Cars of Many Colors
Sam Aurelius Milam III
 If the people of the Earth had used constructively the resources that they've thus far squandered on death and destruction then, by now, all human society would be a paradise.— from the Frontiersman April 2007 |
Before I get started, I’ll digress briefly. It’s unfortunate if this article offends people but, as my Aunt Eloise used to say, some people are so thin-skinned that you wonder what keeps them from bleeding to death. Maybe they shouldn’t be so sensitive. Anyway, I’m not going to falsify the historical use of certain terms. I’m going to use terms that were common at the time of the events mentioned herein, so that I can accurately describe those events. Some terminology that was discouraged or prohibited in the past seems to be gaining a new acceptance lately. However,
there are some strange associated rules of usage. For example, why
can I say “your people” but not “you people”? Why can I say “people
of color” but not “colored people”? I don’t know, but it reminds me
of that comment by my Aunt Eloise. Getting on with my article, I recall a
time when I was riding with some relatives in southern Louisiana, in
the 1950s, and we passed a garishly painted multi-colored car that was
filled with black people. One of my aunts remarked that only “niggers” would paint a car like that. Apologies. See the first paragraph.
Anyway, from the innocence of my age at the time, I suggested that maybe
they didn’t have enough paint that was all the same color. It got quiet
in our car for a few seconds and then somebody changed the subject. For good or ill, my aunt’s comment, and my reply, reflected an
aspect of 1950s reality in southern Louisiana. Back then, when
we saw something that was improvised out of scraps but that worked anyway,
we usually attributed it to black people. We called it a “nigger-rig”. Apologies. See the first paragraph. The term reflected the situations
of black people at that time or, at least, our perceptions of their
situations. At that time, even if there were some black people in the South who weren’t poor, we perceived all of them as being poor.
Thus, the term is, if nothing else, a record of our perceptions.
It’s also a reminder of some of our past attitudes and behaviors that
maybe we ought not to forget. Eventually, the use of such terms
became inadvisable. Black people would object. Preacher’s wives
would go pale. Our mothers would shake their fingers at us,
glancing nervously over their shoulders. Our fathers would mutter
and mumble. So, such terms tended to fall into disuse, at least
in polite company. The loss of a word from the language, even a “bad”
word, is a bad thing. People need to be able to describe reality, even unfortunate reality. Eliminating a term that describes an evil thing doesn’t necessarily eliminate the evil thing.
Worse yet, removing the term could make it easier for us to pretend that the evil thing doesn’t exist, and maybe never did. Poor people, blacks among them, continued to improvise. Other people, no longer able to describe such things as nigger-rigs, tried to find a substitute term. I recall the
term afro engineering. It didn’t last. I think
that it was too obviously a play on the original term and, therefore, more of a bad joke than a good substitute. I also remember black magic. Like afro engineering, it didn’t last.
Maybe the magicians were offended. Wiktionary lists jury-rig as a synonym for nigger-rig. I don’t know why jury and nigger would be regarded as synonyms, or if the black people or the jury members would be more offended. If we lack a term for something that’s a cobbled together mess but
that still works, then maybe the entire concept will disappear from our
awareness. Remember that, in Orwell’s novel 1984, the agenda
of the Ministry of Truth, and its Newspeak Dictionary, was
to reduce the ability to think by reducing the vocabulary. This is
as good an example as any. If we’re prohibited from using the term,
and if there isn’t a good substitute, then how are we going to describe the
thing, or even to recognize it for what it is, when we see it? In spite of decades of such turmoil over words, it doesn’t seem to me that there has been much of a change in the prejudice. Back then, somebody could be despised because he was black, homosexual, Jewish, or
whatever. Today, somebody can be despised because he’s racist, homophobic,
anti-Semitic, or whatever. The prejudice is the same. The kinds
of people who were prejudiced back then haven’t be-
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