Using The Word Honky To Counter The N Word

I was reading a post on social media.  It was a picture, actually.  People love to use pictures on social media to express their thoughts on things without actually saying anything.  Suddenly, you have people sharing the same picture to express their thoughts.  In this case, it was from the side defending the Southern Cross Flag or the Flag Of Dixie.  Basically, it said that people want to ban The General Lee car from TV, and yet George Jefferson used the term Honky against white people for years.

It's interesting that they brought that up.  Norman Lear was the producer of The Jefferson's and other shows, and racism was a big topic of his shows, which aired in the 1970's.  They were interesting, but I felt they were too left leaning and didn't always offer a fair depiction of white people.  That's for another article.  I want to talk about the word honky here.

George Jefferson was a hard working black man who built up his own business.  He was able to move to a better place with his wife Louise and son.  He probably had to deal with racism growing up and the attitude that a black man couldn't make it big in America, but he never let that stop him from trying.  He wasn't sitting there waiting to blame people for his failures.  He used the hate he received to motivate his successes.

George dealt with anybody if they had cold hard cash.  He knew the game the rich people played, so he played it too.  There was still a resentment of the white people in his life who treated him differently for the color of his skin, and he held onto that.  Louise sometimes had to give him reality checks over that.  Just as not all black men are the same, neither are all white men.  But, George became fond of the term honky as a slur against white people.

It was his counter word for the the N word.  It seems funny that I can't use that word when discussing things in the context of this article, but that is the PC world we live in.  I can say honky all day, and it's no big deal.  To George, that was his N word for white people, and it became more widely used in pop culture.  Movies and TV shows even picked up on it through the years.

The word was actually used long before The Jefferson's and for the same reason.  I think it may have derived from the term Honky Tonk, and that makes sense to me.  Those were the taverns where they played country music and in some cases had that southern pride that seems to be such a bad thing these days.  The white people who went there seemed like a fair target to the black people who felt oppressed by racism.  So, honky became the N word to use against white people.

When George said it on The Jefferson's, nobody said how racist he was being.  Make no mistake, it was a racist thing to say.  Contrary to what some will say, black people can be racist.  Any race can be.  We aren't born that way, we learn it as we grow up and either accept it or reject it.  Fortunately, a lot of people have rejected it and try to be color blind to people, but others on all sides wear it like a badge of honor.

So, people laughed when George said it.  It was okay if he said it.  But, in reality, there's another reason for the laughter.  That word was nowhere near as hateful as the N word or other ethnic slurs that have been used.  Oh, it was made for the same reason, but it's just not the same.  People don't feel like second class citizens or sub human when they are called honky, and that's the difference.  I don't think George was a bad man.  He was a good mad who did his best in a world that made it harder for him to be successful.  He learned the lesson of how the world really works.  If you have money, all the other stuff doesn't seem to matter as much.