Racist!

So I was surfing through commenters' blogs on Hammer's blog and came upon an article linked from this site, which resulted in a day of sporadic giggling fits, much to the chagrin of my dear wife.

[While driving home from the grocery store, during one of the fits of laughter]

"Why do you keep laughing for no reason? You're really creeping me out."

"Hm, it's kinda hard to explain. I'm thinking about this article I read today that had something really ridiculous in it."

"What did it say?"

So I thought about it for a while, how to explain why a racial slur would make me break into hysterics every time I thought about it, without seeming like I myself was a kard karrying klansman.

The article I'm referring to is this one, about how porches are making a comeback and the subsequent social implications. I'll go ahead and post the last two paragraphs, which contained the zinger, emphasis mine:

As newcomers to Herndon last year, Joanna Wilbur says she and her husband, Chris, found that sitting outside was "a way to make friends and connect ourselves more with the people living on our cul-de-sac. After work, people would come up to the porch and introduce themselves, or we'd say hi to them as they walked down the street. One couple would bring their daughter over to play on the porch swing."

The porch sealed the deal for the couple -- she's a credit union retirement specialist, he's an Army translator -- because it strongly evoked her Midwestern childhood. "I was a big-time porch monkey in St. Louis. Everyone was outside on the stoop until long after the streetlights came on."

All Clerks 2 references aside, the last line of the last paragraph had me in stitches. Why? For a number of reasons, but mainly because I couldn't believe that a) someone would say something like that, and b) the editor at the Washington Post would allow something like that to be published. I've noticed that a lot of people these days are fond of saying 'I was the only white kid at my high school', as if it gives them some street cred or makes them hard, but not me. I grew up in public schools, mainly white, mainly military brats, far from the darty souff, but somehow, somehow, I managed to acquire the knowledge that porch monkey is indeed a racial epithet.

"Porch monkey? Why is that a racial slur?", my wife asked.

"Hm, I dunno, maybe because it's saying that black people are simian in appearance and intelligence, and that they refuse to do anything but sit on the porch due to laziness?" I guess I'd never really given much thought to the etymology, but that was the best I could do.

"Wow, that's pretty bad."

And it is. So I got the thinking about how that made it through the presses, and I came up with a couple possibilities:

Ignorance

No, not the "I'm a racist cuz I'm ignorant" ignorance, but (again, Clerks 2 references aside) her not knowing that it's a racial slur. I've been familiar with this from a very early age, when I was watching a movie with my dad and everyone was throwing around the word "Chinaman", so I did too. "Don't say that, that's a bad word", said my dad, which I repeated to my grandmother when she was throwing it around one day. "Who says it's a bad word?" asked my grandmother. "Dad did", which elicited a predictable reaction from my grandmother who a) understood my dad is an area expert on China and b) thinks that area experts in general are lazy and stupid possessing no more knowledge than the last article she read about their particular area in National Geographic at the doctor's waiting room. "It's not a bad word", she replied patiently. "I think 'Chinamen' is a nice word. Chinamen. Yeah. Chinamen." ...Aaand I got to hear that word about 15 more times during the next 20 minutes. (As a side note, you can imagine how much this made me laugh a number of years later.)

We get a lot of that around here in Japan, too.



The biggest one around here is the word "Jap". Maybe it's just ingrained in my or something, and while I don't get all fired up when I hear it, it does rub me the wrong way. I suppose "gaijin" could be considered derogatory too, but like "Jap", I don't really bother correcting people who use it anymore. When I say "You know, that's kinda derogatory," they usually just give me the "nah-ah" business, and/or go ahead and, like my precious gramma, disagree with me and use it as much as they can around me because they know it irritates me.

I suspect that the woman quoted had no idea that it was a "bad word", but most surprisingly, that the editor didn't know. I find it hard to believe that a professional wordsmith working for the WaPo, presumably (unlike me) with a strong background in journalism, would not know the expression. There may be another explanation though, namely:

...zing!!!!

While I personally wouldn't practice this form of humor using a racial slur, I can certainly appreciate it when I see it. Think of this as a joke (something meant to make someone laugh) that is a) time released and/or b) like shooting a gun into the air in a crowded city -- you probably won't hit someone, but if you do, they're gonna really feel it (though in the case of the joke they'll laugh really hard, not die). Humor like MST3K and Homestarrunner include a lot of these -- where the humor is incredibly esoteric and sometimes hits you a little while later, resulting in genuine lolz when you get it.

Perhaps this is what Mrs Wilbur intended, intentionally launching a nuke-tipped probe through the WaPo's editing processes just to see if it could get through because, well, that'd just be funny now, wouldn't it? Regardless of whether or not it was intentional, which I'm pretty sure it wasn't (because when I showed people at work a few folks didn't get why it was so weird either), it reached me and had me utterly incapacitated for at least a good 15 minutes throughout the course of the day. So again, Mrs Wilbur whether your bigotry was a result of a malicious mind or just being a simpleton, on behalf of myself and all my friends I sent it to (who I knew would laugh for the same reasons, I thank you.