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Based on the reports of the GA congressman referring to the Obamas as ‘uppity' I have become embroiled in a heated debate as to the racist origins of the word ‘uppity'. I was always under the impression that this word denoted someone with their nose in the air, a snob if you will. I am being told I am naive, and ‘uppity' is a term describing the behavior of a ‘Negro' who acted out of place/above their station. Which is true?
Oh dear, it would help if I could type. My apologies for the misspelling of racist in the topic line.
On the American Dialect Society email list, there's speculation that whether you think it's racist depends upon how old you are.
Interesting. Thanks for the reference, Grant. Looks as though the OED citing from 'Uncle Remus' ties it up pretty neatly as a pejorative Southern term linked directly to race. I think the idea that it has changed in the last 30 years is interesting.
BTW, I didn't know there was going to be math on this site ~sigh~
that is from the hungryblues.net site:
I suppose this might seem hyperbolic to some. It is a factual, historically accurate statement.
When I interviewed the children of Samuel O'Quinn, an African American man who was shot dead by a sniper at the gate to his property in Centreville, MS in 1959, they said that the main problem their father had with whites was that he was well educated and successful.
Samuel O'Quinn was a graduate of the Tuskegee Institute—â€the highest form of education you could get†at that time, if you were Black, Rance O'Quinn emphasized.
“My mother and father gave away a fortune,†Rance O'Quinn continued. “They gave money to every cause, the building of every church. They bought the bus for the kids to go to school and paid the bus driver to take children to school.â€
“That's why he was hated,†added Phalba O'Quinn Plummer. “They said he was biggity. They would say ‘uppity' and ‘biggity.' ‘Biggity' means too big for his britches.â€
Five years after Samuel O'Quinn was murdered, in April 1964, his eldest son, Clarence, was attacked on the Centreville Post Office steps by Chief of Police Bill Ivey. “You damn uppity nigger, you think you own the town,†Ivey said, as he beat O'Quinn with other whites looking on.
The word uppity has no racist origins. It is a United States word from the 19th century, based on an older British word, uppish. In the modern United States imagination, the word uppity may echo in some people"s minds the unfortunate phrase "uppity nigger", but uppity itself is not a racist term; anyone can be uppity. Outside the United States, uppity is not at all a charged or uncomfortable word.
The word niggardly is another word that some people mistake as racist. It has nothing to do with the word nigger, having a completely different derivation — from Norse rather than Latin — so the two terms are unrelated. There is even an article about mistaking the word niggardly in Wikipedia.
Here is the entry for uppity from the Oxford English Dictionary:
uppity, adj.
Pronunciation: /ˈʌpɪtɪ/
Etymology: < up adv.1 + -it- + -y suffix: compare biggity adj.
colloq. (orig. and chiefly U.S.).
Above oneself, self-important, 'jumped-up'; arrogant, haughty, pert, putting on airs. Cf. uppish adj.
a. attrib.
1880 J. C. Harris Uncle Remus: Songs & Sayings 86 Hit wuz wunner deze yer uppity little Jack Sparrers, I speck.
1933 Times Lit. Suppl. 9 Nov. 776/2 Grammy is living contentedly enough with an 'uppity' young creature named Penny.
1952 F. L. Allen Big Change ii. viii. 130 The effect of the automobile revolution was especially noticeable in the South, where one began to hear whites complaining about 'uppity niggers' on the highways, where there was no Jim Crow.
1982 B. Chatwin On Black Hill v. 28 He had a head for figures and a method for dealing with 'uppity' tenants.
b. pred.
1932 Sun (Baltimore) 23 Aug. 6/2 [She] could have plenty o' friends. The trouble with her is she thinks folks too common to bother with unless they're too uppity to bother with her.
1947 'N. Shute' Chequer Board 68 They've been here alone too long, and they've got uppity.
1955 F. O' Connor Wise Blood v. 89, I reckon you ain't as uppity as you was last night.
1966 D. Bagley Wyatt's Hurricane i. 27 The Navy is trying to build up Cap Sarrat as a substitute for Guantanamo in case Castro gets uppity and takes it from them.
1973 P. White Eye of Storm viii. 381, I came prepared to rough it.‥ It's Dorothy who grows uppity if all the cons aren't mod.
Derivatives
uppitiness n. the quality of being 'uppity'; an instance of this.
1935 H. L. Davis Honey in Horn x. 145 Clay's bravery and uppitiness had done nothing.
1966 Listener 27 Oct. 622/1 She had decided that Joyce was 'pretentious' and 'under-bred'.‥ But who was Virginia Woolf to talk (in this purely literary sense) of 'uppitiness'?
1975 Listener 9 Oct. 479/1 Few delegates seemed versed in Private Eye nomenclature and would, anyway, disapprove of such uppityness.
1982 R. Barnard Death & Princess ii. 17 Joe may appreciate my couthness‥but he can sniff out uppitiness.
I learned the word in the 1950s from my grandmother (born 1884), quite a snob, who used it rather frequently. There was never a hint of racial overtone in her usage, always applied to fellow whites that she felt had overstepped their social bounds. It was only after I was familiar with her usage that I began to hear it from others in a racial context, invariably in conjunction with the n-word. I never had a sense that the word uppity itself had a racist taint.
Yeah, I'm with the not-racist vote. I think I used to hear it applied to children more than anyone else, when I was one myself. Sure, like any pejorative term it can be applied by racists, but then so can, I dunno, "stupid", which also is not racist in origin. And anyway I decline to allow the racists OR the anti-racists highjack every remaining word in the English language for their debates. I even had someone take offense at my use of the word "negro" a year or so ago, for all love.
The fact that the origin is "1880 J. C. Harris Uncle Remus: Songs & Sayings 86 Hit wuz wunner deze yer uppity little Jack Sparrers, I speck." says that it does have racist origins.
And according to this article from ABC http://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=5823018&page=1#.TxV5GqU7X4s -- many people agree that the origins, if not then the implied undertone is racist.
Urban dictionary's definition is: "Taking liberties or assuming airs beyond one's place in a social heirarchy. Assuming equality with someone higher up the social ladder" which if applied to someone of the African American culture, especially coming from the mouth of a white politician would DEFINITELY have racist implications.
The term can be applied by an African American to another African American -- in attempts to keep them down as well.
For a word without the racist undertone is "hoighty-toighty" which still means "above one's station" or "snobbish" or "aristocratic" -- the opposite of the "hoi polloi" or "the common people"
McCroan, I'm going to disagree on two counts...no, three:
1) The oldest citation above is not thereby the origin. Even if by some unlikely chance that's the first time the word ever appeared in writing, it was almost certainly in existence before then. This is a quibble; I include it just to be complete.
2) That it's in the mouth of a negro, in this story, doesn't make it racist even in that particular usage, unless you want "little", "sparrow" and "tattler" to have racist origins, too, since Uncle Remus uttered them as well. He said it about "Jack Sparrows"; I suppose you could argue therefore that "uppity" is originally not racist but birdist.
3) The really big mistake above is in figuring that if a word can be applied to a race, then the word is racist. By that token you can assume racist origins for "short", "pale", "black", "caucasian", "war-like", "musical", "studious", almost any adjective and most nouns you care to name. And as I said above, I absolutely decline to allow most of my language to be highjacked and rendered unusable by those who can't think better than that about the phrases they've heard others use.
If I call someone an emotional female, it may mark me as a sexist but it doesn't make "emotional" a sexist word. If I complain that all lawyers are manipulative it may tell you I have a prejudice against lawyers but it doesn't say any such thing about the word "manipulative". And if I call Joe a stupid Mick, I'm probably revealing a racist streak in me but it doesn't make "stupid" a racist word.
Here's a belated word on behalf of the other side of this argument: We may reasonably argue that there's something unpleasant about the concept of "uppity", something wrong with the assumptions that lie behind it. In the USA we tend to pride ourselves on harboring no feelings that a human being even has a place, so if X thinks Y has gotten "above himself" it seems to prove nothing about Y but something discreditable about X's attitude toward his fellow man. Who is X (we ask ourselves) to judge what is Y's "place"? Who can judge that but Y himself? From elementary school on we're assured that a) in the Old Country such hierarchical thinking was rampant, b) which is one reason the US succeeded while Europe stagnated. The older I get the less convinced I am of either truth, but it certainly affects how I react to words like "uppity".
So I have no problem with the notion that "uppity" is something-ist. I deny that it's specifically racist, for it can be applied to almost anyone or anything (even a sparrow) that we perceive to have a place in this world.
And even with that qualification I end up deciding that the word still (you should forgive the expression) has its place. If Joe the Plumber decides to run for Congress, or an actor starts pontificating on political questions, I may suspect their ambitions exceed their abilities but I can't agree that they should be forbidden the attempt. When Michael Jordan decided he wanted to play pro baseball, there was a lot of indignation over it; I couldn't understand that at all. But it's a mistake to discard entirely the notion of one's proper place. I don't allow my dog to growl at my children (except in play, of course), nor my children to speak disrespectfully to their elders. If you want to know how the word may be properly applied, read the first few pages of Captains Courageous by Rudyard Kipling; Harvey Cheyne Jr is a great example of an "uppity" kid.
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