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 the article, I recall that, on a family trip that we took in the 1950s, in southern Louisiana, we passed
a garishly painted multi-colored car filled with black people.
One of my aunts remarked that only “niggers” would paint a car like that. See the first paragraph. Anyway, my aunt made her candid comment and,
from the innocence of my youth, 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
such a thing a “nigger-rig”. 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, however, that in his novel 1984, Orwell warned us, by way of the Ministry of Truth and its Newspeak Dictionary, that we need to preserve our powers of description.
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 much has changed in terms of attitudes. 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 bigots back then haven’t become
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