Calling folks Uncle Toms, House Negroes, Aunt Jemima's and other similar terminology is racist.

[delrem]

299. Nobody but you has said that.

The opposite has been said -- e.g. explanations about "tribalism" upthread.

However, in the Americas, descendants of the European colonists ("whites", in the simplistic language of skin-color oriented racism) are the group that has had the raw power to institutionalize and drive home an incredibly deep and dehumanizing racist structure. The racist language that accompanies those racist institutions not just demeans, it helps control the narrative while expressing the emotional zeitgeist of whole communities.

We're *born into* a European colonist culture and its language (not just the racist epithets) and values are absorbed with our mother's milk, becoming our reality, our world. Nobody can tell me that it's all in the past. Not when, on mature reflection, I recognize how that inbred racism informed *me* and all of my friends, before I even started school, at home and exploring outside, at school, and throughout my life. It does seem to be getting better, at least the surface sheen is looking more polished so there are no more bars and restaurants with signs saying the native peoples are excluded. No more (at least openly, and with pride in the results) bulldozing native cemeteries into the river, and so on. But that polish is the thinnest veneer ....

Comparing *that* with some imagined "hurt" that I might receive on being called "honky" is ridiculous.