Cabbage Babble, where did you stand to be able to see this?!
The one thing in Nashville I’ve been dying to see (aside from ghosts and an actual kick-ass scary occult shop) and have so far failed at. Tell me and I will make my way there to see for myself.
Tiny Cat Pants 
Aunt B. Cotton-picking? Seriously?
What? I can’t wait to hear how this warrants a “seriously.”
#1 – “Cotton-picking” is fine with me. The phrase, I mean. It reminds me of my mother.
#2 – I was in a small ski boat, tooling about the Cumberland. It is the coolest cave ever. I want to live there. The downside, besides the flooding, no garden in a cave. But great acoustics.
ah “cotton picking” used as an adjective — takes me back to childhood..
Not getting why “cotton-picking” is objectionable as an adjective.
Yeah, I love you guys and would do much for you, but I’m not going to de-Hee-Haw my vocabulary for anyone.
Cotton picking (in my experience) has been used as racially pejorative. Not picking on you for being provincial or anything like that.
Hmm. I don’t doubt you, but I wonder how that happens. Even now, yes, you’re certain to find a lot of cotton field workers who are black, but it doesn’t seem to me that cotton-picking, itself, is devalued here or racially marked as a job only fit for black people. I could be wrong.
It’s hard work, but compared to other jobs, it’s historically often paid better than most (which shows the fucked-up-ness of the sharecropping system. It allowed outsiders to believe that everything was okay because people were being paid, while providing a closed loop that funneled the money right back to the landlord; though I’m vastly vastly oversimplifying here.). And it has to be done. For me, it’s a little like hearing that folks somewhere use “corn-detasseling” to put down rural white folks.
Yes, there are historic reasons that have everything to do with slavery and the oppression of African Americans why so many rural African Americans picked and pick cotton. But all hard work in the South is racially marked that way. Wall-building. Road-building. Field-clearing. Iron-working. Farming. Horse-breeding and training.
Where in Tennessee can you put your foot down and not stand on the largely unacknowledged and uncompensated work of African Americans?
Like I said, I don’t doubt you. But I’m curious now to know how that came to be. Was it during the Great Migration? A way to single out newly arrived Southern rural Blacks?
Anyway, shoot, no skin off my nose to stop using it, if that’s it’s meaning outside of here.
No skin off my nose? Really, Aunt B? Seriously?
Oh, god, but I come from people with syphilis!
Even now, yes, you’re certain to find a lot of cotton field workers who are black, but it doesn’t seem to me that cotton-picking, itself, is devalued here or racially marked as a job only fit for black people.
I don’t know the etymology of the phrase, but I was under the impression it was a slave/sharecropper reference. It’s meant to be racist as well as classist.
Lou Dobbs was ranting about “cotton-picking black leaders” not all that long ago and tried to catch himself. It was not one of his finest moments and Dobbs spews a lot of racist bigotry.
Proving, once again, that you can always find somebody to be offended by anything.
On this blog, that’s a given. It’s the African savannah watering hole for the easily offended.
It’s like the good old days, you two dragging around here, busting chops. I was worried wives and puppies and children might have ended that for good.
Proving, once again, that you can always find somebody to be offended by anything.
Proving, once again, that you can always find somebody to insist that racially pejorative terms (even ones that are a bit more obscure) are not offensive.
Wow, I feel gypped by this thread. Don’t get your irish up, fizzy.
as for “cotton pickin'” being racist… not so. My mother picked cotton in her youth. She’s as white as they come – actually whiter as she’s lost a lot of melanin in her skin on her forearms. So there…