Well, she dared because after Graham got his brother and sister-in-law to perform the broom jumping, he was met with icy hostility. "Why would he bring a n-wordish thing like that in here?" and "These country-ass blacks always have to drag in this slave history crap. Jesus Christ."
So, "country blacks" is like white trash and redneck a relative term. South side Chicagoans use it against West side Chicagoans, even though they all might have migrated from the south.
At 10:10 PM 2/3/2008, shag wrote:
>I googled this but came up against too many false positives such as, "...in
>the country, blacks..." even adding westside and Chicago didn't do anything
>but narrow the results to a more manageable two pages of results. ANy one
>familiar enough with Chicago to know the term?
>
>Came across it in _Our Kind of People_. I was getting so bored by Lawrence
>Otis Graham's way too labriously detailed account of the black elite, I
>almost decided to skip reading about specific elite black communities in
>various cities. I'm glad I forged on, since his discussion of chicago clues
>me to some information about Graham that is helping me parse this, how to
>say it?, extremely weird book.
>
>I was telling Doug, off list, that some of it is just creeping me out since
>he keeps talking about the need for black elite clubs, schools, etc. as a
>way to ensure that the black children of wealthy black parents don't lose
>their black identity. As I read, though, I had to ask: _what_ black
>identity? this is the same stuff that white elites do? and his insistence
>that the people in these groups are special -- and especially deserving of
>membership because of their intelligence...
>
>anyway, it's been a weird book to get a handle on. I will try to do it
>justice when I get out of the depths of the forest. In the meantime, on the
>Chicago chapter now, I stumble across several quotes from elite Chicagoans
>who speak of how segregated Chicago was in so far as blacks were largely
>confined to the south side. But the south side black elite mention blacks
>who lived on the West side -- which was kind of eeuuuww icky to south
>siders. West siders are called "country blacks".
>
>In other chapters, words like "coarse" have been used to describe noveau
>riche blacks, mostly people from sports and entertainment. e.g., Spike Lee,
>although a member of elite clubs of the old guard, is considered too
>declasse, only partially acceptable because he went to Morehouse. But in
>this chapter, no such words are dropped to clue me to what is wrong with
>west siders and why "country blacks"? Is it because these folks came from
>the south and never dropped their 'country' ways? That seemed hard to
>understand since, right now, I'm on the part where he's recounting the work
>of a Chicago based newspaperman who did much to advertise to black
>sharecroppers the wonders of moving north to Chicago. And this section is
>specifically about South siders, so clearly blacks from the south moved
>into the south side.
>
>On related note, I learned that whites who hang their laundry on the line
>in back of their summer homes in Sag Harbor are called rednecks. This is
>hilarious. Multi-millionaire rednecks. He also notes that elite blacks have
>tended to want to ignore the bigotry of wealthy whites in order to maintain
>a sense of peaceful relations, relegating racism to a thing of the past.
>Instead, they attribute bigotry to rednecks and white trash. He calls this
>racism, which I thought absurd, especially when he seems to find it hard to
>use the word to talk about black experiences.
>
>
>
>http://cleandraws.com
>Wear Clean Draws
>('coz there's 5 million ways to kill a CEO)
>
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