This is “Scooter” Magruder. People have told him on more occasions than one that he “talks white.”
But what exactly does that mean?
Magruder remembers a time when “talking white” wasn’t even a thing.
“Let’s go way back in the day when we were three-fifths humans … during the slave trade. Before the Bloods and the Crips, gang banging and AKs, nobody talked white or black. They talked slave master and slave.“
The founders wrote the three-fifths compromise into the U.S. Constitution in 1787 to determine how slaves would be accounted for with legislative representation. It was decided that each enslaved black person would count as only three-fifths of a person. The clause was repealed in 1865 after the Civil War and the adoption of the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery.
But “talking white” still wasn’t a thing even after slavery was outlawed.
“Things changed after the Civil War, luckily. Now you weren’t talking white. You were just being uppity.”
He’s just waxing poetic there, and I love it. The bald eagle was actually named the national bird of the United States in 1782, almost a century before Jim Crow laws — named after an incredibly racist song-and-dance from the 1820s — were enacted to keep blacks separate and unequal in a post-slavery U.S. But you get the point.
If you haven’t already caught on, “talking white” is not a thing.
And to say it to someone is to compare them to caricatures that you’ve somehow come to believe represent millions of people.
Needless to say, that would be ridiculous. Scholars would call that an ethnocentric viewpoint, which is basically the passing of judgment on other racial or ethnic groups that you see as inferior, perhaps without even realizing it.
“Talking proper isn’t white. Talking black isn’t ghetto,” says Magruder.
BOOM.
Watch Magruder’s impassioned delivery below:
