Word: epithets
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Paradoxically, it turns out that for all the wrong reasons, the protesters are right. The 1927 musical is racist. The problem is not the epithet "niggers" in the opening song, which was not meanly meant in the first place and which in any case has been expunged in favor of the less incendiary "colored folks." Nor is it the historically accurate portrayal of blacks as mostly compliant, if resentful, field hands and laborers. The real problem is that the show follows the wrong story. It assumes that black people are inherently less interesting than whites...
...Lillian Hellman. The playwright, who by many accounts was a world-class harridan, once told a friend in her employee's hearing, "Well, I see the little Irish girl has set out the wrong dinner plates again." Mahoney's reaction was classic. "The remark -- which amounted to an epithet -- conjured images of a feckless, carrot-topped rustic with a camel's long lashes and a blush that traveled from throat to freckled hairline, awash in a sea of plates the likes of which she had never had the privilege to be confused by before...
Harvey Keitel bulldozes this point home as Graham, Smith's old partner--a grumbling and epithet-spewing caricature of the ignorant American. In the novel, Conner explains he could no longer live as a Caucasian among Japanese because he "got tired of being a 'nigger.'" Though the film cuts this line, it would have had a strong resonance with Snipes' Smith...
...from New York City to call Senate candidate Kay Bailey Hutchison a "female impersonator." Actress Annie Potts of Designing Women pooh-poohed the Republican's vague stance on abortion rights, saying, "She's just the same old thing in a skirt." Columnist Molly Ivins hung the epithet "Breck girl" on her, comparing the way the candidate tossed her blond hair to the slow-motion antics of models in the shampoo commercial. But Hutchison, the Texas state treasurer, survived those and many other attacks. Last week she defeated Democrat Bob Krueger, winning the seat vacated in January by Lloyd Bentsen...
...from conservatives, escalated into national news after Hackney's nomination. Israeli-born freshman Eden Jacobowitz was charged with racial harassment and threatened with probation for yelling, "Shut up, you water buffalo!" at a group of boisterous black women students outside his dorm. He denied any bigotry in the odd epithet, pointing out that it is Hebrew slang for an inconsiderate fool. On May 24, as the campus churned over the controversy, the women dropped the charges, but only after blasting the school for injustice...