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ethnic

Sat 18 May 2013 by abagond

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ethnic beauty

Ethnic is a Eurocentric way of saying non-Western. In America since the 1920s it has meant something not part of White American culture: ethnic foods, ethnic beauty, ethnic neighbourhoods, etc.

“Ethnic” comes from the word for Gentile in the Bible. The Jews divided the world into Jews and Gentiles, into the Chosen People and Everyone Else. The Jews called the Gentiles the goyim, “the nations”. In the New Testament, written in Greek, goyim became ethnoi. That became, by way of Church Latin, the English adjective “ethnic”.

By the 1400s “ethnic” applied to anyone who was not Christian or Jew – the heathens and infidels.

By the 1920s White Americans were the Chosen People – American exceptionalism, Manifest Destiny and all that. Now Italians, Jews, Poles and others who came from Europe who were not part of White American culture were “ethnic”, formerly known as “alien races”.

By the 2010s spaghetti sauce was no longer an “ethnic food”. Now “ethnic” was a nice-sounding way to say non-white: blacks, Latinos and Asians were now “ethnic”. But not Native Americans – they were still “tribal”.

By the 2050s America will no longer be mainly white. What will “ethnic” mean then?

Or what does it mean now if you look at the world as a whole? You know, that place where most people are “Asian”.

starbucks-2

ethnic coffee shop

The truth is, everyone is ethnic. White Americans, just like everyone else, have their own foods, holidays, heroes, newspapers, neighbourhoods, restaurants and shops. They speak English with an accent just like everyone else.

  • Thanksgiving is an ethnic holiday.
  • Starbucks is an ethnic coffee shop.
  • NPR is an ethnic radio station.
  • Indie rock is ethnic music.
  • The New York Times is an ethnic newspaper.
  • The Upper West Side in New York is an ethnic neighbourhood..
  • “Friends” is an ethnic television show.
  • McDonald’s is an ethnic restaurant.
  • English and history at American high schools are White American (ethnic) studies.

“Ethnic” beauty positions white beauty as “universal”. Women of colour are “exotic”, they can even appear on the cover of American Vogue or Maxim, but their sort of beauty is seen as a little something on the side, something to add a little “flavour”. You would never know that white beauty is itself “ethnic”.

Words like “ethnic”, “urban”, “mainstream” and not calling white things white (the white press, my white professor), allow White Americans to talk about their divided society in a way that does not make them feel too uncomfortable. It allows them to keep up the fiction that their society is colour-blind and has magically risen above race, that there is no such thing as White Entertainment Television and  White History Month. Words like “black”, “white” and “people of colour” do not support this fiction.

White Americans talk about themselves as if they are beyond ethnicity and race – when all they are doing is being blind to their ethnicity and race.

That is not something to laugh at – due to their numbers and power it privileges them, it supports white privilege and therefore racism.

See also:

Posted in stuff | 25 Comments »

booty

Fri 17 May 2013 by abagond

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Bria Myles

Booty, the human hindquarters, is much larger in humans than in other apes. English has many words for it that have arisen down through the ages:

  • 1000s: arse
  • 1100s:
  • 1200s: buttocks
  • 1300s: bum, tail
  • 1400s: butt, rump
  • 1500s: backside
  • 1600s: posterior, seat
  • 1700s: behind, bottom, derriere
  • 1800s: ass, tush, rear end
  • 1900s: booty, batty, buns, fanny, keester

Some of these words are dialect, like ass, arse, bum, butt and batty. So is booty, but I am using it here because I just did a post on booty dancing.

The word booty itself goes back to the 1950s. It spread from Black American use to general North American use in the 1990s by way of hip hop. I am guessing that because of hip hop the word is known throughout the English-speaking world.

Functions:

  1. Muscle: Provides muscles that allow humans to stand up and walk on two feet.
  2. Fat: In women it stores fat for having babies.
  3. Beauty: In women it is a secondary sexual characteristic, like breasts. On average it is larger in women than in men.

Stone Age art regularly shows women with big booties like it was a good thing.

The ancient Greeks: Aphrodite Kallipygos, goddess of love, had a booty more beautiful than any other part of her body. The Greeks built a temple to her. No other part of the body was so honoured by them.

The Western world is kind of strange:

  • Writers: Since at least 1500 its writers and poets have said little that is good about booties.
  • Fashion models: extremely thin, almost bootyless.
  • American men’s magazines: only those for black men regularly show women with serious booty.
  • Sarah Baartman: a black woman with a huge booty who was brought to Europe in the early 1800s. She became a sideshow and museum specimen.

Yet, despite all that, women’s clothing in the West, like the bustle (1780s) and designer jeans (1980s), helped women to look like they had a good booty.

Then came Jennifer Lopez. In the late 1990s white men were saying what a beautiful ass she had. The Economist called her “callipygian”. Yet black women have had that and better since forever. What was going on?

Then, when tennis star Serena Williams won the US Open in 2002, the white press said her covered booty was an “inappropriate” display of sexuality.

Backstory: White men used to commonly rape black women in slave times – men like Thomas Jefferson, an American Founding Father. Out of that came the Jezebel stereotype, the self-serving idea that black women are loose and mad for sex. Most White American men, even today, see black women as sex objects, not as women who possess beauty, who should be loved and treasured.

So:

  • Jennifer Lopez is beautiful because she can be loved.
  • Serena Williams, when showing her “ghetto booty”, becomes hypersexualized as some thing to fuck.

Many black men have bought into this racist mindset too, as shown in countless music videos.

See also:

Posted in stuff | 56 Comments »

booty dancing

Thu 16 May 2013 by abagond

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Booty dancing (by the 1700s) is a dance where the booty (backside, rear end, bum, bottom, batty, arse, ass) becomes the centre of attention. Generally the dances are not as simple as just facing backwards and moving you hips side to side, just wiggling your butt or booty shaking. It is mainly women who do it. When men take part it comes close to seeming like sex.

Among the many dances:

  • American: twerking (1993), booty drop (2008)
  • Jamaican: whining (by the 1940s)
  • Dominican: perreo (1990s)
  • Ivorian: mapouka (modern version 1980s)

Josephine Baker’s danse sauvage (1925) in Paris arguably is a booty dance too.

Booty dances are found among blacks in at least West Africa, the Caribbean and North America. From the 2000s they have been spreading to whites in the English and Spanish-speaking worlds. Presumably the same thing has been going on in Brazil and the Portuguese-speaking world.

Booty dancing goes back at least to the 1700s in West Africa. I say that because it fits the pattern of an Africanism:

  1. Found among blacks on both sides of the Atlantic.
  2. More common among blacks than whites.
  3. More common in the Caribbean than America.
  4. Considered “ghetto” in America – that is, more common among working-class blacks than middle and upper-class ones and looked down on by whites.

Another sign that they go back hundreds of years in Africa is that the older form of the mapouka is sometimes done during religious ceremonies.

Booty dancing might, in fact, go back thousands of years, but that would be hard to prove.

To White Americans booty dancing seems to come from hip hop in the 1980s, but that is simply when it first made it onto television, notably in 2 Live Crew’s “Me So Horny” (1989). American television is heavily censored. Also, black music and dance, especially in the 1950s and 1960s, was “cleaned up” for white audiences. In any case, much of the supposed booty dancing in American hip hop videos is just booty shaking, not particular dances.

Views: Some consider booty dancing, at least in particular forms, as something that should not be done in public. This is mostly a Western view. In West Africa in the 1930s it was considered to be pretty ordinary stuff – it was Western dances, where the partners touch each other, sometimes body to body, that were seen as a bit too much.

Overlaid on top of that are white hang-ups about the “ghetto booty” of black women – like where they see Jennifer Lopez’s (Latina) booty as beautiful, but Serena Williams’s (black) booty makes them uncomfortable.

That in turn leads to black shame among some white-minded blacks.

And, add to all that, black men making women into sex objects in hip hop and dancehall videos, based to a large degree on their butts.

The unfortunate misogyny by black men and the creepy hypersexualization by white men makes it next to impossible for American culture to process booty dancing in healthy ways.

Thanks to commenter Peanut for suggesting this post.

See also:

Posted in stuff | 140 Comments »

style guide: Briticisms

Wed 15 May 2013 by abagond

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British beauty: Freema Agyeman

Briticisms are words, expressions, etc, that are found mainly in British English. As dialect they should generally be avoided unless you are writing only for the British.

There are all kinds of differences between British and American English, in words, meanings, spelling, pronunciation, punctuation, grammar, etc. You could write a whole book on it – I have two of them.

On the other hand, upper and middle-class London English is easily understood by most Americans. In part because educated American English was modelled on it, in part because it is the English dialect that has produced the most books from at least 1500 to 1900.

The Economist is a good model of English that can be understood all over the world. It is written in London yet half its readers are Americans.

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British wildlife: a badger

General guidelines:

  1. Britain is not the world: Do not assume your readers understand cricket or council estates, much less British politics, geography or wildlife. Few Americans know what goes on in Fleet Street or what a quango is. Not everyone has a clear idea what heath or a badger is. Likewise the north is not colder in Australia or South Africa, nor is January in winter.
  2. Insults: Insults based on sexual activity are not always understood. It took me years to understand what bugger, wanker and, especially, tosser meant.
  3. Measure: Use metric units – everyone has to learn them at school and they are the same everywhere. Not so English units: Gallons, pints and tons are smaller in America than in Britain. Most Americans do not know what a league, stone, fathom or furlong is.
fish_and_chips

British food: fish and chips

Some confusing words – and what they mean in America:

  • braces – not for holding up trousers but wires for straightening teeth.
  • brilliant - not awesome or excellent but amazingly intelligent.
  • bum – not rear end but a homeless person.
  • chemist – not a pharmacy or pharmacist but someone who works in chemistry.
  • chips – crisps. Americans call chips “French fries”.
  • clever – not intelligent or bright but intelligent in a tricky way.
  • cot – not a bed for babies but for camping.
  • dear – not expensive but just well loved.
  • diary – not an appointment book but just a personal journal.
  • dumb – not unable to speak but unintelligent.
  • fanny – not vagina but rear end.
  • fight – not always physical but sometimes just verbal.
  • homely – not like home but kind of ugly.
  • mad – it can mean insane but it mostly means angry.
  • momentarily – not for a moment but in a moment.
  • no question – not out of the question but no doubt.
  • pants – not underwear but trousers.
  • public school – not a private school but a state school.
  • purse – not just a small bag you keep money in but hand bags too.
  • quite – not somewhat but very.
  • smart – not well-dressed but intelligent.
  • spunk – not semen but a personal quality that makes someone not give up.
  • surgery – not where you meet a doctor or MP but where a doctor cuts you open.
  • vest – not an undershirt but a waistcoat.

See also:

Posted in stuff | 82 Comments »

Millennials

Tue 14 May 2013 by abagond

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Millennials mock the Time magazine’s 2013 cover story on them by making it into a meme. Click to enlarge.

Millennials ( c. 1982-2100), also known as Generation Y, are those Americans born between 1982 and 2001, give or take a few years on either side depending on who you ask. Currently they are those in their teens and twenties. Most are children of the Baby Boom and Generation X. There are about 80 million Millennials, making up a fourth of the country. They will become increasingly important over the next 50 years or so.

American generations that are still alive, going by Time magazine’s names and dates:

  • 1901-1924: The Greatest Generation
  • 1925-1942: The Silent Generation
  • 1943-1960: Baby Boomers
  • 1961-1980: Generation X
  • 1980-2000: The Millennials

Some famous Millennials: Mark Zuckerberg, Lil Wayne, Nicki Minaj, Lady Gaga, Lindsay Lohan, Malia Obama.

Millennial demographics:

  • 60% White
  • 20% Hispanic
  • 14% Black
  • 5% Asian
  • 1% Other

Note: Most studies are done on white, middle-class Millennials at university by white male professors of the Baby Boom. 

Millennials are on average, compared to older generations at the same age:

  • poorer and more likely to be out of work or underemployed for their level of education;
  • live with their parents longer, get married and have children later;
  • less in debt, despite the student loan horror stories;
  • more concerned with getting rich;
  • more narcissistic;
  • less able to put themselves in other people’s shoes or understand their point of view;
  • less racist, sexist and homophobic;
  • less creative, less rebellious, more pro-business, more accepting of society the way it is;
  • more likely to ask their parents for advice, more likely to listen to the same music and watch the same television shows as their parents;
  • less likely to belong to a religion (30% do not, a record), less concerned with developing a meaningful philosophy of life.

Most are digital natives: they grew up with computers, mobile phones and the Internet. They are not “new” things to them like they are to older Americans. They seem to be looking at a screen much of the time. In fact, much of their society has moved from meatspace into cyberspace. Facebook is their invention. So is Tumblr.

Uncommon experiences: Writing a letter with pen and paper, using a dial telephone, seeing a television station go off the air, playing a phonograph, being completely lost.

Ancient history: Nixon, the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement, Jim Crow, the 1950s.

Timeline:

  • 2010s to 2020s: sing most of the new American pop music. 
  • 2030s: write about how terrible Generation Z is.
  • 2050s: Millennial presidents.
  • 2070s: Listen to Lady Gaga on cruise ships.

Two things that has surprised me about them so far:

  1. Multigenerational music: They listen to rap even when their parents do. The only new forms of music they have invented so far are metalcore and dubstep. Admittedly, it probably sounds as unmusical to me as rap did in the 1980s to older people or rock did in the 1950s.
  2. They did not protest the Iraq War, not in huge numbers, even though it was every bit as nakedly imperialistic as the Vietnam War.

Source: Time, Wikipedia.

See also:

Posted in stuff | 45 Comments »

Jimi Hendrix

Mon 13 May 2013 by abagond

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James Marshall Hendrix (1942-1970), better known as Jimi Hendrix, an American rock musician, is widely regarded as one of the best electric guitarists of all time. He made the electric guitar more than an acoustic guitar hooked up to an amplifier – he made it into a new musical instrument. His ways of playing guitar were quickly picked up by Led Zeppelin, Funkadelic, Black Sabbath – and even his old bandmates in the Isley Brothers.

He loved his guitar. He played it constantly. He slept with it – even back when he was 15 and all he had was a cheap $5 guitar. He could play it with his teeth, he could play it behind his back, he could play it without the E string, he could play it so that it sounded like two guitars at once. He used speaker feedback, distortion and wah-wahs to make it sound like more than a guitar.

His hands were bigger and stronger than most, giving him a wider range in what he could do on a guitar. He was left-handed, but instead of buying a left-handed guitar, even when he could afford one, he played a right-handed guitar restrung and upside down – which put the controls in easier reach than for most guitarists. His father could not afford lessons, so he taught himself, a shy, creative kid in Seattle.

He played loud. He set his speakers to 10, the top volume setting (there was no 11) – but even that was not loud enough. He had louder speakers made producing a dirtier sound. It would later make rock concerts at football stadiums possible.

Bob Dylan:

He had such talent, he could find things inside a song and vigorously develop them. He found things that other people wouldn’t think of finding in there.

Hendrix was a huge Dylan fan – in Harlem in 1965, no less, where it was rare. He wore out his copies of “Highway 61 Revisited” (1965) and “Blonde on Blonde” (1966).  Dylan’s terrible singing style set the bar low enough for Hendrix to make it big in rock music. Hendrix could not sing “pretty” enough for the blues, R&B and soul music scene he grew up in and, in the early 1960s, took part in as sideman and session musician.

In the early 1960s he played on the chitlin circuit with the likes of the Isley Brothers, Ike Turner and Little Richard. You can hear him on the Isley Brother’s 1964 song “Testify” one minute in. But playing in the background with these acts, he had to turn his star all the way down.

In 1966 he moved from Harlem to Greenwich Village and got noticed by Chas Chandler and Mike Jeffery of the Animals, who had the wherewithal to make him big – in their native Britain. In Britain his huge talent was instantly recognized by Pete Townsend, Eric Clapton and other rock greats. Where they pretty much just copied Black American blues guitarists with some changes, he took the same music and made it his own.

See also:

Posted in stuff | 15 Comments »

Princess: Say I’m Your Number One

Sun 12 May 2013 by abagond

Remarks:

This went to #7 on the British charts in 1985, and #36 on the American R&B chart. It was a top ten hit in Australia, New Zealand, Germany and the Netherlands. Stock Aitken Waterman wrote and produced it. They went on to produce 12 number one hits on the British pop charts in the late 1980s – Rick Astley, Mel & Kim, Kylie Minogue, Jason Donovan and so on.

The video seems as good to me now as when I first saw it in the 1980s. I know why too: it is her eyes.

Lyrics:

Say I’m your number one
I only wanna be close to you – say
Say

Say.
Say I’m your number one – your number one
Your number one -
’cause you know I’ll be good to you – say
Say
Say.
Say I’m your number one – won’t you ?

They say I’m crazy
They say that I’m a fool.
And I feel so helpless because love can be so cruel.
But I’m just waiting and burning up inside.
Come tomorrow
Come tomorrow
Will you still be mine ?

Say I’m your number one – your number on
Your number one -
In only wanna be close to you.
Say I’m your number one – your number one
Your number one.
‘Cause you know I’ll be good to you – say
Say
Say.

Say I’m your number one – won’t you
You may be tempted and sometimes led astray.
But I know
But I know your regret it very next day.
I sit and wonder whenever we’re apart

Would you do it
Would you do it
Would you go and break my heart ?

Say I’m your number one – your number on
Your number one -
In only wanna be close to you.
Say I’m your number one – your number one
Your number one.
‘Cause you know I’ll be good to you – say
Say
Say.

Tell me that nobody else will do -
Say
Say
Say your number one
Your number one
Your number one
…
Say
Say
Say your number one
Your number one
Your number one

Posted in stuff | 39 Comments »

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