In Nyack, New York, a law firm purchased some designer black jack o’lanterns from “Bed, Bath, and Beyond” as office decorations. Some residents complained to a local TV channel and to the law firm, claiming that the decorations were “racist.”
The law firm, Feerick, Nugent, MacCartney, immediately removed them, and soon thereafter, the household accoutrements chain pulled the item from its inventory. Now the law firm is busy grovelling, especially after the local NAACP accused them of “extreme lack of sensitivity.”
I think he meant “a lack of extreme sensitivity.” Isn’t that more accurate?
“We understand that someone complained about them and so once we got word of that we immediately took them down,” said Mary Marzolla, a partner at the racist firm. “We represent people of all colors and faiths, and we would never do anything to exclude anyone from any community,” she added,
What? How do black painted or colored pumpkins exclude anyone from the community? Is she really saying that if an individual, no matter how foolish or addled, complains about anything, then the firm is ethically obligated take remedial action? Is that the standard? Let’s test it: I’m complaining about the firm’s conduct in capitulating to an idiotic and manipulative claim of racism. OK, Feerick, Nugent, MacCartney, the ball’s in your court.
Satisfy me.
Is there no way in 2019 to tell a hypersensitive wacko, “I’m sorry, but you are a fool. There is nothing to be offended about. I do not have to cater to your paranoia or contrived sensitivities, and I will not.”
Now partners at the firm are asking why the black faux-carved pumpkins didn’t “raise flags” at Bed Bath & Beyond, which has also apologized. Let’s see: the lawyers are saying that it was the store’s fault for selling decoration that made the firm reveal its racial insensitivity? If the firm couldn’t tell that black jack ‘o lanterns were on some double-secret race-baiter’s list for future gotchas, why was Bed, Bath and Beyond supposed to figure it out?
Black jack o’lanterns have been around for a long, long time. One even appears briefly in Disney’s animated version of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” The black nicely contrasts with the flame-glow from the orange interior. How is that racist, by any definition of the word? It isn’t, of course, or wasn’t. NOW it’s racist, because some clever black activist figured out that they had an unexplored way to make white people feel guilty and beg for forgiveness.
Here are just a few black jack images from the web; I don’t know why these were not vetted in Nyack, which appears to be the Racist Pumpkin Authorities Center…
Forget Bed, Bath and Beyond, I want to know why the NAACP never told us for all these years that black pumpkins were racist. Isn’t that their job? Here we have been ignorantly using these things all these years, and the experts on detecting coded racism in every nook and cranny of our society, language, entertainment, advertising, looks, dress, and body language just let it go on so they could spring the trap in Nyack?
Better yet, I want someone to explain how coloring black a carved vegetable that does not represent a human being and that is traditionally orange, unlike any human without some kind of skin affliction ,can legitimately offend anyone other than those who are desperately looking for ways to be offended, so they can make people grovel for forgiveness.
Ethics Alarms 
wow
Boo.
Black cats? “Orange Is The New Black”? Stupid.
I’d love to spend more time discussing this issue, but I’m off to let my friends who did pumpkins in Packer green and gold that they’re either racist or appropriating football. Better to hear it from me than some NFL zealot.
This is why I LOVE fake apologies:
If you are going to pretend to be harmed, I will pretend to be sorry.
(It should be exempted from your apology scale: a fake apology for a fake offense.)
-Jut
Don’t you think the law firm is sorry, though? Sorry to have to deal with bad PR? Sorry to appear insensitive by anyone’s lights to the poor, downtrodden, victims of society? I bet they are REALLY sorry…who would hire a law firm that capitulates like this? We FIGHT for our clients, unless we’re accused of racism, in which case we fold like wet cardboard.
Yeah, exactly. Sorry a hypersensitive cur dragged them by the tongue around the politically-correct castle while the Twitter mob waited to drub their corpse.
What a sad state of affairs, both for the offended and offender, but honestly, I think the law firm deserves the most opprobrium. They put up zero fight and capitulated almost before anyone could get mad.
I like it, Jut. Also, I like that China didn’t buy the NBA’s apology. For the first time in 10 years the Chinese state-run sports TV station did not broadcast the season opening games last night. I guess once a totalitarian regime, always a totalitarian regime.
” unlike any human without some kind of skin affliction ”
Well, there you go! Orange Man Bad. Jack-O-Lanterns are actually Donald Trump and making them black is the equivalent of him wearing blackface.
….
Or something.
As good an explanation as any.
Many have seen D. T. as the orange faced man. So I am glad he hasn’t decided to use his position to send the NSA, FBI and any other agencies he could call upon to bring his wrath against all the people who have orange colored Jack O Lanterns ! Because this is obviously discrimination aimed at him. I wonder if he can make Jack O Lanterns illegal. Maybe declare then as a national security threat.
As a University of Georgia alumnus, I have in past years had both red and black jack-o-lanterns displayed on my porch at Halloween. Little did I realize that I was displaying insensitivity to both Native Americans and African Americans in one thoughtless act! Mea culpa!
As a University of Georgia alumnus, I have in past years had both red and black jack-o-lanterns displayed on my porch at Halloween. Little did I realize that I was displaying insensitivity to both Native Americans and African Americans in one thoughtless act! Mea culpa!
#ToHellWithGeorgia.
That’s ok, Buzz is culturally appropriating both Asian and African American culture due to his black and yellow stripes. As is his name triggering to those who don’t like loud noises. Don’t get me started on how scary a swarm of Yellow Jackets is …
Good Luck on the rival game!
It’s.
A.
Gourd.
How can anyone take these people seriously from here on out..
There should be abject ridicule of all involved. “When you are going up against insurance companies with powerful lawyers choose Ferrick Nugent and McCartney. They will settle quickly”.
Bed Bath and Beyond will be eliminating all products that are black to show solidarity and sensitivity.
The NAACP is now the National Association for the Advancement of Colored Pumpkins.
Fricken morons.
“National Association for the Advancement of Colored Pumpkins”
You know, I just got a brand new keyboard, and you ruined it..
So… regular Jack-O-Lanterns mock the president, got it.
Really, the pumpkin growers association should go with that and then mail all registered Democrats with a catalog.
I’ll show myself out, thanks.
since Trump is the new orange… I Mean his skin is “orange” and ppl make fun of that… This is just nuts!! are all toys now which we want black going to be banned???? sigh.. this is so dumb. and no, I don’t think they are sorry… just trying to dodge bullets
OMG!! what if they were black japanese pumpkins????
https://www.amazon.com/10-Japanese-Black-Pumpkin-Pollinated/dp/B014H8B9SW
they do exist!! is that double racist? I WANT TO SCREAM!
There are white pumpkins, too. Are they mocking white people, or promoting white nationalism? It’s so hard to keep up on these things.
Here the white pumpkins can be seen colluding with the orange ones…probably plotting against the black ones:
https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcT65vxyaX0SJNeyCHfMnylC4dxnNPja2uLZlZnTnwTHNM0zdLu5&s
OMG, I’m so triggered I have to go home and shut myself in a dark room!
How do these groups feel about Black baby dolls, or the animatee Cosby kids .
https://www.post-gazette.com/local/city/2019/10/11/Columbus-Day-parade-pittsburgh-bloomfield-false-advertising-posters-not-canceled/stories/201910110159
Check this out. If you can’t persuade, and can’t bully, get tricky, is the new motto of the hyper-offended. However, usually it doesn’t come to that, because so many people are pushovers when someone claims offense. It’s like this country collectively forgot the rule that, as parents, sometimes you have to stand firm and say no, no matter how much the kid screams or cries, or says bad things. If you give in and say “ok, ok, I’ll give you what you want, just stop screaming,” then you have just taught the kid that all he has to do is scream, and he’ll keep right on screaming until he’s your ruler.
These days, all someone who is not a white male has to do is say he’s offended, and presto! Statues come down, new ones go up, holidays get renamed, traditions get changed, companies grovel and ask for forgiveness. The thing is, those who play on this serial offense will never be satisfied and never be interested in extending forgiveness. What they want to do is place everyone in a narrower and narrower box that they don’t dare step out of for fear of offending someone.
That comes back to the idea I expressed 2 years ago that the left wants a monopoly on honor, so that they can extend that into a monopoly on expression and ultimately a monopoly on thought. They want those who disagree with them to disappear or be cowed to the point of racial or gender castration.
[Steve is right on the verge of *seeing clearly*. But he can’t come out and say it directly (yet). Once it does happen that the Compromised & Disempowered ‘Conservative’ gets himself, and herself, oriented properly, then there will be a beginning of a significant push-back movement. Not until then.]
OK, Alizia, where do I fall short of seeing clearly? Please keep your answer (relatively) short and succinct.
Here you — relatively — go:
You must take into account that I have assumed for myself a general critical posture. I take such a posture because it is natural to me. A part of my make-up related to my upbringing and my resistance to my upbringing. I present myself in this way and I avoid all friendly association and teaming up with other forum contributors in an attempt to maintain complete independence of thought.
I am forced to employ a somewhat defective — or troublesome, or inaccurate — *you-plural* when I try, in good faith I must say, but somewhat annoyingly I admit, to locate and describe errors of perception or also of ‘complicity’ in those conditions of our time, those that are producing the very strange developments we see taking place.
Excuse the preamble: it is necessary that I do so because of my essential respect, for you and for all who write here.
This quote seems highly relevant to me and I use it as a starting point to answer your inquiry:
I use Robertson’s analytical paragraph as a starting point:
1) I do not hear you acknowledging the loss of preeminence, as he terms it, of that ‘largest American population group’ nor of the social conditions that brought it about.
2) Nor the ‘spit in the ranks’ that he speaks of that allowed this/is allowing this to go forward, now with accelerated force.
3) I do not hear you, nor do I hear anyone who writes on this Blog/Forum, speak about the problem of ‘spinning off’ from a group nucleus. Of the loss of cohesion and of adherence to identity. *You* seem to have no identity, and I do mean ‘as a people’ and also as a people with an ethic and racial identity (such as the Founders very clearly and very definitely had).
4) I only hear people who speak of abstract political values and adherence to Americanism as an ideology and a patriotic stance or belief, but nothing or next to nothing about the people who are necessary for the definition of abstract union to function. I refer to this as the ‘original demographic’. That is, to a certain level of homogeneity which is necessary for a Nation to function as a nation and to be a nation.
5) I do not read in what most people write here clear definitions about why what is happening is happening, and what is beginning to take place now, is happening. That is, the causal chains that have produced it. That is I do not hear clear definitions which, I assert, could only come from a solid identity-structure.
6) In you — and I find you lucid and articulate — I read *complaints* about superficial details (and I feel it fair to say that most of Jack’s ethics topics start from a somewhat superficial plane of observation, without addressing the more relevant, and the more serious, underlying issues.
There is a term that interests me: Dynamic Silence. There are only limited definitions available for it, for example if one googles it. As I tried to explain by reference to my *upbringing* I have been dealing with ‘dynamic silence’ for a looooonngggggg time.
It is a silence, a non-response, a non-follow-up, a refusal to say anything at all when a discomfiting idea is presented, which yet is ‘pregnant with signification’. Nothing is said but yet a great deal is said.
Here, one often gets ‘dynamic silence’ as a mode of response. Instead of being silent in the face of it, I force myself to point it out.
If the real conditions that we face in this highly tumultuous present cannot be accurately seen, revealed (‘put on the table’), and talked about, there is no hope for progress, advance or amelioration. One of the main efforts of the *opposition* is to silence dissent. They have a whole array of mechanisms and strategies that they use.
But more than just curtailing free speech what that really means is to silence free thought. In my own opinion I see this as even more critical because that suppressive effort involves shutting down rational and intellectual processes. And — going even further — it also means shutting down the higher aspect of ‘intellect’ as in the theological term intellectus.
We participate in the shutting down of *true* and penetrating intellectual work to the degree that we agree to remain silent … to stop our rational and intellectual processes by shutting ourself down and by ‘self-censorship’ of ideas and their implications before they solidify into actionable thought.
Self-suppression of this sort has become a culture-wide habit or perhaps ‘reflex’ is the better word. There are hundreds of things you simply cannot say, everyone knows this, and yet they accept. But then what of the things that one cannot even think?
I accuse many here of being participants and collaborators in these shutting-down processes. I say this is an ethical infraction of a severe sort. It has extremely negative consequences. How this has come about (the simple term is ‘dumbing down’) is highly complex and not a simple affair. To see it, one must work at an inner level to discover those points & areas where one is *complicit*. And one must become willing to confront one’s own self. But beyond that there is the effort to begin to see and describe how suppressive control mechanisms are established and who and what stand behind them (cui bono perhaps is a way to put it).
I accuse the Conservative American Establishment of complicity in suppressive efforts. So, it is not in any personal sense meant. It has to do with a critique of those established means by which repressive modes are ‘enforced’ and ‘imposed’.
And what I get here is (often) a resounding and resplendent dynamic silence. Isn’t that curious? In a place where you’d imagine that a full intellectual conversation is possible, one notices strongly the suppressive mechanisms. This is not to be disruptive nor disrespectful because after all I am tolerated. It is simply to note something, to point it out.
In an article for The Hoover Institute — “America’s New Jacobins” — Victor Davis Hanson argues that the Democrat Party is in a transformational phase into a Socialist Party. [It is an article published over a year ago but my how quickly things have changed & progressed.
Hansen writes:
My impression is that as this transformation is pressed forward it must confront and it must defeat or push aside rationalism and rational categories generally. I think that it is possible to take the declaration of one writer at the NYTs (I forgot his name) as a good example of a kind of invitation to become as irrational and forceful as is necessary to defeat what they define as an *evil*. In the article, the writer suggested that it was a moral necessity to oppose Trump with any and all tools (I am paraphrasing). He suggested that even journalists, supposed to be dedicated to accuracy and truth-reporting, might need to (or would need to) become activists for a given political viewpoint even if it involved them in less-than-truthful reporting. The end of defeating the *evil* becomes more important than holding to truth or accuracy.
I have the impression that what this attitude induces in people is that which I have called *hysteria*. There is an invitation to *do whatever one can*, through whatever means one has at one’s disposal, to become engaged in the social and ideological war that everyone recognizes is going on. The basic purpose is to demonize one’s labeled opponents and to rain down on them shame & blame. It is far less rational and idea-based as it is emotion-based, and the reason is quite simple: only emotions can excite the irrationalism of the masses and focus it properly.
Therefore it seems to me that this Pumpkin Rehearsal, though it looks completely ridiculous and even unbelievable on the surface, when examined more closely actually reveals a sort-of logical structure or perhaps *purpose* is a better word.
Hansen continues:
It seems to me that *rational people* who are grounded in rationalism and rational categories could see, and did see, that the Blasey performance was a badly performed and falsely-based charade. Well, except for those people who wanted her accusations, and needed her accusations, to be *true*. But really true & false, real and unreal, these are not really important. Because the real important thing, that pushes aside all other considerations, is to do something/anything to keep a particular Conservative from gaining a position on the Supreme Court. That is the ‘moral object’ and how it is achieved is far less important. Therefore it invites any kind of activism, and you can be creative about it. Yelling at your *enemy* in a restaurant is fine and good: a necessary expression really for ‘the Good’. You can assault people in elevators and you can invent complex stories of being assaulted in the street by white terrorists as you go to the convenience store: all of this is proper activism if the goal of political and social transformation is understood to be the Good Object.
The larger struggle, the encompassing struggle, is as I always say a demographic struggle. It is based in the appearance of and the strengthening of and the assertion of itself as the new directing social and political demographic force in an America that has been *socially engineered* over the course of 50-60 years: the life-span of most of those who write in this blog in fact (it is your creation largely).
It revolves around displacement and *dispossession* of the Original Demographic: and here the code-word is Republican. Demography Is Destiny. The shrill notes and the biting tones of today are the tones and notes that will be heard for years and decades and they will — obviously — increase in pitch. You are destined to be replaced. Displaced, dispossessed, pushed to the side, made irrelevant. Unfortunately, and rather sadly in fact from where I sit, many people will remain focused on the *surface* (some lunatic’s hysteria over a black pumpkin) and fail to understand that the social transformation to a Maoist-style Socialism is being carried out and is inching forward day by day month by month — with hardly anything at all to oppose it. To see just the Pumpkin Incident is to see mere *surface*; to see through it and beyond it to ‘what is really happening’ is the proper step.
An interesting related comment from an article by Morris V. de Camp (in Counter-Currents):
I would modify this phrase ‘history becomes God’ to something like: the present and all that is done in it by the awokened is seen as metaphysically good, pure and unquestionably necessary and for this reason it cannot be questioned.
My larger purpose — annoying though it may be! and against a deafening dynamic silence — is to alert certain people to the degree which they have bought into these various Lies and how they function at the base of Americanism as it has been defined in the Postwar. This is the basic reason why most — certainly most who write here — cannot take any sort of positive stance against the Movement of the Present.
Well….
Back in my “everything is about race” days it wasn’t too hard to find things that were “racist.” Many things became a kind of cosmic competition between whites and anyone who didn’t pass the paper bag test. Game shows, toys, authority figures, etc. all were scrutinized though the lens of trying to “one up” whites to bring forth “equality.”
An episode of Jeopardy turned into a race contest when POC and whites were playing. I had to root for the brown person because…justice.
A brown doll was always better than a white one because…fairness.
A brown teacher, journalist, writer, politician, and so on was always better because…equality.
Then there was the reverse mode of the same struggle – find the racism.
And racism (or any ism or phobia) is everywhere if you wish or have been brainwashed to view the world that way. A game show isn’t really a game show. A doll isn’t really a doll. And in this case a pumpkin isn’t a pumpkin but a representative of the never ending struggle to balance the scales.
Having Racial Sensitivity Syndrome (that’s what I call it) is an exhausting way to live and those who let people (brown, black, white) get away with the constant complaints aren’t doing them any favors by acquiescing to such fear based narrow-minded thinking. It only spreads more fear that simply isn’t based in reality.
And I agree with Chris. The NAACP should now be known as The National Association for the Advancement of Colored Pumpkins.
“There is nothing to be offended about. I do not have to cater to your paranoia or contrived sensitivities, and I will not.”
Thanks, Jack. I intend to memorize that and have it ready to spew at the next “hyper-offendable” fool who “confronts” me about something I’ve said or done that’s “offensive.”
While you’re at it, copy in Rand Paul. It seems he has lots of chances to use that.
Just get rid of all the holidays then. Next will be Christmas & Thanksgiving. People get offended by anything. Guess what, if you don’t like these things don’t celebrate them. I am a 58 year old white male & have never thought of this that way. People offended by things like this cause the USA to be more divided every day. These people have a lot of time on their hands. Keep complaining & you will get what you want (a divided nation !!!!)
I don’t think we are too far from the absurdist end result.