"Keep your....."
Recently, there’s been controversy regarding a Republican lawmaker approving of someone demanding that Hakeem Jeffries “keep his cotton-picking hands” out of the politics of another state.
This lawmaker acted foolishly, but in all honesty, I’m not going to make a big deal about this because I’ve made very similar mistakes.
When I was a kid, I was a big fan of the old Tom and Jerry shorts from the 1940's and 1950's.* There was lots of racist imagery that, by the I saw them in syndication on TV (1970’s), had mostly been edited out. (These might have shown one of the characters looking like they were in blackface after something blows up right in front of them.). But there was one image they really couldn’t remove – the periodic appearance of a heavy-set African-American woman, wearing an apron and holding a broom, catching Tom in the middle of mischief and chasing him off with a husky voice.
Seeing it now, with my adult eyes, I see this as a racial stereotype. The woman was a maid. But in the working-class (and overwhelmingly white) Massachusetts neighborhood in which I grew up, no one had a maid. The only maid I ever saw was Alice on The Brady Bunch, and she was as white as the rest of the cast. I hadn’t seen Gone with the Wind or any other program that used the racist African-American maid stereotype. And there were still plenty of stay-at-home moms in the neighborhood at the time. It wasn't unusual to see a stay-at-home mom wearing shown with an apron on TV in those days.
To me, this character was the woman who lived in the house, and Tom was her cat. I saw nothing racist in it - not because it wasn't racist, but because I was ignorant of the underlying context.
Likewise, I didn’t realize that the original version of “eenie meenie minie moe” was racist until I was well into adulthood. (I didn’t realize the version used in Pulp Fiction was the original until several years later, when a radio commentator in Austin, where I attended grad school, used the modern sanitized version without knowing its history. He caught blowback. To his credit, he apologized – and it wasn’t one of those “I’m sorry if anyone was offended” non-apology apologies – and vowed to do better.). Same is true for “cotton-picking hands;” I heard it in cartoons as a kid, but because I didn’t use it myself, I hadn’t really put thought into the phrase's origins
This shows how pernicious racism is in US history. Images and phrases that started out as racism don’t actually lose their meaning, but to those unaware of the context, it can be overlooked.
There are plenty of reasons to call out MAGA poiticians, but I'm not sure this is the best one. She might not have known of where the phrase came from. This doesn't mean it wasn't harmful, especially when directed at an African American man. And she should apologize. But I think our efforts would be better directed at explaining the context to avoid such incidents.
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*When the CGI feature Sing came out a few years ago, reviewers argued that the gorilla character was the first animated character to hit the right keys when playing the piano. This is untrue - Tom also does this in the earlier parts of 1946's Cat Concerto.