Current Events > 12 Common Words And Phrases With Racist Origins!!!

(+) Yeah! (+)

https://www.yahoo.com/huffpost/common-words-phrases-racist-origins-connotations-210155868.html

• Peanut Gallery

Its a colorful phrase and one that journalist Jeremy Helligar pointed out in Readers Digest has the fingerprints of Jim Crow and segregation all over it.

The peanut gallery was once used to refer to people mostly Black people who were sitting in the cheap seats in vaudeville theaters and would throw peanuts on stage if they didnt like a performance rather than throwing tomatoes.

Some hold that the peanut gallery is more of a classist disparagement than anything else but others say theres a racist implication.

The peanut gallery was the cheapest and worst part of the theater, and the only option for Black attendees, the National Urban League said of the phrase in 2018. No one wanted to sit in the peanut gallery and today, no one wants to hear from the peanut gallery.

----

• Grandfathered In

The phrase has a racially charged history: Its origins go back to post-Civil War attempts to undercut the voting power of newly free Black people by creating strict requirements for new voters, including literacy tests, that did not apply to the descendants of those who voted prior to (usually) 1867. On paper, these rules didnt discriminate, but in practice, everybody understood how they would work: It was white people, by and large, who were grandfathered in to vote.

---

• Gyp, Gypped, Jip and Jipped

This one is racist because its tied to the term gypsy, an offensive term used to refer to the Romani people, whove long faced discrimination because of their darker skin and were even enslaved in some parts of Europe.

---

• Uppity

Its used to disparage a Black person who does not know his or her place, she said. Uppity is a term used by White people to refer to Black people who have the audacity to think well of themselves, to assert unapologetically an opinion that may be outside a white persons comfort zone or thinking.

---

• Spirit Animal

There are terms like spirit animal which denote something positive, intimate, universally attractive and dont seem to denigrate the original owners of the term but the acid test is not to make that judgment ourselves but to ask, in this case Native Americans, what they think, Thorne said.

Nearly always they will say they dont feel comfortable with the casual cultural appropriation, he said.

---

• Paddy Wagon

The term Paddy Wagon goes back to the 19th century when Irish immigrants, refugees from the Great Famine, flooded the cities of the northeastern U.S. The rowdy, hated Catholic Irish, as the poor frequently do, liked to steal, drink and fight. This behavior usually caused them to be arrested and carted away in Black Marias. Soon the Marias had a new namePaddy Wagons!

---

• Long Time No See and No Can Do

The history of the phrases isnt innocent, though. No can do originally emerged in the 19th century to mocked Chinese immigrants speech patterns in English. (Pidgin English, as it was called.)

As for long time no see, its debated whether the phrase originally mimicked and denigrated Chinese or Native American speech patterns.

---

• Sold Down The River

The origin lies in one of the horrors of the American slave system: Those who were sold down the river were enslaved people, separated from their families in most cases, and transported via the Mississippi or Ohio river to cotton plantations in states further south.

---

• Blacklist, Blackball, Black Mark,

The Black power movement brought front and center the way the term black is used with rare exception to convey a derogatory, devalued meaning, she told HuffPost. The meaning of these phrases is always something undesirable evil, depression, gloomy, immoral.

---

• Off The Reservation

The phrase is rooted in the forced relocation of Native Americans. In the 19th century, it referred to Native Americans leaving the reservation land to which they had been confined.

---

• Eeny, Meeny, Miney, Moe

But according to Dictionary.com, when kids in the U.S. in the late 1800s chanted it, the object of the catch wasnt a tiger but a n****.

---

I have seen so many people say Spirit Animal. Had no idea that was offensive.

---

Fuck trying to format your post into anything readable. GameFAQs fights against any kind of spacing corrections that I try to make. Every Admin on this site should be fired for incompetence.

---

Lebronwon posted...

I have seen so many people say Spirit Animal. Had no idea that was offensive.

It's not. Spirit animals are not unique to native american culture, and there are tons of different native american cultures and belief systems. Rest seem spot on.

---

I don't know that I agree with Spirit Animal. Native Americans are not the only culture with spirit animals. they even used to be in europe if you go back further than 2 thousand years. and you can find them in pacific island cultures. in native australian culture and in certain sub cultures in siberia and in the Ainu culture of Japan

BeyondWalls posted...

But according to Dictionary.com, when kids in the U.S. in the late 1800s chanted it, the object of the catch wasnt a tiger but a n****.

I'm glad whoever wrote that article thinks that phrase fell out of use in the 1800s. But I can 100% tell you I heard it a lot with the N-word in my North Carolina middle school.

---

Black = bad likely comes from the primal fear of the dark and has been used that way forever.

I also don't know about long time no see and no can do. Those are literal translations of the phrases in Chinese. That doesn't make it a bad thing.

---

BeyondWalls posted...

Nearly always they will say they dont feel comfortable with the casual cultural appropriation, he said.

What if my "spirit animal" is Old Crow?

if blacklist is racist, then being in the black is also racist?

---

monkmith posted...

if blacklist is racist, then being in the black is also racist?

being in the black is a good thing though. it means you are making a profit

Zikten posted...

being in the black is a good thing though. it means you are making a profit

but its got black in it...

---

EmbraceOfDeath posted...

Black = bad likely comes from the primal fear of the dark and has been used that way forever.

I also don't know about long time no see and no can do. Those are literal translations of the phrases in Chinese. That doesn't make it a bad thing.

being afraid of the dark is deeply ingrained racisms

---

ThePrinceFish posted...

being afraid of the dark is deeply ingrained racisms

all humans got a fear of the dark from our african pre human ancestors. apes in africa were scared of the dark and it got passed on to us. the first humans scared of the dark WERE black humans living in africa before anyone left

12 Common Words And Phrases With Racist Origins, maybe... kind of. If you squint real hard.

Let's add some others.

"The Bomb" - ultimately has Origins in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, celebrating the wholesale destruction of tens of thousands of Japanese civilians. Saying something is "The Bomb" is kinda like saying it's "The 9/11"

---