hotel porters, couriers, precocious children, negroes, parrots, and schizophrenics

From: Cruising the Past

“[…] For example, in the middle of an introduction to carnival barking, the caller was supposed to occasionally 'slap his hands like a [n-word]' when accepting money. I mean, right there in the middle of a nothing sentence, this awful stuff would just appear. After many exposures to this I took it to represent very deeply rooted systemic racism, where light banter and semi-meaningless explanations would be peppered seemingly from nowhere with racist statements.
     I remember feeling so outraged opening a pamphlet on Purina sheep feed and catching a phrase where the farmer is supposed to feel some part of a sheep's wool and that it should feel something like '[n-word] hair but softer.'
     It is an incredible disgrace to read it in 2014 and to think that in 1940 (when the Purina sales catalog was written) that it would be so much part of the verbal landscape that it would seem like nothing at all. […]"
—JF Ptak Science Books
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