Again, I'm not saying there aren't people capitalizing on this, I am saying that the joke isn't inherently harmless even if there was no intent to harm, it's like calling a black adult male character "boy" cause his brothers are Roy and Troy
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Replying to @saintwalker98
*how*? It's already an absurd joke, where the people are defined by their profession being their name. Is "Black farmer" off limits? Like, this is not something that has *ever* come up before today
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Replying to @BootlegGirl @saintwalker98
I believe Lido means specifically to suggest there’s the potential for unfortunate implications given the exact phrasing of “in the fields” over eg “on the farm”, in this context, not the concept of a farmer who is Black?
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The specific phrasing was "likes to till the fields"
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I mean, I really, really would never have thought to even question if that was an okay thing to say. My extended family's from the deep south and I've overheard racist conversations, and I'm not gonna repeat them but there's certain farm activities they associate w black people
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Replying to @BootlegGirl @arthur_affect and
But not tilling fields I really didn't want to wade into this. I suppose I'm out of my lane, but the lanes are being redirected by hostile forces and I'm trying to point that out
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Replying to @BootlegGirl @arthur_affect and
I can kind of see the vague, unfortunate-association aspect as being worth a furrowed brow, but it's hard to really see this all as being proportionate.
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Replying to @mssilverstein @BootlegGirl and
Does moving it from “tilling the fields” (specific task that is called that and done on farms, afaik can’t be rephrased much if at all) to “work in the fields” (generic) allow “farmer or ag worker” to be conceptualized as ever in question, is that the enablement work being done?
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Replying to @chrysopoetics @mssilverstein and
At the very least tilling the fields feels a lot closer to a genuine act of farming, like it's a much more directed visual as opposed to the open and ambiguous "work the fields" which is a lot easier to lead the mind in a racist direction once that accusation is added in
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Replying to @saintwalker98 @chrysopoetics and
If we're going to get into an absurd level of detail for a joke that was clearly thought up in about the amount of time it takes to say it -- A human being tilling the earth by hand would be unlikely for plantation agriculture, which by definition is large scale
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On a cotton plantation, which is where most of our "classic" racist stereotypes come from, the plowing and tilling would be done by an animal, a mule or a horse The literal sowing of seeds was an "easy" task relegated to women/children/junior workers
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Replying to @arthur_affect @saintwalker98 and
The strenuous labor was the pruning and weeding of the crop and, most of all, the harvest It is the fact that cotton needs to be laboriously picked by hand and can't just be reaped with a scythe that kept the farms dependent on enslaved labor
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Replying to @arthur_affect @saintwalker98 and
It's not to say that agricultural tasks in general weren't done by enslaved workers or that you couldn't have a small farm where all the tasks were done by a few workers and those workers were enslaved
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