S. Bridgeplate is a large black man?
Very nice -- did you? Was he singing all the verses? I don't really remember anything past "Steel bars will bend and break" but it seems to my memory like it was a fairly long story.
Build it up with iron bars, iron bars, iron bars.
Build it up with iron bars,
my fair lady.
Aha! It was parallel in construction to "There's a hole in the bucket, dear Ida, dear Ida", right?
Did you tell him he was earning his pay today?
(For those who haven't, read the comments to that post.)
S. Bridgeplate is a large black man?
5: He didn't seem like he was working that hard to me. But if he had been, I'd have let him know I approved.
Jinx doesn't live here anymore.
Experiment reveals that I still laugh out loud when I get to comment 21 on that thread (must read from beginning). Sigh.
Boy, that's for sure. I understand about 10% of what goes on around here, but I knew what SB was talking about by 11.
17 -- too bad. If you had done it, perhaps everyone on the street would have burst into song and started dancing, and you'd have been in a musical comedy.
Thesis: random citizens sing in public more in NYC than in any other place in the world.
JM -- we talking musical comedies here or RL? I lost track.
Data points 2&3: I sing on the streets all the damned time. And I live near a music school, so the drunken 3 am carousers sing opera at a volume that can actually wake me up.
We need a comparison group. JM, what can you tell us about Paris?
Real life, Osner. Those musical comedies have to have some basis in fact, or what will the world have come to?
In Paris, everyone is too afraid of being laughed at to make any such spectacle of themselves.
Hm. Well as a data point I'm pretty sure I have done it though not on a regular basis. I do whistle in public, more-or-less tunefully.
More chanting in Paris, though, because more strikes and street marches.
Ooh, I haope I see a street march when I go to Paris. It's like a parade, but against the man.
31--That's for damned sure. The first year I spent there I kept expecting the looting to begin any minute. (And the first time I saw a "sans papiers" demonstration I was astonished that they weren't all summarily arrested.)
If it had been a large white man, would you still have posted that little vignette?
What if he were Asian? What if he were a sumo wrestler? What then?
It would have depended on what kind of large white man. Probably, given the kind of large man that usually unloads trucks.
Too...many...hypotheticals...can't...process....KABLOOIE!
Foreign street protests: not as much fun as one would expect.
Just curious because it made me remember something from college. After one of my friends passed out one night from drinking, the other drunken friends broke out the felt tipped markers and began writing on him. One of the things they wrote on his back was "insert large black cock here" with an arrow down to his ass. I was offended at that (I wasn't present for the writing, just the aftermath the next day), should I have been?
The freedom to sing in public with impunity is for me one of NYC's strongest draws. I catch myself doing it all the time, but it's strictly frowned upon here in stuffy DC. Can you still pee wherever you want?
(Needless to say, "Insert large white/asian/mexican cock here" would have been equally offensive.)
Yeah, foreign protests against the U.S. government wouldn't be so great for an American.
However, French people marching for their vacation days = awesome.
Can you still pee wherever you want?
Depends on your gender.
I just had a vivid flashback to being very little and driving with my dad through Glasgow and having to pee so badly that he told me to jump out and pee behind a bush on somebody's lawn.
Then yes, you should have been offended.
Did you ask him if he had kids? Because I find myself singing the most embarrassing things sometimes....
Can you still pee wherever you want?
Depends on your gender.
No, depends on your sex. And even then . . .
I'm pretty sure 51 was about the man singing, not about inserting a large black cock anywhere, right?
52 -- I think if you examine your post with a little care you will see why I chose 'gender'.
52: and I thought they should admit me into the monastery for curing my hiccups...
51: I didn't.
40: It's offensive no mater what race since its homophobic, and it's compounded by trading on the "black men are big oversexed animals" stereotype. Yes. Bad.
I think if you examine your post with a little care you will see why I chose 'gender'.
Examining my post confirms that I am male, but it gives no clues my gender.
It was originally, although now that you mention it....
58: Mr. B is Standpipe Bridgeplate!
55 - Huh, I had never thought of it as homophobic, just as something that he wouldn't like done to him, no matter the cock color.
The other thing that prompted me to comment was that I was curious about what the use of "black" adds to the post (other than it being an accurate depiction of the scene). For example, if it was a large white man (as I hypothesized) and you had put up the same post (as you said you probably would), would you have mentioned that he was white?
I suppose to the extent "large man" defaults to "large white man" in the minds of people (rightly or wrongly), the use of white would be superfluous and black necessary to shift off the default.
I've had this experience, and remember thinking "I couldn't, nor could any other white man, do this and leave the same impression. The white guy would be advertising "flake," in a way the black guy isn't.
would you have mentioned that he was white?
I've noticed that I increasingly do specify if someone is white, as in: "Mr. Waiter, I'm looking for my friend, a tall white guy with an Irish accent and an orange jacket." I don't know if this is some sort of PC fairness instinct, or if it's a reaction to the fact that a lot of the people I interact with these days aren't white.
I had never thought of it as homophobic
Wow.
Strangely, this story reminds me of a summer afternoon when I had just walked into a bookstore. A man who reeked of smoke walked up to me and said with gravity, "Friend, how do you know you weren't a great guitarist?"
apostropher - Perhaps it comes from knowing the participants.
Right, that makes sense, particularly given the jokes that fly around here.
"London Bridge " is an earworm. Blogs with earworms should post warnings so people can aviod infections.
Yes, infections spread easily because it's a small world after all. It's a small, small world.
Blogs with earworms should post warnings so people can aviod infections.
Yes, that bird flu is a very nasty infection indeed.
41 to 42.
Smasher, please. You should save it for saving the world and stuff.
61: It's hard for me to answer this hypothetical because it would depend on a number of factors and what role his race played. I said he was black because race is one of the few obvious markers you can discern about someone, and because the point of the post was about the comedic disjuncture between how I, as a young medium sized white woman who's pretty working class herself but might someday not be, am taught to perceive the categories "male," "large," "black," and "working class" and their intersection, and how different that is from how that particular guy behaved.
Now I feel like Professor Wacky.
Recently I described someone as a "white guy in a baseball cap," but I am too tired right now to link to it.
I guess the answer is that I might have said "white," but it would have been intended as a scene-setting descriptor, not as part of the funny contrast.
How about: "A large universal human subject on the back of a truck's cargo bed..."?
As anyone may or may not have noticed, one of my many little idiosyncracies is that describing people as "black" or "white" is one of the umpty-zillion usages that just irritates the crap out of me, since people are neither, and I'm in the whole "it's fine if you wish to self-identify with a social construct" thing, but hate implications that there's much more to it.
I tend to refer to how pale or not someone is, if it's relevant.
Identifying people as "black" or "white," regardless, when there's no relevancy of skin shade, as opposed to, say, "that red-haired fella" or "that six-foot-three gal," as means of identification has also always bugged me as seeming to suggest that the person uttering the usage classifies people right off by "race."
Naturally, whenever I note this, I usually offend someone who does it, and then they think I've called them "racist" and it's all downhill from there. So usually I don't say anything. But since it came up.
I just the other day noticed Pam Noles' use of "Friends of Pigment," and "people of pigment," which I think I'll give a spin at using for a while, where relevant. I'd point you to my post with links, but Blogger and Blogspot seem to have just gone, however momentarily or not, offline again, so I can't. But it's in a post on my front page, from either yesterday or the day before, with the header "SHAME," and you should be able to find it if you want with no problem. (It's about Pam Noles' terrific essay on the whitewashing of Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea in the apparently crap-ass movie the Sci-Fi Channel made [don't have cable, haven't seen it, take people's word for it], and growing up pigmented and having cognitive dissonance with the paleness of science fiction characters she read until she found Le Guin; it's a terrific piece, entirely worth reading even if you think all science fiction and fantasy is inherently junk.)
"...because race is one of the few obvious markers you can discern about someone...."
Wow, is that wrong.
"it's fine if you wish to self-identify with a social construct" thing,I should immediate add "or society forces you to," and "or if you have any number of excellent reasons for doing so." It was dumb of me to imply it was some sort of purely voluntary thing; I didn't mean to.
Gary, are you grumpy today? I'm feeling that my cranky-uncle niche is being invaded.
"Gary, are you grumpy today?"
No more than the norm. Generally speaking, I'm fairly copacetic.
I am, in fact, the great-uncle of a one-year old.
Blogger and Blogspot having come back, the post I was referring to is here, by the way.
Gary, sure, race is a social construct, okay, but nevertheless, having so been constructed, it's easy to identify someone as "what society calls black," and it can be both casually descriptive, to identify them or paint a picture, or relevant to the story, as it was in mine. In fact, one reason why I say "black" and not "African-American," is that, given that no one I know actually takes offense at "black" and it's thus available to me, "black" describes what I mean, which is the imprecise sense that someone is dark-skinned, or has a certain kind of hair or features, or somehow crosses the category into "will be perceived as black, with the attendant set of stereotypes, mostly disadvantageous, attached." I don't mean to refer to their ethnicity, which I don't know. Gender is socially constructed too, at least to a great extent, but you can usually (though not always!) tell someone's chromosomal sex just by looking at them. It's not meaningless to say right away that you can tell someone's a woman, and that you know certain things about how society will react to her, even if, in a few cases, you'll be wrong about some of the details, and in others still, you'll be wrong about all of them.
Once something has been constructed, the names of the constructions communicate meaningful information.
Gary, as you've said before, you've made your views on 'blackness' and 'whiteness' clear before. Is it really necessary to rehash it?
I quite liked the post on Pam Noles; thank you for putting that up.
We've gone around on this before (at Unfogged).
Weiner, you're just too quick for me tonight.
I was hoping that my expectation that the thread would devolve into just this point would be disappointed. No such luck.
The more links the merrier, SB.
w/d, you lint puppet, maybe the reason Orin Kerr is so widely non-disliked is that he always does see the bright side of everything.
"Is it really necessary to rehash it?"
Don't plan to say more about it. But as noted, lots of new folks around.
I poked briefly around the archives recently, and was surprised yet again how recently it was that Unfogged went from an average of 0-1 comments to turning into IRC. Only around 17 months ago it was still pretty quiet around here. Then: boom.
Amusing to check the link to the previous discussion and see that I had a grand total of one (1) comment. I realize my comments are awesomely devastating, and their power is unbounded, and people live in fear of that awesomely awesome awesomeness, but, gee.
Of course, it gotat least five offended complaints/arguing responses. Awesome. Imagine if I actually tried to troll.
I think we were all a bit primed because we remembered the thread linked in 84.
For shits and giggles, I'll observe that my Persian-Iranian boyfriend and his family consider themselves "white." As, I'm extrapolating here, our host did. To be clear, that "white" as in "well, we're white, but we're Persian." Whereas, according to country-club standards of whiteness, neither my boyf nor our Mexican former-host would qualify.
Here's ogged calling himself white.
Hm. That makes a whole lot of sense. Clearly I should have been asking him more direct questions when he was still around.
A little birdie suggests this data point, and that there may well be others.
"Persian-Iranian"
"Persian" modifies "Iranian" distinguishing from other Iranian ethnicities, I take it? As opposed to "Turkmen-Iranian" or "Kurdish-Iranian" or "Assyrian-Iranian," and so forth?
"To be clear, that 'white' as in 'well, we're white, but we're Persian.' Whereas, according to country-club standards of whiteness, neither my boyf nor our Mexican former-host would qualify."
This is why the whole "white" thing is so [adjective] and is difficult to discuss without going into the history of the term, which is, ah, difficult to defend. But I said I wasn't going to go back there, so stopping now.
"But see."
But also see. Ogged later says there: "...I once asked, on separate occasions, three white guys what it is that white guys think about (y'all are mysterious to me, you see)...."
He is large, he contains multitudes.
Y'know, rereading that thread, while I'm sorry if it made anyone uncomfortable -- or maybe it's just that having gone through it, the general thought is that there's no point in repeating it, which is completely reasonable -- looking back at it, it seems to me like a calm and interesting discussion that enabled some of us to better understand each other. But maybe that's just the way I read it because I was talking a lot. And maybe the only uncomfortable person was Ogged, whom I took then to be, and rereading the thread still read him as, reacting at least a bit that way.
Before it either degenerated or was uplifted (take your pick) into brief discussion of Alyson Hannigan , and then died, that is.
Anyway, rereading it, I'm perfectly comfortable with what I said, and stand by it, except that, you know, I'm actually sitting.
"Persian-Iranian" was used so as not to get into the utterly pointless argument about whether ethnic Persian emigrants from Iran should self-declare as Persian (which tends to mark them as partisans of the Shah) or Iranian (which tends to mark them as partisans of the Islamic Revolution). If Ogged were around, he would have appreciated my hair-splitting.
As for the whiteness, I think that there is a genuine irony that traditionally white America hasn't quite caught onto yet. I'm right now too tired to explain myself fully. Others? Is/was Ogged "white"?
And while we're rehashing race discussions, I'll link this, too.