Given Azizi's remark about unwelcoming-ness to blacks at Mudcat, I feel it is very important for people to realize that hers is one person's point of view.
-Crowhugger

Crowhugger, I'm glad that you feel very welcome on Mudcat. I was a very active poster on this site for 5 years until I realized that I could not continue posting here the way I had done. It seemed to me that I had become "the Black spokesperson" here, even when I wrote that I was speaking for myself. I admit that this was largely my fault because 1. I self-identified as an African American female on a forum that had (and I believe still has) very very few other People of Colors

2. I started a number of discussion threads about Black culture/history/current events and 3. I chose to comment on most threads about Black culture/history/current events when asked or when I saw those threads.

3. When people here asked for my opinion as a about some Black current event I usually responded. However, I realized that this role wasn't healthy when I saw that there were some discussions about Black stuff when people would write "I wonder what Azizi thinks about that". That's one of the reasons I knew that I had to either change how often I posted here or stop posting all together.

As to my comment on this thread about the n word:

As indicted by my repeated use of the phrase "I believe", I was speaking for myself and not for all Black people anywhere and everywhere.

Also, I want to clarify that I believe (that phrase again) that these secular slave songs should be preserved, shared (in certain settings for educational reasons), and studied. I recognize that Mudcat is an online resource for such purposes. My position is that visitors to this site who arrive here via search engines such as Google should be notified up front that songs that contain what is generally considered now to be offensive language are presented for their historical and folkloric values.

As to my personal position about the use of what I and some others refer to as "the n word", I'll share a lengthy excerpt that I wrote as a preface to my presentation of numerous text examples of African American Secular Slave Songs on this page of my Cocojams website: http://www.cocojams.com/content/african-american-secular-slave-songs:

Like many African Americans, I grew up knowing very little about the dance songs, work songs, and play songs of enslaved African American Americans. As a teen, and as a young adult and middle aged adult, if someone had asked me whether enslaved African Americans had had dance songs, I probably would have said "no" because such a concept would have appeared to have contradicted the horrors that I had read about slavery and given comfort to the trope about the "happy slaves"...

However, in the beginnings of my sixth decade on this planet, I now recognize the restorative effect dancing has on the body and the spirit. I also now realize that were it not for those social songs work which helped keep the pace, certain repetitive work (such as those associated with sailing and cutting timber) would have been more difficult and dangerous. I also realize that the social songs of enslaved Black people enabled them to comment about their conditions with plausible deniability. And I now realize that without those sometimes light hearted and sometimes bitter songs, my ancestors and the ancestors of many other Americans may not have been able to survive the spirit breaking experiences of chattel slavery.

I still detest the use of the "N word" as a referent for Black people that is found in those plantation songs. Nor do I like the dialectic language found in many of those 19th century Black American songs. I accept that some 19th century African Americans used the "n" word as a referent for themselves while some 19th century African Americans would never even have considered referring to themselves or other Black people using that word. I also accept that some Black people used dialectic language although the dialect in some secular slave songs and minstrel songs probably was exaggerated for one reason or another. I also recognize that times change, and so too do the acceptable and accepted referents & vernacular language. I know that some Black people today believe that there is nothing wrong with their use of the n word, and their fully spelling that word in their writing. Some Black people believe that they can reclaim this word, reducing or completely eliminated its toxicity. Some of those Black people believe tha this word (or its "updated?" form nigga) should be reserved only for the use of Black people. Suffice it to say that I don't believe that the n word can be reclaimed, I don't believe that there is any real difference between the n word and the word "nigga" except that the latter word is more contemporary, and I wish neither word was used by anyone.

However, with regard to African American secular slave songs, I have chosen to "play pass" (Ignore as much as I can) those words to focus on the creativity of those examples, the strength & resiliency of those people who composed them, and the information that those songs might reveal about the lives of people then, and the lives of people now.