Byron Crawford Stand Up! (nullus)
Thanks to COMBAT JACK’s ethering of Village Voice music critic TOM BREIHAN we actually have a few new visitor’s to the site. While I have their attention I thought I’d bring some of you up to speed on what it is we do here at DALLASPENN Dot Com.
WE ARE NOT A HIP-HOP BLOG!
Hip-Hop was killed approximately 25 years ago with the commercial release of the song ‘Rapper’s Delight’. The members of the SugarHill Gang had not met each other prior to being corralled into the recording studio and most of the rhymes were stolen from the notebooks of Grandmaster Casanova. The carcass of Hip-Hop has remained on life support systems like the body of TERRY SCHAIVO while people have fought over the soul. East versus West, North versus South, everybody versus Jay-Z. Hip-Hop is dead. Long live Hip-Hop.
JIG WORDS is one of the websites’ public service features where we help people from all different backgrounds learn a common language. Through communication we may all learn to appreciate one another for our different ethnicities, religions and nationalities. You’ll notice that I didn’t say race, because race is a make believe construct that is impossible to quantify. If it is skin color that determines race you might be surprised to know that even Pakistani nationals are considered ‘white’ by no other rating system than the Federal Bureau of Investigation. If a brownskinned towelhead terrorist is considered white then what exactly does ‘white’ mean? It means nothing.
JIG WORDS, however, does mean something. JIG WORDS will shine the light on some of your favorite words and terms and help you better understand their meaning so that just in case you are a standup comic and some fans heckle you from the audience you will be armed with a knowledgable retort that requires no apology.
CRACKER
For a long time most people were under the impression that ‘cracker’ was the term of derision given to the so-called white man by Blacks. When in fact the ‘cracker’ is anyone that abuses their power of authority. The painting above was done in the 1600’s and it described the whipping of a mulatto slave by a couple of the plantations ‘crackers’. Mulatto slaves were some of the most unfortunate people on the plantation and were known to have their azzes kicked by everyone since their skin color reminded their plantation owning parent that he had fucked a slave and they also reminded the chattel of how horny the plantation owners were.
The ‘cracker’ would snap their whip at workers who were being unproductive or appeared lazy. This was a form of intimidation and an assertion of power that they were in fact the liaisons of the plantation owner. As more immigrants came to America from Ireland, Scotland and eastern Europe, plantation owners were able to replace their slave overseers with these new immigrants.
The ‘cracker’ today uses other tools to maintain control through intimidation. Whether it’s 50 shots fired from the automatic weapon of police officers or the prevalent campaign against ‘snitching’ the outcome is always to keep oppression and supremacy in place.
NEGGAR
What word is as misunderstood and misused as this one? Americans continue to debate and discuss this term and how and who has license to use it. The truth is that this word describes someone’s job in an agrarian based culture. The plowman, the fieldhand, he is the neggar. In farming there isn’t a more difficult and demanding job. If your farm is too small to have a beast of burden then that job falls to the shoulders and back of the neggar. When this country was first being settled by the Dutch, Germans and English they brought their own neggars. Their indentured servants were the people that assisted in breaking down the soil and establishing crops.
Being a plowman in America wasn’t considered a bad occupation until America emerged from the Civil War and embraced Industrialization. After that point it was considered lower than working class to still be relegated to sharecropping or farming. At that point Americans chose to remind the Blacks that lived here with legislation and outright terrorism that their destiny would never escape that of being a piece of chattle conscripted to working on the farm. Through house burnings, lynchings and overt verbal terrorism the word ‘nigger’ came to be assigned to Blacks.
The truth is that the neggar was a name that white gave to other white. And it wasn’t a term of disrespect either. The early European settlers of America were smart enough to have respect for the people that handled their food supply. Who knows what kind of E-Coli you might acquire when you no longer respect the people that feed your azz.
