my last long post

This is my last long post.  I get it.  I'm bad at blog manners.  This is my end of the semester wrap up.  Final thoughts:

Perhaps the most intriguing theory I've learned this semester is that of reclaiming names.  This phenomenon strikes me most because it leaves no category of people outside its realm.  From “bitches” to “rednecks” to the detestable N word, name reclamation has profoundly reached a widespread population.

Over the past century, women have made leaps and bounds in the ways of, well, everything but peeing upright.  Little girls everywhere hum “Anything you can do, I can do better.”  Gone are the days when women went to the offices of their “Mad Men” bosses to refill their vodkas and light their cigarettes all day.  Rather, today yields a very different scene when it comes to positions of women in office.  Men, being the symbols of ego, have seemingly given labels to the power-hungry, multi-faceted, big-breasted super humans in the running for their jobs.  This explanation paints a very different picture of “bitch” than perceived in a work called “Bitch Manifesto.”  Nonetheless, these women who have taken on many characteristics of men, are not rejecting their insulting stigma.  They are owning it, and even running with it.  It is not uncommon to hear a group of females in a pub addressed (and claimed) by another peer as her “bitches.”

“Call a dog a cat for so long and he’ll start to meow.”  This phrase applies to the reclamation of words.  Fifteen years ago, a “bitch” was perhaps the most despicable thing one could insult a woman.  Now, the term is seemingly empowering to a woman, giving her justification for her actions and the confidence to behave in an “anything but ladylike” manner.  The women on MTV’s “Jersey Shore” not only address one another by “bitch,” but also by far worse names involving their personal levels of promiscuity, like “whore” and several derivatives of such.  But the women of Da Shore do not deny these insults, and in fact give life to the name-calling.  “He bought me drinks all night…of course I slept wit him,” is just one of the shocking quotes “J Woww” is recorded saying in the second season.  It isn't just women though; name reclamation stretches from the female sex to the rural areas of the United States.

Behold, a doublewide trailer covered in overgrown weeds, hidden in the mossy cloak of oak trees in the backwoods of Eutaw, Alabama (pronounced like "Utah").  The poorly planned rock driveway employs an old truck, which savors a garbage bag as the passenger’s window.  The lawn that is dead grass and crushed cans of Tab somehow houses a mutt attached to six feet of chain and an empty cereal bowl.  Beyond this plot lies the trailer, in all its weather-battered glory, only complete with a Rebel flag, older than the structure it is strewn upon.  Behold, this is God’s country.  The heartland.  Within the confines of this trailer does not sleep a southern gentleman, no, but a redneck.

You might be a redneck if…you pictured your grandparents’ home in the previous paragraph…if before Blue Collar Comedy, you took offense to the term “redneck.”  Before the days of Jeff Foxworthy and the gang, country folk lacked a concrete reference to embody themselves.  They didn't see humor in their way of life.  They blissfully saw racism, a flirty relationship with poverty, and Billy Rae Cyrus’s video for “Achey Breaky Heart” too many times.  Oh and they were still pissed off about the war.  (The war their “people” fought over one hundred-fifty years ago.)  With the unveiling of Blue Collar Comedy, suddenly the stigma of being a redneck became IT, and people began to celebrate those ideals and traditions for which they had been criticized for so long.  They were no longer embarrassed of their old trucks and doublewides and in fact, celebrated the extreme.

The men of Blue Collar Comedy did a segment on the most recent edition of their tour in which old photographs of their upbringings were projected while they did their comic banter.  As the slideshow progressed, one might have inquired, “Is that real?!  That can’t be real.  Those people are in our country?”  This reaction from the American population only loaded more ammo into the gun that was Southern pride, and rednecks everywhere were not only changing their screennames to include the word, but also answering these questions confidently with, “Yes Ma’am, we’ve been here and we’re not goin’ anywhere.  Git-r-done.”

On the opposite end of the spectrum is the most fascinating realm of study we have covered, in my opinion.  Perhaps my interest in this topic is deeply rooted in my childhood, spent in New Orleans, which remains one of the most invisibly segregated places in America.  (I am unsure of the quality “invisible segregation” brings to the table, but what I mean is that there are clearly defined lines between black neighborhoods and white neighborhoods.)  I grew up in a non-racist home, but sadly I was not naïve when it came to the meaning and impact the N word has.  My mother always told us never to use the word, no matter what, ever.  She said there was never any reason for it and that she wished that it would simply go away.  Now at the age of twenty, I wish the same.  But it isn’t white people I hear saying it most, but actually black people.

In the beginnings of the Civil Rights Movement, one major push was to change the common reference of an African-American person from “negro” to “black,” from “ghetto” to “community.”  With the help of symbolic realignment, protestors may actively change the definitions of the movements they are, well, moving.  It seems however, that after much advancement and progress black people have made, some are now reclaiming the N word, just as women claim “bitch” and rural dwellers claim “redneck.”  I often hear young black classmates of mine greet one another with this word, and even in rare cases, refer to people of their own race as such.  This is an awful reflection upon our society.  And I’m not playing the role of sad oppressed white girl.  I have definitely heard the word used by members of my own race, in far worse contexts than where “dude” or “man” could have been substituted. 

I guess my main thought is that if everyone stopped using this disgusting piece of American diction, it would eventually cease to exist, at least in common conversation.  My wish is that we can someday achieve this word as a relic only to be remembered in history.  

Just like Paris Hilton’s “that’s hot.”