Hold on a second THG. Help me understand how anyone who knows the era in which Buckwheat and the little rascal was produced, does not think that calling a kid Buckwheat was not a racist slap in the face of the poor student who had to endure it along with the other African Americans in attendance.
Allow me some air time as I just joined this group a few days ago. Here is a little history lesson for you all BR.
First, I love kids and the sports that they play. The mere fact that kids went to a game and called a player out of his name is WRONG. They did not critize his game or his skills rather they called him Buckwheat. What the hell does that have to do with basket ball? The name Buckwheat carries all the sterotypes associated with the actual character (coward, dumb, follower, pest, lazy, etc...). The era of the little rascal was after the minstrel shows based on the book by Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin. In the book Uncle Tom was relatively intelligent, although not educated, and an example of Christian morality, in one sense. On stage in the minstrel show he became the shuffling toady. He became the sniveling black man who was really a coward and was ignorant and somewhat comical in his connection to the slave masters. Any resemblance between uncle Tom and Buckwheat's character is not by chance my friend. It is by design. The design was to continue to de-humanize an entire race of people by feeding them images of themselves that made them feel less than human. I fully understand why my mother kept me from watching that crap. So, Buckwheat's image came totally from minstrelsy, and if we could go down the line and point out other ways in which those images pervaded the society at that time, those were the images, that was the sense of what black people were like. Therefore, when the kids called the guy Buckwheat please don't think for one second that it was not RACIST! IT WAS RACIST! They might as well have called him lazy, shiftless, coward, dumb, Coon, stupid, and many other adjectives that I care not the write. I hope this point is clear. Now, it could be that the kids who called him Buckwheat do not know the history in which case I would blame not only them but the Educational Institution who claims to be educating them! I.E. BR!
Now, I'd like to address the Curly comment and how it would not be consider racist for a Leo kid to call a BR kid Curly. You know, you are correct in that it would not be racist but you don't know why? The reason it would not be racist is not because the kid actually looks like Curly as you maintain. It would not be racist because the reference to Curly comes in the context of the Three Stooges. Now granted they were all crazy, but there was a balance in the show where you had at least one leader (Moe) and all the characters were white. In the little rascals, the Buckwheat character was all there was with repsect to Blacks. So, you did not have a balance to offset the baffon image that he protrayed. You could not see a black who had some sense on the show. All you saw was the sterotype. Why? Because that all they wanted you to see. The did not want you to think for one second that blacks could do anything productive.
I could go on but I need to close down now. I hope you feel me on this and more importantly I hope that you will not give the kids at BR an excuse to a call anyone out of their name whether it is racist or not. The kids were wrong and it was racist. Now that's the fact. I would have respected BR much more if they accepted it as such and worked on educating the students as to why African Americans took offense to the comment. Maybe this can start with you. It's never to late. I'm sure you have shared the views in your last mail to some of your friends. I ask now that you rethink them and open the dialoge with your friends again based on some input from a African American (me)who takes offense to anyone calling a black person Buckwheat.
Lastly, less you think that I'm smart please take a look at the following PBS website on Blackface Minstrelsy