Up Front: White in Brighton
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The title of the piece is inspired: Nick Smith Is Shit.
A Dunedin artist did an excellent bust of Lockwood Smith in 1994 made out of horse manure. About twice life seze. Oh how we laughed!
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(That's from White trash: race and class in America by Matt Wray and Annalee Newitz.)
Oh! I've met Annalee a couple of times, at Foo Cap in the US and here. She's cool. I knew she'd done science writing and is behind this place of geek worship, but I had no idea she'd done that.
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I can remember the one occasion I was ignored for being Pakeha. I turned to my mate and he had to explain what had just happened.
I had that "so that's what it is like' moment. Of course one event doesn't equate for the cumulative impact he experiences.I can also remeber the one occasion I was abused for being Maori - which was so strange as to be funny.
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I can remember the one occasion I was ignored for being Pakeha.
How did you determine you were being ignored for being Pakeha? What was the context?
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Big BBQ up North and my mate was pally with these guys so I went over to say Hi and silence.
He later explained what had happened and that these guys were all about Maori and only Maori. -
I was refused a drink at a pub in Northern Transvaal once because the barman thought I was Indian.
I told him to “F off” in broad Kiwi, and he was extremely apologetic.
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I was refused a drink at a pub in Northern Transvaal once because the barman thought I was Indian.
In the late 70s, my parents stayed at a small B&B in Wales. The proprietor and his wife were surly and noncommunicative. After a day, as they were leaving the building, the wife asked if they were going "back home to England". My mother said yes, but they were actually from New Zealand. Two minutes later, as they were getting in their car, the proprieter ran up, knocked on the car window and said "New Zealand - the All Blacks is it?" in a friendly manner, and was polite and welcoming from then on. I've had several similar experiences in Europe when people assumed I was English. It's one reason why backpackers sew NZ flags on their packs...
Humanity, eh?
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With respect to your parents Jack, the first thing you do when visiting Wales or Scotland or particularly Ireland is drop a “Gidday mate”.
But being a patriotic Welsh B&B owner must be the job from hell.
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Where did that come from, Dylan?
It's a weblog of some US academic... Erin O'Connor - not to be confused with the catwalk model who looks like a very young Helen Clark. I was really using it for the link to Harriet Beecher's Stowe's quote. I have also read it used by Booker T. Washington (in his book Up From Slavery) and the context in both cases that sprang to mind was that it was a pejorative term used by blacks against ignorant whites.
"Without schools or churches, these miserable families grow up heathen on a Christian soil, in idleness, vice, dirt, and discomfort of all sorts. They are the pest of the neighborhood, the scoff and contempt or pity even of the slaves. The expressive phrase, so common in the mouths of the negroes, of 'poor white trash,' says all for this luckless race of beings that can be said."
I'm not sure if that's the case because I'm unsure of the source, but I have read a bit about the history of the 'N' word. Before it was positively re-appropriated (and some people dispute that that re-appropriation is a positive thing) by some black artists, it was often used by black people who felt they had risen to a better place in society to describe black people who had not.
The word "nigger" was appropriated waaay back by black people as shorthand for "uppity nigger" which was once a pejorative term for someone who had ideas above their colour, but quickly became a term proudly used to describe someone who did not take shit from whitey.
And given that you missed out this rather key point from your link: 'while white trash is likely to have originated in African American slang, it was middle-class and elite whites who found the term most compelling and useful and they who, ultimately, made it part of popular American speech', it's pretty clear that there's a race-based subtext to the term in the USA, at least.
Yes, I quite agree... I was just saying the origins of the term are much older and come from a different source than assumed.
The idea that poor whites in the 20th century carved out a place for themselves by being extra racist to the black people slightly lower on the totem pole is basically a truism at this point, however.
Poor whites didn't so much carve out a place for themselves by being extra racist as wind up just as disenfranchised as the black slaves themselves, as great tracts of land - and the means to generate wealth - slaves - were tied up in the hands of a very few wealthy plantation owners.
Speaking of origins of slang or phrases - Craig was absolutely right when he said William F. Buckley was an unlikely person to use the term "panty waist". He is from an ivy league background and if he were looking for a pejorative term for a weakling it wouldn't be "panty waist" as that would be a term used by someone from a rougher, more working class background.
The panty waist was a garment used by toddlers in one form (Dill in To Kill a Mockingbird is wearing shorts that button at the waist to his shirt when Scout meets him - that's a panty waist) and in older boys it's a short undershirt that was worn under their shirt and buttoned to their knickerbockers. It denotes the wearer is very young and inexperienced - and it also implies the wearer is not working class, as these were garments that were more likely to be worn by wealthy (or at least not impoverished) boys. Actually William F. Buckley is almost certain to have worn a panty waist in his youth.
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Not wrong, Legbreak...most of my immediate whanau have spent time in Europe, and especially the 'UK'- we've found that the flag is OK; pounemu & paua & bone hei recognised; the accent not especially clear to English ears, but our general 'get off arse & do it' attitude
known - and appreciated. But - we *still* get confused with other colonial riffraff (Yanks excepted.)
Incidentally, never been to Wales or Ireland, but I found Scotland agreeable - and understandable. Whereas - while I dearly love a lot of things about England -I didnt engage with the country or nation...Oddly, there were few resonances with our Christchurch - the land & the weather & the history here have thoroughly deracinated the City On The Plains...Otautahi/CHCH now-
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O, latest judgement out on water-rights!
Now, jugular-cut&choke will begin!
(And, bad luck all you other water-users in Canterbury.) -
linkies?
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You do it so much than me - thanks so much, Sam F!
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Ta
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Has the HPT arranged a mitigation payment sufficent to record the loss this development will have upon our heritage, of this iconic landscape?
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Sacha-thinking of the meanings of 'ta'- yep-
Just thinking -umm, this is a provocative and necessary & overwhelmingly appropriate question, entirely relevant to the circumstances, and certainly should be considered in depth.
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Poor whites didn't so much carve out a place for themselves by being extra racist as wind up just as disenfranchised as the black slaves themselves, as great tracts of land - and the means to generate wealth - slaves - were tied up in the hands of a very few wealthy plantation owners.
Yeah. But I'm not talking about their status in the economic context of slavery (and later sharecropping), but their cultural 'place'. Which is clearly defined by 'not-blackness' as well as 'poor whiteness'.
I am also going to immerse myself in some Dolly Parton box set goodness, thanks 3410. :)
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On the subject of Christchurch being "English", I've just been reading The Shell Guide to New Zealand, a 1969 travel guide edited by Maurice Shadbolt. ('Tis my new favourite book).
In his essay on Christchuch he writes, "But typically English? Travel beyond the central city area and such an affectation becomes quaint and then comic. Leave behind the cathedral, the university, the law courts and the willows along the Avon, and you are in suburbs indistinguishable from those of any other New Zealand city."
And it's true. It's only the (very un-English) flatness of the landscape that marks Christchurch's suburbs out as different from the rest of NZ.
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Yes Robyn and it should not come as a surprise to our avid readers that if you want to find an English City then, as I alluded to earlier, people should, really, go to England, they have loads of them.
If, on the other hand, you wish to find out what a New Zealand city of the future will look like, try Toronto. -
On the subject of Christchurch being "English", I've just been reading The Shell Guide to New Zealand, a 1969 travel guide edited by Maurice Shadbolt. ('Tis my new favourite book).
Ohhh... can I borrow it when you're done?
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to find out what a New Zealand city of the future will look like, try Toronto
Auckland is about to get some of the worst features of their civic structure imposed on us at haste. Perhaps we get the urban and social form as a bonus?
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On the subject of Christchurch being "English", I've just been reading The Shell Guide to New Zealand, a 1969 travel guide edited by Maurice Shadbolt. ('Tis my new favourite book).
Ohhh... can I borrow it when you're done?
That made me all nostalgic. When a small version of the Clark Family was doing the North Island/South Island roadtrip -which we did every May holidays from 1974 to 1982, pretty much - we used the Mobil Travel Guides. Long skinny books they were, and full to the brim with every single town, large and small, in NZ, and what to do, where to stay and what to eat while you were there. Fantastic. Which has nothing at all to do with Chch. Much like myself.
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That made me all nostalgic. When a small version of the Clark Family was doing the North Island/South Island roadtrip...
You were lucky! We drove without any map/s. Dad happily got lost. He seemed to think the US Navy gave him NZ driving cred.Now it seems I am pretty much the same though, I always say to t'other half that it's all a grid pattern. If you just zig and zag one eventually hit's the beach. :)
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The word "nigger" was appropriated waaay back by black people as shorthand for "uppity nigger" which was once a pejorative term for someone who had ideas above their colour, but quickly became a term proudly used to describe someone who did not take shit from whitey.
Holy heck! That word has to be one of the most plastic in the language.
I'm curious to learn more of its parameters and permutations now but I don't want to spend such a glorious Canturbury afternoon typing 'nigger' into Google.
Plus I have a meeting with the 7th Goatmaster of Christchurch Citizen Control System 9 under Le Cafe later on and have neglected to polish the ritual croquet hammer.
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