what was then US Route 66.
It freaks me out how words become weapons of hate!
Sometimes I find myself using these words lightly because they bare no significance to me.
Watch out for the magic words, they can get you in trouble. Like casting a spell.
I love it! This blog is off to a good start! You should take a look at the IAT test https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/. It demonstrates subconscious racism even in people who believe they are not racist. You have to put words into categories. There will be two columns. One column says something like Good/White and the other says something like Evil/Black. Then there are words in the middle like anger, love, MLK, devil, color of coal, angel. For most people (especially white people) when the categories are Good/White vs Evil/Black they do well categorizing the words, but when it's reversed and they are Good/Black vs Evil/White it takes them dramatically longer to complete the test. Interestingly you can take the test over and over and you will do just as bad; however, if you watch videos of black people doing positive things such Martin Luther King leading a peace march or Obama giving a campaign speech your score improves. An Even better way to improve your score is to hang out with black people. This hints at the very possible, but difficult for some, cure for racism.
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