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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]At work a white guy at a meeting that 1/2 the people were black used the term “cotton picking hands”

Big deal. Should we fire him. BTW he is 60 from the South with lots of black friends and black co-workers.

I guess to sensitive ears it is an issue [/quote]

This is inappropriate and he should be counseled.  Lots of people say inapprpriopriate things without thinking — the right response is to teach them to do better.  I wouldn’t fire someone over this unless it was a persistent problem that the person refused to acknowledge/fix.  [/quote]

Unless he was using the phrase to refer specifically to black people (which from the context it’s hard to imagine), it’s not inappropriate. I grew up in cotton country and the phrase has nothing to do with race, it’s simply an expression to convey displeasure, similar to dad-gummed, blasted, or in modern parlance d—d or f——ing, which seem to get thrown around helter-skelter without phasing anyone.  By the way, lots of white people picked cotton, too, including my grandparents and quite possibly his.  It’s hard to gather much context from a single phrase, but it sounds like the sort of expression one would use about their own hands if they were fumbling a little, ex. “Eh, these cotton-pickin’ hands just don’t work as well as they used to.”. It’s just a regional expression.  For future reference, the following expressions may not be familiar to you, but they’re not offensive either:

anagogglin’
caddy-corner
caddywampus
crawfishing
boy howdy
gully-washer

Incidentally, while city folk may refer to a busy day as “having places to go and people to see”, country folk say they “have rows to hoe and fields to plow”.

By all means, call out offense when it is clearly intended.  But a guy with lots of black friends probably isn’t going to want to say something offensive about
black people to begin with, especially not in the office in a meeting where 1/2 the people are black.  Moreover, don’t you think they would have called him on it if they felt offended?  I’m sure they recognized it for what it was, a casual expression that had nothing, whatsoever to do with race and had no malice behind it.  If the people you think need to be shielded from such a comment weren’t offended, you might consider that you’re missing something and it actually wasn’t offensive. I wish people would stop assuming the worst of others and looking for excuses to cast blame.  Because if we were going to cast blame, I might say that the people complaining about this were classist snobs who looked down on farmers and people from rural backgrounds.  I don’t actually think you mean to be offensive, either, though. Maybe we can all extend a little grace towards each other, which will make it a lot easier to have productive meetings and otherwise function together as a society. [/quote]

Omg, you sound so annoying [/quote]

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