Topic 86: Color Antipathies

Carol:

Seeing Red

The men are pumped up for the battle, fueled by the sounds of the crowds gathering at a safe distance from the anticipated fray. Not everyone is on the side of the Patriots. Murmurs from the opposition provide an undercurrent of tension as these brave men charge onto the battlefield, blood and victory on their minds. They quickly move into formation, raise their heads and eye the opposition glaring at them from across the field, nostrils steaming in the January cold. One last word from their General: “Take no prisoners!”

So will begin the battle next Sunday as Quarterback “General” Tom Brady leads the New England Patriots against their rival New York Jets for the AFL championship.  There would have been better literary symmetry if the New England Patriots were matched against “Red Coats,” the Arizona Cardinals. But, the Cards already lost their bid for an NFL championship slot. The Patriots against the Red Coats..

Colors. Antipathy is a pretty strong word, a fist-shaking kind of word, so that’s what led me to think about uniforms and battle lines, and team allegiance. Seems like the only uniforms that create so much passion these days are sports teams, and the only military uniforms that distinguish themselves by color are paraded on dress occasions and exchanged for grays, greens and brown camouflage in real battle.

Not so when the Red Coats were the enemies of the original New England Patriots and their bright scarlet uniforms stood out against the backdrop of the countryside battlefields. The term “Red Coat” wasn’t actually used at the time of the American Revolution, and the early patriots  referred to them as The British, or simply “the enemy.” In a letter written in June, 1775 young Private Peter Brown describes for  to his mother  the Battle of Bunker Hill:

       When the Arrows of death flew thick around me, I was preserv’d while others were suffer’d to fall a prey to our Cruel enemies . . .altho’ we have lost four of our company & several taken captive by the enemy of America, I was not suffer’d to be touch’d. (source:Massachusetts Historical Society: Bunker Hill Exhibit)

Nowhere in his eloquent letter does Peter Brown mention “the enemy” by the color of its uniform.

Author Kenneth Roberts recreates the events of June 17, 1775 in his book Oliver Wiswell, which looks at the American Revolution from the viewpoint of the Loyalists who were considered traitors to the American cause. Roberts’ main character has fled to Boston and views the  Battle from the window of a house across the bay from Bunker Hill. After the first volley of guns and cannons,Oliver Wiswell watches the British troops fall, and then reform:

      The scarlet shadow stayed where it was, but the moving scarlet figures went
       swiftly down the hill to the bottom; and there, like scarlet quicksilver, they
       gathered in blobs that expanded, contracted, swirled, thinned and gradually
      flowed again into scarlet lines that lay along the center of the little valley.
      (Roberts p 95)

The “scarlet shadow” he describes is the tangled mass of British bodies felled in the first round of gun volleys. And, of course, we can’t help but think of that other red, the color of blood. Again, nowhere in Roberts’ fictional saga of the Revolutionary War do we hear the term “Red Coats.” According to Wikipedia, the most common epithet for the British soldiers at the time in Boston was “lobsters.”

So, where did it come from, that derisive term we so associate with American history? Apparently, it didn’t come into common usage until the 1880’s when it had became popular among the British themselves. And, Britain was not the only country to use the color red for its military uniform. Apparently, the only country to have antipathy for the “Red Coat” is that rascally upstart offspring of Mother Country, Great Britain—the United States.   

Go, Patriots!    

Sources:
  Peter Brown letter
  Roberts, Kenneth. Oliver Wiswell. New York: Doubleday, 1940. page 5

Megan:

Color(ful Vocabulary) Antipathies

I’ve been wracking my brain trying to think of colors that I dislike so much that I avoid them, but even neon colors (which I extremely dislike) look all right in certain contexts – like Las Vegas (which I also dislike). So I googled this title, and aside from being proud that this website was number three on the listed results, I was surprised to discover this expression has racial and sociological connotations. So Kelly suggested this could seg nicely into a comment on the recent Huck Finn scandal over the replacement of certain words in a new edition intended for children.

We were driving to a grocery store yesterday when my phone beeped with an incoming email and when I checked I saw that it was my daily update from the ALA’s discussion group on LinkedIn. “The Librarians,” I said, turning to Kelly, “are Angry!”
 

Censorship, which is what this revision is being called, is one of several issues librarians are ethically bound to have an opinion on (another is Privacy).  However, a well-reasoned argument on either side of this issue is difficult to achieve when the forum restricts character length (as in Twitter, which is where some of this conversation is taking place), and people react from a hardwired emotional place. And actually, this emotional reaction is what the publishers of the new edition are trying to avoid from young students of color.

From the censorship angle, I just have this to say: we are not being called to burn all former editions of Huck Finn. No one is trying to erase the original text – this new edition everyone is so fired up about is not even the first abridged version to censor the racist lingo. See here a Junior Classics edition published 12 years ago.  I am no fan of censorship in any situation, and if and when I have children, I will make sure they read the original version once they have reached an appropriate age. But like me, they also will never be able to understand the genuine devastation and outrage provoked by that word.

In the course of our discussion, Kelly and I realized that as two highly educated, middle-class, white women our ability to rationally discuss the context and literary value of the n-word was exactly the sort of ‘white privilege’ we heard Black scholars rail against in college. We do not have emotional reactions to this term because we have NO IDEA what it’s like to be systematically oppressed and subjugated (no matter what we might claim when our feminist hats are on) and to claim a place in a discussion of the appropriate use of the N-word is arrogant and disrespectful.