Earlier this week, a white woman was captured on video confronting several black women at a restaurant in Raleigh, North Carolina, telling the women they were being too loud and, when challenged, calling them “stupid n***ers.”
After the video went viral, a reporter for a local news station, WRAL, tracked down everyone involved in the confrontation. 72-year-old Nancy Goodman, the slur-slinging white women, blamed the incident on her “anxiety,” (though she didn’t appear at all anxious in the video in question) and said she would use the slur again.
“I used that word because they forced me into it,” she explained to WRAL.
And of course she didn’t apologize to the women. “I’m not going to say I’m sorry to them because they kept pushing at it,” she told WRAL. “I would say it again to them. They are the rudest individuals I have ever seen.”
In a Facebook posting after the interview, however, Goodman offered her apologies to “my family, friends and other patrons in the bar at North Hills Bonefish” — essentially everyone but the “three rude, loud obnoxious black women” she had called the n-word.
“Economic anxiety” strikes again, I guess.
You can see the original video, and her later non-apology here.
— David Futrelle
H/T — WRAL.com
Brand New Ugly highlights stories that are emblematic of the political and social ugliness of Trump’s America. Send tips to dfutrelle at gmail dot com.
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I will simply take comfort in the fact that statistically speaking she will die before I do. Though I won’t even pretend to feel sad if circumstances expedite this.
Re Jordan Peterson,
I totally believe he was randomly talking with a young woman who’s being guilt-tripped because her friends are a bunch of ecofascists who not only choose to forgo reproduction but get actively preachy about it. Just a normal thing that happens in leftist circles these days.
[/sarcasm]
And apparently, Peterson’s argument is that Christians have always unquestioningly appreciated Mary’s motherhood, so why don’t you appreciate your own prospect of motherhood.
@Dalillama, Katamount
Could either of you recommend a good, trustworthy of how totem poles actually work? I just had one of those moments of immediate “Wait, of course that’s probably offensive” when something’s pointed out you’ve never thought about before, and it made me realize I don’t actually know the non-offensive reality (if you see what I mean).
@Rabid Rabbit
The idiom itself is, as far as I know, completely unrelated to what “totem” or “crest” poles actually are. They’re a tradition in Nisga’a, Haida and Tlingit communities among other aboriginal nations along the Pacific Northwest and have various uses.
The ones I am the most familiar with are the Crest Poles at the Royal Ontario Museum, which are more than a century old and so tall that the museum’s 1933 expansion had to be built around them, the main staircases winding their way around them such that the viewing public can see each segment up close. Last time I was there, I made it a point to photograph each segment and its interpretation.
I once had a nightmare when I was a kid that I was stuck at the top of the tallest one (which is 80 feet up). You can get a real sense of vertigo if looking down over the third floor balcony.
I couldn’t think of where else to put this link, but this guy is a welcome antidote to Incel thinking:
https://twitter.com/RemakingManhood/status/1154707519253680129?s=20
Re: Totem Poles
This is a sad case, but with a sort of happy ending (notwithstanding some rather insensitive condescenion by a museum).
https://plone.unige.ch/art-adr/cases-affaires/g2019psgolox-totem-pole-2013-haisla-and-sweden-and-museum-of-ethnography
It does provide a bit of an example of one reason for commissioning a totem pole.
I have depression as well as anxiety and have for my whole adult life. Even before the meds, I was somehow able to interact with rude people of various colors without using any racial slurs. I guess I’m just a mutant of some sort.
Openly uses racial slurs, has the nerve to call anyone else rude.
@Rabid Rabbit, Katamount:
(Been out of town for a week or so, up in Ottawa, sorry for the late notes)
There are, unsurprisingly, several near and within the Royal British Columbia Museum as well. The First Peoples gallery there has a reproduction of a long house from up near what is now Fort Rupert, created by his sons and grandsons. (I went to school with one of the great-grandsons, which made school trips to the museum interesting.)
As noted, the ‘totem pole’ idea as ranking who is above whom has nothing at all to do with the original meaning(s). And there were multiple original meanings, though the most common type people think of is probably best considered like heraldry: so a lot of the original totem poles were basically family crests.