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Chrishayden
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Posted on Tuesday, July 06, 2004 - 04:41 pm:   Delete Post View Post/Check IP Print Post    Ban Poster IP (Moderator/Admin only)

We are all finely attuned, I think to spotting racism in American Literature.

Do we sometimes go overboard with it? What do you think about the following author's piece on L.Frank Baum's The Wizard of Oz. Do you think this is reaching? Do you think this guy is serious?

From Counterpunch.org

Weekend Edition
June 26 / 27, 2004
L. Frank Baum: Racist
Indian-Hating in "The Wizard of Oz"
By THOMAS ST. JOHN

Lyman Frank Baum (1856-1919) advocated the extermination of the American Indian in his 1899 fantasy "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz". Baum was an Irish nationalist newspaper editor, a former resident of Aberdeen in the old Dakota Indian territory. His sympathies with the village pioneers caused him to invent the Oz fantasy to justify extermination. All of Baum's "innocent" symbols clearly represent easily recognizable frontier landmarks, political realities, and peoples. These symbols were presented to frontier children, to prepare them for their racially violent future.

The Yellow Brick Road represents the yellow brick gold at the end of the Bozeman Road to the Montana gold fields. Chief Red Cloud had forced the razing of several posts, including Fort Phil Kearney, and had forced the signing of the Fort Laramie Treaty. When George Armstrong Custer cut "the Thieves' Road" during his 1874 gold expedition invasion of the sacred Black Hills, he violated this treaty, and turned U.S. foreign policy toward the Little Big Horn and the Wounded Knee massacre.

The Winged Monkeys are the Irish Baum's satire on the old Northwest Mounted Police, who were modelled on the Irish Constabulary. The scarlet tunic of the Mounties, and the distinctive "pillbox" forage cap with the narrow visor and strap are seen clearly in the color plate in the 1900 first edition of "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz". Villagers across the Dakota territory heartily despised these British police, especially after 1877, when Sitting Bull retreated across the border and into their protection after killing Custer.

The Shifting Sands, the Deadly Desert, the Great Sandy Waste, and the Impassable Desert are Frank Baum's reference to that area of the froniter known always as "the great American desert", west and south of the Great Lakes. Baum creates these fictional, barren areas as protective buffers for his Oz utopia, against hostile, foreign people. This "buffer state" practice had been part of U.S. foreign policy against the Indians, since the earliest colonial days.

The Emerald City of Oz recreates the Irish nationalist's vision of the Emerald Isle, the sacred land, Ireland, set in this American desert like the sacred Paha Sapa of the Lakota people, these mineral-rich Black Hills floored by coal. Irish settlements in the territories, in Kansas, Nebraska, and Minnesota--at Brule City, Limerick, at Lalla Rookh, and at O'Neill two hundred miles south of Aberdeen--founded invasions of the Black Hills.

The Yellow Winkies, slaves, are Frank Baum's symbol for the sizable Chinese population in the old West, emigrated for the Union-Pacific railroad, creatures with the slant or winking eyes.

The Deadly Poppy Field is the innocent child's first sight of opium, that anodyne of choice for pain in the nineteenth century, sold in patent medicines, in the Wizard Oil, at the travelling Indian medicine shows. Baum's deadly poppies are the poison opium, causing sleep and the fatal dream.

The Wicked Witch of the West is illustrated in the 1900 first edition as a pickaninny, with beribboned, braided pigtails extended comically. Baum repeats the word "brown" in describing her. But this symbol's real historic depth lies in the earlier Puritans' confounding of European witches with the equally heathen American Indians.

The orphan Dorothy's violent removal from Kansas civilization, her search for secret and magical cures for her friends, her capture, enslavement to an evil figure--and the killing of this figure that is forced on her--all these themes Baum takes from the already two hundred year old tradition of the Indian captivity narrative which stoked the fires of Indian-hating and its hope of "redemption through violence".

In the year immediately following the huge success of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Baum wrote a fantasy entitled The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus. It is apparent that his frontier experiences were still on his mind. The book was illustrated by Mary Cowles Clark--tomahawks, spears, the hide- covered teepees, and the faces of Indian men, women, and children, and papooses fill the pages and the margins. Baum describes the "rude tent of skins on a broad plain".

Two crucial chapters are titled "The Wickedness of the Awgwas" and "The Great Battle Between Good and Evil". The Awgwas represent native Americans: "that terrible race of creatures" and "the wicked tribe". Baum condemns the Awgwas:

"You are a transient race, passing from life into nothingness. We, who live forever, pity but despise you. On earth you are scorned by all, and in Heaven you have no place! Even the mortals, after their earth life, enter another existence for all time, and so are your superiors.".

Predictably enough, a few pages later, "all that remained of the wicked Awgwas was a great number of earthen hillocks dotting the plain." Baum is recalling newspaper photos of the burial field at Wounded Knee.

The Wizard of Oz in 1899 ruling his empire from behind his Barrier of Invisibility evokes the 1869 Imperial Wizard of the Invisible Empire of the South, the Ku Klux Klan. Baum's figure King Crow and his by-play with the Scarecrow relate to the Jim Crow lynch law at the turn of the century.

Lyman Frank Baum's overwhelmingly popular fantasy, and the more violent aspects of United States foreign policy, were welded togehter in the American mind for the next century and beyond.
Frank Baum's widow, at the Hollywood premiere of "The Wizard of Oz" in 1939, complained that the story had been sentimentalized. Indeed, the old and crudely direct political symbols had been removed, and the sweetness poured in--the new U.S. foreign policy demanded more subtle justifications.

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.".

Thomas St. John graduated from Drew University in Madison, New Jersey, and lived in Boston and Cambridge, Massachusetts. He is the author of "Forgotten Dreams: Ritual in American Popular Art" (New York: The Vantage Press, 1987), a collection of essays on Nathaniel Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables, Reverend Jonathan Edwards' "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God", the black history driving the films "Casablanca" and the cartoon "The Three Little Pigs", and the Dakota Indian territory symbols in "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz". The short book "Nathaniel Hawthorne: Studies in the House of the Seven Gables" is now almost complete and online. He can be reached at: seekingthephoenix@yahoo.com


Weekend Edition June 12 / 13, 2004

Peter Linebaugh

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Cynique
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Posted on Tuesday, July 06, 2004 - 05:27 pm:   Delete Post View Post/Check IP Print Post    Ban Poster IP (Moderator/Admin only)

Verrrry interesting, Chris.
In "The Lord of the Rings, the words uttered by Aragorn to the dying Boromir resonate with symbolic racism, when Aragorn swears "I will not let the white city fall, or our people fail." Boromir repeats the words "our people" and, with visions of all those sub-human orcs being defeated, he dies happy. It is not surprising that J.R.R. Tolkien would be come across as racist. He was a man of his times, an academic exponent of Western Civilization.

(I forgive you, Viggo, for reciting those lines, you were just earning your million-dollar pay check. >>smooches<< )

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Chrishayden
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Posted on Wednesday, July 07, 2004 - 10:29 am:   Delete Post View Post/Check IP Print Post    Ban Poster IP (Moderator/Admin only)

Cynique:

I hear you. There are, of course many examples in American literature of overt racism. The novel The Clansman (which inspired the movie "Birth of a Nation") for instance. Racism being a facet of American culture for so long it is inevitable that it would show up in literature.
One can point to Twain, Faulkner, Hemingway and others in the past for concrete examples.

For my thinking, the jury is out on the essay above--though Baum wrote during the time Legal Segregation was being enshrined as the law of the land, I would want some further evidence that his intent with The Wizard of Oz was to justify the slaughter of the Native Americans--note that by the time it was written it had been largely accomplished--so why the need of propaganda?

Do you think it has been purged from today's literature?
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Bleekindigo
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Posted on Wednesday, July 07, 2004 - 10:46 am:   Delete Post View Post/Check IP Print Post    Ban Poster IP (Moderator/Admin only)

Chrishayden,

When you ask if "it" has been purged from today's literature, do you mean racism or propaganda?

Thanx-
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Cynique
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Posted on Wednesday, July 07, 2004 - 11:11 am:   Delete Post View Post/Check IP Print Post    Ban Poster IP (Moderator/Admin only)

Funny you should ask, Chris. I just finished reading "The Rule Of Four", this best-selling book co-written by two white Ivy Leaguer "Bright Boys." One of the main characters in the book is a black guy who I am sure the authors intended to portray as a noble sympathetic person. But, to me, he came across as a latter day ol faithful servant ready to lay down his life for massa. His mother was also a stereotypical domineering heavyset black woman. And no mention was ever made of his father. This book was about hidden codes and riddles and I wonder if the 2 authors, who are from privileged upper-class backgrounds had a clue as to the hidden message they sent with the way the black guy was portrayed. But since one author was a Harvard graduate and the other a Princeton one, maybe good-hearted patronizing blacks are the only kind of black people they ever encountered. I might add that there were white characters in the book who were familiar types, and I'm sure this was deliberate on the part of the authors.
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Chrishayden
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Posted on Wednesday, July 07, 2004 - 11:20 am:   Delete Post View Post/Check IP Print Post    Ban Poster IP (Moderator/Admin only)

Bleek:

Racism, and Cynique's post seems to answer my question.

Cynique:

There it is. As we keep saying, "Here. In the 21st Century!"
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Bleekindigo
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Posted on Wednesday, July 07, 2004 - 11:46 am:   Delete Post View Post/Check IP Print Post    Ban Poster IP (Moderator/Admin only)

Do you think that it will ever be possible for a white man/woman to write a black character into anything successfully?

A wonderful writer and friend of mine wrote a piece on children in inner-city New York. She asked me to read and comment. WELL!! I am too dark to turn red, but she noticed that something within me had indeed turned red. I was highly angered by her audacity to write about the black children that she had written of in her piece.

I asked her why she thought she could write about black children in Harlem.

She was not surprised at all. She informed me that she had,had reservations about writing the piece for fear that she might be asked that question by other black folk and her answer would never suffice because she was white.

I sat back and thought about what she'd said and I couldn't bring myself to find the "good" on any level in a white person writing on black folk.

I am sure that this cannot be a healthy way of being, but, I think that I am so protective of black culture that I try to shield it from...from what? A necessary evil? I do not know. What do you guys think? Should I loosen up and be more open to positive possibilities in white folk writing on black folk?



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Chrishayden
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Posted on Wednesday, July 07, 2004 - 12:04 pm:   Delete Post View Post/Check IP Print Post    Ban Poster IP (Moderator/Admin only)

Bleek:

If you would ask even the white writers I have cited, I am sure that they would have answered that they had successfully written blacks into their literature. They had probably based them on blacks that they were familiar with and comfortable with.

Twain and Faulkner and Hemingway, for instance, must have known blacks who did not say yassuh boss. They must have had contact with black artists, musicians, writers--university trained people.

On another list I mentioned stereotypical, racist blacks in the book More Than Human by Theodore Sturgeon, who many would probably cite as a humanist or progressive. He has an ignorant, yassuh boss black janitor in the book who is so dull he doesn't notice his twin daughters (who act like Topsy) have pyschic abilities. He wrote this during the 50's when he lived in Greenwich Village in New York. He didn't know any black hepsters? He never saw Miles Davis? He couldn't have had Harry Belfonte or Sidney Poitier or Dick Gregory be the basis of the character?

How daring and groundbreaking for a Sci Fi story, which is supposed to be a daring and groundbreaking genre, to feature one of these brilliant blacks? Maybe he was not comfortable with them himself. Then again, and this might go for the rest of them, maybe the editors and publishers told him what kind of blacks to put in his stories.

I think white folk are going to write on black folk. I don't see how you can stop it. I don't think we can stop them either writing unflattering or even racist things. Those might reveal their honest feelings or orientations.

I think we can call them on it. Maybe they don't even consciously know what they are doing.
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Bleekindigo
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Posted on Wednesday, July 07, 2004 - 12:20 pm:   Delete Post View Post/Check IP Print Post    Ban Poster IP (Moderator/Admin only)

Yes Chrishayden, you have hit upon very good points. And I have often thought on the very last line you wrote, "Maybe they don't even consciously know what they are saying." Maybe they don't.

Although, I must say that I might have liked to read a black character written by Stephen Crane. Perhaps the white naturalist writer might have been more capable of writing the black character? Maybe not.
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Cynique
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Posted on Wednesday, July 07, 2004 - 12:20 pm:   Delete Post View Post/Check IP Print Post    Ban Poster IP (Moderator/Admin only)

This subject has been raised before, bleekindigo, and other posters have cited a few "black" novels that they didn't know until later were written by white authors because these people had done such a credible job. I guess it depends on the subject matter, because sometimes the human factor can transcend the race factor. Maybe you should ask yourself that if you put your mind to it, could you write an authentic book about white people.
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Chrishayden
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Posted on Wednesday, July 07, 2004 - 12:23 pm:   Delete Post View Post/Check IP Print Post    Ban Poster IP (Moderator/Admin only)

Bleek:

Maybe not. Maybe he hated and feared black people. Or maybe he never came into contact with any, that is still possible--didn't he have some black in his short story, "The Blue Hotel"?
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Bleekindigo
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Posted on Wednesday, July 07, 2004 - 12:39 pm:   Delete Post View Post/Check IP Print Post    Ban Poster IP (Moderator/Admin only)

chrishayden: Maybe he did. I've never even heard of that story. Thank you for that info though.

Cynique: I will never be able to write a credible book about white people.
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Soul_sister
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Posted on Wednesday, July 07, 2004 - 01:25 pm:   Delete Post View Post/Check IP Print Post    Ban Poster IP (Moderator/Admin only)

MMMmmm, most interesting - I do not believe that writers can be divested of their cultural filters or time period in which they write. I have never heard about the native American twist before, but than again anything is possible in the post modernist world we are living in.

The deconstructionists are all about revisiting the past and reconfiguring the issues of "whiteness" and white identity. Clearly, the reds, blacks, browns and yellows have been exclusively dissected and studied both on the field and under the microscope - so where does white fit in the human family/timeline? That is the question everyone wants an answer too -- especially those pale people who realize that according to nature - they truly are the "other."
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Booked
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Posted on Thursday, July 08, 2004 - 12:05 am:   Delete Post View Post/Check IP Print Post    Ban Poster IP (Moderator/Admin only)

I have not posted in a long, long while, but I had to get in on this one. Recently, I thought I'd read The Bishop Goes to the University, a mystery by white writer/priest Andrew Greeley. Greeley described a black character in the book this way: "He grinned broadly, the kind of impish grin that African-Americans do better than anyone else." I don't know about anyone else, but that sentence troubled me. To me, "impish" connotes "devilishness" or "childishness". I don't think, based on the context surrounding the sentence, Greeley meant to offend--indeed, I think he thought he was being complimentary. Your thoughts?
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Cynique
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Posted on Thursday, July 08, 2004 - 01:28 am:   Delete Post View Post/Check IP Print Post    Ban Poster IP (Moderator/Admin only)

This was a benign faux pas on Father Greely's part, Booked. Recently in one of his newspaper columns, the good father, who is a stauch liberal, compared George Bush to Hitler. Anybody perceptive enough to discern this can't be all bad. LOL
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Yukio
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Posted on Thursday, July 08, 2004 - 01:39 am:   Delete Post View Post/Check IP Print Post    Ban Poster IP (Moderator/Admin only)

hmmm...I don't know, cynique. Liberals are as racist as the next clansman...it is just a matter of degrees, no? One will slit ya throat and the other will scratch the f*%K out of you til u bleed to death...
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Yukio
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Posted on Thursday, July 08, 2004 - 01:49 am:   Delete Post View Post/Check IP Print Post    Ban Poster IP (Moderator/Admin only)

MLK (1963) Letter from Birmingham City Jail

I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the WHite CItizen COunciler or the Ku Klux Klan, but the white moderate who is more devoted to "order" than to justice.

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Lambd
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Posted on Thursday, July 08, 2004 - 07:44 am:   Delete Post View Post/Check IP Print Post    Ban Poster IP (Moderator/Admin only)

I'm sorry, but that 'impish grin that African-Americans do better than anyone else' is offensive. F+++ Father Greely and the stauch liberal horse he rode in on. Maybe I'm not as perceptive as he is, but I percieve that he could have described that grin differently.

I read a critique on Stephen King a while back that charged Stephen King with rascism in his writing. I've read everything he's ever written, from short stories to novels to nonfiction and collaborations. Not once have I been personally offended. King has been known to use the word 'nigger' in his writing, but I realize that some of the characters in his books think or speak that way. 'Nigger' or 'nigga' in the context of someone's thoughts, narrative, or speech is sometimes germane to the story/character. That, to me, keeps it from being offensive.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that racism in literature is sometimes in the way it is received.

Also, no offense to anyone on the site in particular, but I think you can read just about anything you want into damn near anything you want. Next thing you guys will be telling me that 'Alice in Wonderland' was racially motivated. I guess if I think long and hard on it I can find away to make Mickey Mouse, with his white face, hands, and shoes, a minstrel mouse. Minnie aint nothin' but a ho and Mickey pimpin' that ass. Takin' all of Donald Duck's money. Cause you know how them white ducks loves dem sum black ho's. What movie was it where someone was trying to explain how the game of pool was rascist?
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Yukio
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Posted on Thursday, July 08, 2004 - 07:56 am:   Delete Post View Post/Check IP Print Post    Ban Poster IP (Moderator/Admin only)

boomerang...martin lawrence said it.
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Cynique
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Posted on Thursday, July 08, 2004 - 12:42 pm:   Delete Post View Post/Check IP Print Post    Ban Poster IP (Moderator/Admin only)

Nobody ever said Liberals were perfect, and being a liberal is not just about race. It's a philosophical approach to dealing with all of Society's the ills. I defended the unintentional slur made by my ol Chicago home boy Father Greeley because, as a liberal, he has always put his money where his mouth is, and, believe me, his long career as a writer has netted him millions. BTW, he's Irish and nobody ridicules the Irish any more than he does. He also "castigated" the Catholic church for its handling of child-abushing priests. (no pun intended)
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Lambd
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Posted on Thursday, July 08, 2004 - 01:06 pm:   Delete Post View Post/Check IP Print Post    Ban Poster IP (Moderator/Admin only)

My small scale(in comparison to some of you) rant was not directed at anyone. I was only venting. I'm sure Father Greely is a nice man. He just has a dirty mouth. That little impish...that AA's...yackety smackety kind of rubbed me the wrong way. I should probably read the whole page before I pass judgement on that rascist SOB..<wink>
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Cynique
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Posted on Thursday, July 08, 2004 - 01:19 pm:   Delete Post View Post/Check IP Print Post    Ban Poster IP (Moderator/Admin only)

Likewise, my retort wasn't directed specifically at you, Lambd. And - have I told you lately how funny and clever you are? If I haven't done so, I'll rectify that right now. Lambd: you are funny and clever.
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Lambd
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Posted on Thursday, July 08, 2004 - 01:28 pm:   Delete Post View Post/Check IP Print Post    Ban Poster IP (Moderator/Admin only)

Thank you, C-neek. I love yoouu.
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Cynique
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Posted on Thursday, July 08, 2004 - 02:06 pm:   Delete Post View Post/Check IP Print Post    Ban Poster IP (Moderator/Admin only)

Awwww, Lambd. You're so sweet.
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Abm
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Posted on Thursday, July 08, 2004 - 02:07 pm:   Delete Post View Post/Check IP Print Post    Ban Poster IP (Moderator/Admin only)

I think rather than rehashing Greely’s (relevant?) liberal socio-political record, perhaps we should consider ‘who’ within his book utters the "...impish grin that African-Americans do..." comments.

Booked, are you quoting the comments of a character within Greely’s book? Or are you quoting the book’s narrator? The answer to those questions should largely dictate what one thinks/feels about Greely.

If these are the comments of one of the book’s - presumably flawed - characters, this is likely a complete non-issue because uttering such might reasonably fit the nature/behavior of a (possibly biased, racist) character. If those were, however, the comments of an omniscient, third person narrator, perhaps then there is more reason to criticize Greely because it is reasonable to assume they reflect HIS actual views.
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Cynique
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Posted on Thursday, July 08, 2004 - 02:22 pm:   Delete Post View Post/Check IP Print Post    Ban Poster IP (Moderator/Admin only)

Would a children's advocate be offended if Greeley had said that a child smiled in that impish way that only children can do? I think we're giving too much weight to the word "impish". Black people very often smirk at white people when they find their stupidity amusing. And they do this from a position of superiority.
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Chrishayden
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Posted on Thursday, July 08, 2004 - 02:30 pm:   Delete Post View Post/Check IP Print Post    Ban Poster IP (Moderator/Admin only)

All:

I'd have to read the whole work and take it in context. I am really unoffended by what Father Greely said as it stands (unless he was talking about one of the altar boyz--if yez know what I mean).

I say, Cynique. Do you think the air has cleared from the latest AALBC contretemps (I swear, y'all remind me of my family-- a feudin' and a fightin' and a fussin' at the drop of a hat--but don't let nobody else try to badmouth 'em!--If y'all ain't black y'all will do till da rill thang comes along!) for me to offer up another one of those boffo Cynique poems everybody who visits here has grown to know and love?
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Cynique
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Posted on Thursday, July 08, 2004 - 02:43 pm:   Delete Post View Post/Check IP Print Post    Ban Poster IP (Moderator/Admin only)

No, Chris, the air has not cleared enough; there is still some residue. So spare us another poem about the virtues of Cynique.
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Lambd
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Lambd

Post Number: 204
Registered: 01-2004

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Posted on Thursday, July 08, 2004 - 06:08 pm:   Delete Post View Post/Check IP Print Post    Ban Poster IP (Moderator/Admin only)

I like the way Chrishayden smiles that broad impish grin; the way only you niggas know how to smile.
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Lambd
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Lambd

Post Number: 205
Registered: 01-2004

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Posted on Thursday, July 08, 2004 - 06:11 pm:   Delete Post View Post/Check IP Print Post    Ban Poster IP (Moderator/Admin only)

I'm sorry. It just seemed to fit. I meant to say it the way old man Greely said it. 'Nigga' just fit right in there so nicely. I suppose I would have to read the whole damn book to take it into context too. It'd be alot easier to call a spade a spade then. Oops! There I go again. No pun intended, really.
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Chrishayden
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Chrishayden

Post Number: 375
Registered: 03-2004

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Posted on Friday, July 09, 2004 - 10:05 am:   Delete Post View Post/Check IP Print Post    Ban Poster IP (Moderator/Admin only)

Lambd:

That wasn't nothin'.

Try again.
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Lambd
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Lambd

Post Number: 211
Registered: 01-2004

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Posted on Friday, July 09, 2004 - 11:15 am:   Delete Post View Post/Check IP Print Post    Ban Poster IP (Moderator/Admin only)

Sorry Chris, I've been working way too hard. Maybe later. thanks anyway.

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