Noqw this thread is prolly one that I should keep the heck away from we all know that the Bobert will step into jus' 'bout any danged mess that's out there, this thread bein' one of 'um...
Ahhhh, first of all, I am somewhat guilty of havin' picked up a great deal of "slave" talk back in my 20's and into my 30's and those speech patterns an' phrases is very much part of who I am and what I sound like... Ahhhh, lets me explain... When I was like 'round 23 I went to work as a GED teacher in the Richmond (Va) City Jail.... Now, back then there weren't hardly no white folks in that Jail so fir 5 hours a day 5 days a week I was purdy much completely surrounded by black folks... Even the guards were black...
I also was workin' at a drug treatment half way house teaching GED and runnin' counselin' groups and bei8ng "Staff on Duty"... Well, Staff on Duty (SOD) was like a lot of hours... Every other weekend I would go on right after the jail gig on Friday and be there until Monday mornin' when it was back to jail... Now, the half way house waas right in the middle of one of Richmond's ghettoes and most Saturday nights I would be up 'til 3 or 4 in the mornin' talkin' with residents and strret folk... Sometimes I'd just sit on the sidewalk at the corner of 2nd and Calhoun St. while hookers 'n pimps 'n rippers & runners would be hustlin and on those nights I would have a lotta conversations with latta black folks that most white folks didn't ven know existed...
It was during them years that I learnt up (an' internalized...) a lotta dialect that some might consider "slave" talk... I learned real quick that black folks in these settings freely us3e the word "nigga" as a endearin' term when talkin' to one another and I also learned that it din't have nythin' to do with one's color because the folks I worked with would call my white butt "nigga" as freely as they would call a black friend "nigga"...
Now, I had been brought up in a "liberal" familee and leraned at an eary age that the word "nigger" was not a word that we used... Yeah, my mom was involved in the Civil Rights movement and we had a lotta contact with black folks so I just knew that phrases such as "nigger or colored" wasn't part of our vocabulary... So even when I was called "nigga" by black folks I could never bring myself to use the word back but used the word "brotha" (prolly same diffrence but...)
Now, after my stint with the drug program, I got a job as a social worker and this work kept my white butt workin' in the black areas of Richmond... At age 39 I made a career change but after some 16 years of spendin' almost all my wakin' hours among Southern black folks, I can away deeply influenced by both culture and speech...
Now, throw in my in music, bouncing 'round folk music styles and most recently, Southern country blues, I can honestly say, yeah, there's prolly way too much "slave" talk in me *but* I have never thought of the way I talk to be offensive...
...until, perhaps, now...
I'll keep an eye on this thread, however, to see if there are changes that I "sho nuff" need to make...