Word: ofay
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...season has already started off Broadway-but with more of a sputter than a spurt. The Ofay Watcher meanders through a black-white confrontation with moments of humor but no fresh insights. Years of sibling rivalry and family dissonance are spewed up in an evening-long wrangle between a brother and a sister in Hello and Goodbye by South Africa's Athol Fugard. Unlike a good family fight, a bad one sounds dull, mean and petty, though Colleen Dewhurst as the whoring sister gives a performance that is etched in sulfuric acid...
...Minn.-a battle that left him with a dozen scars from getting pitched through a plate-glass storefront-he reflected how the white man's brutality "was nudging me into a hatred of him." After his first walk through Harlem's streets, he was convinced that "Mister Ofay"-the white foe-"was the enemy now, the lord of this filthy ghetto." White people, he said, "were making it easy for me to hate white people." But always he looked instead for a better weapon than hatred...
Harlem is where Negroes refer to one another as "nigger" and "brother," "spook" and "hardhead," but woe to the white man who uses the same expression. It is where the white man is no longer the "ofay" (pig Latin for foe), but "Mr. Charlie" or "the man," and mostly "whitey," derived from the Black Nationalist talk of "the blue-eyed white devil." It is where a common laborer mutters to himself at a corner bar: "You don't come up to Harlem and whip my head, white man. You can whip me somewhere else. But not here, white...
...Gospel's move into nightclubs (where Negroes call it "ofay gospel") does not necessarily corrupt either singers or songs. But its adoption by the popular-record industry gives good reason for melancholy. To succeed with the predominantly teen-age audience, it will be hyped up and sanitized to the point of becoming grotesque. At the Sweet Chariot (where the rest rooms are labeled "Brothers" and "Sisters" and the bar girls are called "Angels"), two of the groups have already had their names changed by Columbia, and no doubt they will soon begin to sing arrangements of their music that...
...consciousness of the extent to which race colors personality and social, interaction. The white man must become as acutely aware of his "whiteness" as the Negro is of his "Negroness." He must be made to feel as much pain, as much frustration, anger and hatred at being called an ofay as a Negro feels when he is called a nigger. And he must come to feel his alienation from Negro society as sharply as the Negro feels his isolation from white society...