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Comment by megmogandog | Hacker News Reader

There's a lot of great stuff in this interview, but what really floored me was the question, after Miles had talked so much and so eloquently about race in America and his experiences, "Have you always been so sensitive about being a N**?" Like nothing Miles said entered the reporter's skull.

It's also interesting to see how much he talks about the importance of representation in the media. Given that's something we've only started to see change much in the last 10 years or so, I wonder how his remarks were received then. Would it have seemed totally out of left field, like 'what is this guy even talking about'?

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> Like nothing Miles said entered the reporter's skull.

> I know this interview is from 1962, but are you fucking kidding me?

Commenters might be interested to know that the interviewer in question was Alex Haley. I don't know why OP's version leaves that out.

(Haley did several Playboy interviews, including that with the Klansman; all that I have read thus far have been worth reading.)

It's 1962. "Negro" was the polite word, you don't have to asterisk it.

Oh, that changes the meaning of the sentence significantly.

It does.

Fwiw, Alex Haley was also black, so he was perhaps asking from a shared perspective.

And "Black" was a pejorative.

Steven King used this in "Dark Tower" to show that members of ka-tet were from different times

I'm aware of the context and took no offense when I read it; I asterisked it for 2023.

For what it's worth, the asterix is confusing. Your comment gave me a wildly different (apparently incorrect) impression.

> "Have you always been so sensitive about being a N**?"

Please don't. You severely misquoted by using the ** here. The original word was "Negro", not what many peoplr (including myself) might have thought when reading your comment.

The reporter was black himself, and well aware about the experience of blacks in America. He wanted to make a point and have Miles elaborate on that and his backstory with it.

> There's a lot of great stuff in this interview, but what really floored me was the question, after Miles had talked so much and so eloquently about race in America and his experiences, "Have you always been so sensitive about being a N*?" Like nothing Miles said entered the reporter's skull.

There are several points in this interview with archaic / anachronistic language that read a bit oddly to me, which is what I think is going on here.

My suspicion is that being "sensitive" has some kind of negative connotation to a modern reader than it mightn't have at the time. Note that Davis himself repeats the term and doesn't exhibit any inkling of having taken offense.

> Being sensitive and having race pride has been in my family since slave days

Try substituting other turns of phrases here to see how they feel. Like, "Have you always had such strongly held opinions about" or "have you always been so thoughtful about" or "passionate" etc. I think it's more telling about the modern reader looking back that we somehow find using "sensitive" here jarring - why should we do so?

Seems like a fair question. He wasn't suggesting that it was wrong to be sensitive, he's just trying to learn about a man's history and whether it was a lifelong thing or if some particular incident had made him sensitive to it.

Yep. Journalists' questions can be very direct, and very pointed. It tends to make them sound callous, but it's necessary to get the best answer.

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