From: "Nur Yavuz" <nur-AT-crimsoncurtain.com>
Subject: Re: Question: Race/Color & Thinking modes 
Date: Sat, 23 Mar 2002 01:11:37 -0500



"A prey of employement agents, master chefs, and labor contractors, Vanzetti
had learned the lot of many Italian-born workers in America: the crowded
rooming houses, the loneliness, the back-breaking toil, the scornful
epithets of "guinea" and "wop". "To the bosses "I was a 'Dago' to be worked
to death," he told the labor reporter Art Shields..."

Sacco and Vanzetti
The Anarchist Background
Paul Avrich

----- Original Message -----
From: Juliana Abbenyi
To: postcolonial-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
Sent: Friday, March 22, 2002 1:14 PM
Subject: Re: Question: Race/Color & Thinking modes


To Rebecca's point I'd add these lines from Salman Rusdie's, In
_Imaginary Homelands_:

" . . . dream-England is no more than a dream. Sadly, it's a dream from
which too many white Britons refuse to awake. Recently, on a live radio
programme, a professional humorist asked me, in all seriousness, why I
objected to being called a wog. He said he had always thought it a
rather charming word, a term of endearment. 'I was at the zoo the other
day,' he revealed, 'and a zookeeper told me that the wogs were the best
animals; they stuck their fingers in their ears and wiggled them about
and the animals felt at home.' The ghost of Hurree Jamset Ram Sigh walks
among us still."

Juliana M.N. Abbenyi

"rebecca.fenton-AT-excite.com" wrote:

>  I've never heard wog meaning worthy oriental gentleman. As far as I
> know, wog and wop are basically the same thing. Wop seems to be more
> used in the United States, but wog is the term used in Australia to
> name Italians and Greeks.
>
> Wog used to be very derogatory, and for the older generation of
> Australians it still his. However, in the 80s, a group of Australian
> comedians of Greek parentage started a "wog-centric" comedy troup,
> eventually leading to a highly successful stage show "Wogs out of
> Work" and TV sitcom "Acropolis Now". By taking the derogatory term and
> wearing it loudly and with overstated pride, it stopped being
> something nasty and started being a way for a particular ethnic group
> to use to identify itself. Hence you start to find people who have one
> Italian grandparent identifying themselves to others as a "wog".
>
> Rebecca
>



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