Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley Price, the African-American philosopher-king who took umbrage at a fellow commissioner for using the term "black hole" to describe a city office into which documents disappear, went on local TV today to complain about the inherent theological racism in calling white cake "angel food" and black cake "devil's food."
You have to watch the video to hear his learned disquisition on the meaning of Jewing somebody down. Ah, the gorgeous mosaic...
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From the same post I referenced above:
I won't even go into the number of times they have had people click all their car doors shut when they've walked by. That happened to me too once in Cambridge MA, and I'm a 120-pound woman.
You are imputing racism to these people, BD, as I said in my post at 2:40 p.m. If you try to tell me otherwise, then you're not being honest, either with me or yourself. You can decide that one.
One error I made is that I thought it was woman who locked her car door in MA, but you never specified the person's gender. It could have been a man, and, if so, please change what needs changing.
BTW, there is a positive metaphor for "black". When your finances are "in the black" is a good thing. I'm sure the Native American lobby will be getting on people at Merriam-Webster's, though, about "red ink", though, we can still use "red letter".
You are imputing racism to these people, BD, as I said in my post at 2:40 p.m.
No I'm not, and that's a mighty conclusion for you to jump to. First you say that I tagged someone as an "irrational racist," which I did not. And now in this most recent post you've changed that to say that I'm "imputing racism."
What I DID say was that white folks are oftentimes acting quite reasonably in their fear of young black males, based on statistical reality, and that the downside to this fear is that decent, law-abiding black folks often become the object of this fear. That is a far cry from calling someone a racist.
Didn't even Jesse Jackson, of all people, once say that if he is walking down the street at night and hears footsteps behind him, and he turns around and sees that the person behind his is white, he feels relieved?
"BD and Jason, it would be interesting to see what color metaphors occur in various African languages. Do those languages also equate darkness and night with evil and danger?"
A question that I also had in college. Once in an art history class, we were studying the arts and craft of a particular group in Africa (I forget which one, that knowledge has been replace with child-rearing knowledge). White came up as a symbol of purity. I grilled our prof--is this is a symbol from post-Christian influences? Why, in a society without bleach would white=purity? It is, in fact impossible to know if the symbolism was pre-Christian since Christianity of various forms in Africa predates European colonial activity there.
I would second DavidTC's explanation about light and darkness. I would also speculate about something else. Natives of melanin-rich cultures may not associate their own skin color with the idea of "black" and "dark." It may simply not occur to them for a variety of cultural and linguistic reasons (not to mention very few "black" people are, in fact, "black"). All that being said, I understand that skin-color-based racism exists within dark-skinned groups--where gradations of tone make for division between neighbors.
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