A Teacher Was Unjustly Fired for Saying “Cotton-Picking Hands” to a Black Student
Is this phrase actually racist?
Have you ever heard of the phrase “just one cotton-picking minute” or “are you out of your cotton-picking mind?” Maybe you’ve heard it in a 1953 episode of Bugs Bunny.
Myself? I was pretty sure I had heard the phrase somewhere, but couldn’t quite place it. Until it hit me.
I heard it on an episode of Rugrats, kind of.
In the episode Ice Cream Mountain, where the babies are about to run from a fake gingerbread man on a mini-golf course, the 3-year old character Angelica says “just one collar-picking minute, I didn’t come all this way to get chased off by some dumb cookie!”
As is a typical running gag on that show, the characters often mispronounce words, but it is clear what the phrase was meant to be.
Did the series Rugrats unwittingly engage in a racist act? Is it racist to say “cotton-picking?” I can admit that it certainly sounds that way to our modern sensibilities.
We have a tendency to associate the collecting of cotton to be inextricably linked to the slavery of black people in the American South. In one case, someone even found a cotton wreath in the gift shop of a Cracker Barrel to be evidence…