Friggin' Racism

My toddler daughter is of an age, and really has been for some time, that picks up new and inappropriate words very quickly. I am an occasionally foul-mouthed daddy, especially on days the Packers play, but also quick of foot. My solution is based upon the basic parenting skill of distraction. If she repeats something that has slipped out, I tell her “No, baby, you say geehossafat.*” And she has always liked saying that more than the offending word.

Until the inevitable until…

She repeated the borderline “friggin’” the other day, in the context of “you friggin’ cat.” The wife and I eyed up and did a quick negotiation and called geehossafat on that. And the girl responded in the expected fashion.

But, every now and again she will look at me at say, very seriously, in the midst of play “I don’t say friggin’.”

She has never done this before or since with a geehossafat word. There is something about friggin’ that she particularly likes enough to contrive to say it in a supposedly safe context. Often.

I haven’t quite figured out how to address this with her just yet.

But I did hear a network bumper for some Michael Rappaport probably-UPN sitcom this weekend. Never the lead-in, but twice the part where he says “Yeah, ribs. I know they’re black, but it’s a barbeque. You want me to make spaghetti and meatballs?”

Ya get it? Black folks are coming over to the white folks house, and the white husband is serving barbeque ribs. (Ask me some time about my amusing story of serving dinner for Angela Davis in Syracuse.)

Each time I heard that bumper I chuckled. And I’m no-bullshit-clause enough with myself to say it is because, on some level, I’m thinking “Yeah, those black people sure love ribs.”

That idea, and every related safe-because-it-is-historical-contextual-funny-safe bit of racism we allow in, is our shared cultural “friggin’.” That thing we will repeatedly say, in a safe context, though we know it is wrong, because we like it.

And it doesn’t simply make us racist. Good people laugh, and I’d like to include myself.

But, our cozy little friggin’s have to, simply must, take on a different light in a world in which a man formerly of the post of “czar” in our government says not only where people can hear but actually sitting in front of a motherfucking microphone that aborting black babies reduces crime.

How is it safe to say friggin’ in a world where someone calls your mom a cunt?

Ya dig?




* - There may be an official spelling of this word, but you know it, and I just chose mine. It sounds like jee-hoe-sa-fat.