“Eeny, meeny, miney, moe. Catch a tiger by the toe.”
That’s the rhyme we used as six-year-olds trying to settle the important issue of Who Should Go First. I knew from my parents that the individual caught by the toe had not always been a tiger. The euphemistic tiger was substituted sometime, I imagine, in the 1950s, at least in the north where I grew up. The word “tiger” mitigated the phrase for my generation, but the lore around it was still fresh enough that I was informed of the tiger’s prior identity.
The tiger rhyme was only one of several ditties – some mitigated, some not – I learned as a child. Some were racist, some sexist, some anti-Semitic; none homophobic. I don’t think that indicates a window of enlightenment, it just means the existence of gays and lesbians was not even derisively acknowledged.
These biases existed and I’m glad transitions were under way, that the tiger was found as an inoffensive replacement. The transition was (and is) slow. Twenty years after I stopped playing “Eeny, meeny, miney moe” I stood in a New York state police barracks the week after Thanksgiving, listening to a white trooper explain to a black trooper the pejorative name white people assign to Brazil nuts. Incredulous, the black trooper appealed to a bi-racial trooper. “Yes, it’s true,” he said, “as my father always reminds me.” (The fact that the black trooper had doubts white people could be so insensitive may have been a hopeful sign.)
I was mulling all this in advance of Martin Luther King’s birthday, when the news broke that a new edition of Mark Twain’s work had been released, mitigating some of the words. The same week, Congressional reps read out the text of the Constitution, omitting racist references.
I think that’s wrong on both counts. Mr. Twain’s work – Huckleberry Finn particularly – was anti-racist, for its time. The words we now find offensive should be left in, to help students chart America’s journey out of racism. (It is nowhere near over.) Same for readings of the Constitution.
The original text of “eeny, meeny, miney, moe,” on the other hand, deserves to be put in a vault and buried. It will be available for students of American racism, but I don’t see the point in telling the our kids, “we say this, but we used to say that.” As I said, I’ve got a head full of offensive ditties. I can’t get rid of them for among other reasons, the things we learn as small children seem to be etched more deeply on our memories than later texts. There’s no need to pass them to a new generation. I hesitated writing about the examples above because I don’t want to dredge them from the muck of anyone else’s memory.
“Eeny, meeny, miney, moe” is a game of discrimination. It’s used to decide who takes precedence and who stands aside and waits. That racism was inherent in the game is not surprising.
Mark Twain’s work and the Constitution are important American documents and we shouldn’t water them down out of some misplaced sense of prissiness. As ever, the hard part is to know where to draw the line.
If we want to keep Dr. King’s memory alive and continue his work, a good place to begin is between our own ears.
It Wasn’t Always a Tiger
“Eeny, meeny, miney, moe. Catch a tiger by the toe.”
That’s the rhyme we used as six-year-olds trying to settle the important issue of Who Should Go First. I knew from my parents that the individual caught by the toe had not always been a tiger. The euphemistic tiger was substituted sometime, I imagine, in the 1950s, at least in the north where I grew up. The word “tiger” mitigated the phrase for my generation, but the lore around it was still fresh enough that I was informed of the tiger’s prior identity.
The tiger rhyme was only one of several ditties – some mitigated, some not – I learned as a child. Some were racist, some sexist, some anti-Semitic; none homophobic. I don’t think that indicates a window of enlightenment, it just means the existence of gays and lesbians was not even derisively acknowledged.
These biases existed and I’m glad transitions were under way, that the tiger was found as an inoffensive replacement. The transition was (and is) slow. Twenty years after I stopped playing “Eeny, meeny, miney moe” I stood in a New York state police barracks the week after Thanksgiving, listening to a white trooper explain to a black trooper the pejorative name white people assign to Brazil nuts. Incredulous, the black trooper appealed to a bi-racial trooper. “Yes, it’s true,” he said, “as my father always reminds me.” (The fact that the black trooper had doubts white people could be so insensitive may have been a hopeful sign.)
I was mulling all this in advance of Martin Luther King’s birthday, when the news broke that a new edition of Mark Twain’s work had been released, mitigating some of the words. The same week, Congressional reps read out the text of the Constitution, omitting racist references.
I think that’s wrong on both counts. Mr. Twain’s work – Huckleberry Finn particularly – was anti-racist, for its time. The words we now find offensive should be left in, to help students chart America’s journey out of racism. (It is nowhere near over.) Same for readings of the Constitution.
The original text of “eeny, meeny, miney, moe,” on the other hand, deserves to be put in a vault and buried. It will be available for students of American racism, but I don’t see the point in telling the our kids, “we say this, but we used to say that.” As I said, I’ve got a head full of offensive ditties. I can’t get rid of them for among other reasons, the things we learn as small children seem to be etched more deeply on our memories than later texts. There’s no need to pass them to a new generation. I hesitated writing about the examples above because I don’t want to dredge them from the muck of anyone else’s memory.
“Eeny, meeny, miney, moe” is a game of discrimination. It’s used to decide who takes precedence and who stands aside and waits. That racism was inherent in the game is not surprising.
Mark Twain’s work and the Constitution are important American documents and we shouldn’t water them down out of some misplaced sense of prissiness. As ever, the hard part is to know where to draw the line.
If we want to keep Dr. King’s memory alive and continue his work, a good place to begin is between our own ears.
© Mark Floegel, 2011