When I was kid we noted that the term "son of a bitch" was an insult to one's mother. Over time we stopped thinking about it. Elderly Massachusetts billionaire John Kerry cheerfully referred to one of the Secret Service agents assigned to protect him as a "son of a bitch". I knew a woman who called her own son a son of a bitch.
But I knew a Southerner who worked at a gas station where he was attacked by a customer. There's no self-serve in this state. He pumped this woman's gas and she became enraged when some dribbled on her twenty-year-old Nissan. As he wiped it off, she called him a "son of a bitch". He took this as an insult to his late mother and called the customer a cunt. She punched him. He staggered and realized he was starting to black out. She was about to punch him again so he grabbed her by the head and threw her to the ground. The woman called the police and whined that he attacked her. A geezer who witnessed it talked to the police telling them the terrible thing he had done.
After the police went, he asked the geezer why he was defending her.
"Never hit a woman," he said.
"She hit me just like a man."
"Never hit a woman," the geezer repeated stupidly.
Don't call people "sons of bitches". Not everyone takes it in good humor.
Which brings me to this. Ishmael Reed writes about the protests now going on in the NFL (read the full article here):
One of the CNN commentators, a Trump supporter, asked why a demonstration that was conducted by Kaepernick spread after Trump’s provocative remarks? Trump has criticized the NFL before. Good question.
Is it because he referred to the mothers of Black players as “bitches,” a taboo in Black culture? Basketball players like Kevin Durant breakdown into sobs at the very mention of their mother’s names. These mothers are often single parents who make extraordinary sacrifices in order that their male children avoid death at the hands of their misguided peers or by the police. When it came time for my younger brothers to be ambushed by the police, a rite of passage that every Black kid has to traverse, my mother warned the two policemen, who were assigned to harass my younger brothers, that she was a domestic servant in the home of the mayor’s family. They backed off. She was a Southerner before she moved to the North and often Southern Blacks relied upon good White people to protect them from racists.
Mother reverence is also something that is fixed in Black tribal memory. Mother’s Day in Black churches is the most important date on the church’s calendar. Booker T. Washington said that for his White slave-owning father, there was no difference between a cow and his mother.
So, calling Black mothers bitches recalls a time when Blacks were bred and treated like animals. Even White feminist pundits, the only women who are acceptable to the networks, didn’t pick up on this angle of the controversy, which adds to the feeling held by Latina, African American, Native American and Asian American feminists that White feminists have little empathy for their issues. Some of the pundits’ comments might be the reason that Blacks are prone to hypertension. Like the ignorant ESPN commentator who told Black sports commentator Stephen Smith, on the twenty-seventh of September, that the police only kill Black criminals, which doesn’t explain why Blacks of all classes are harassed, including a famous Black tennis star, who is currently in court with the policeman, a member of the NYPD, who tackled him. A case of mistaken identity. Even the Bush administration issued a report proving the existence of Racial Profiling.
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