It's No Picnic.

I am a true believe in knowledge: The More You Know...[NBC jingle]. Even how you know what you know (epistemology) is just as important as the act of knowing (and then, of course, you can get real deep and simply proclaim, "I know nothing.")

All this to say--I feel ignant.

So I'd heard from a close friend that the word "picnic" derives from the longer phrase "pick-a-nigger", back in the good ole days of slavery, lynchings, and general Black genocide. It made "sense"--as much as a statement like that can make sense, and I filed it away in my box of "real, racialized knowledge", alongside the childhood rhyme "Eenie-meenie-miney-mo, catch a nigger by the toe". I shared my little bit of information of a couple of people, and it was accepted as I had readily accepted it. Yesterday, in a one-on-one conversation, another person mentioned the term, and I jumped in with my "knowledge", and I was so surprised by the negative reaction. It simply upset the person that such knowledge should exist, or be passed around. And I thought about it...what does it mean for me to share the "true" etymology of the word "picnic"...what am I trying to get out of it? Where does it really come from?

So, in true academic style (albeit a few days too late), I looked up the word. I found the following on Snopes:

"Picnic began life as a 17th Century word-it wasn't even close to an American invention...as for how the French came by this new term, it was likely invented by joining the common form of the verb 'piquer' (meaning to 'pick' or 'peck') and a nonsense rhyming syllable coined to fit the first half of this new palate pleaser.

"One has to wonder at the workings of the mind of someone who'd invent this spurious "pick a nigger" derivation and then set it loose on the internet. Of course, the fact that it's spurious hasn't deterred those who are determined to find something to be offended by, as noted in this excerpt from a 2000 National Post article:

Meanwhile things are not peachy on the campus of SUNY Albany. The university wanted to honour baseball legend Jackie Robinson by having a picnic. But the university's equity office said this must not occur because the word "picnic" referred originally to gathers held to lynch Blacks. In fact, as one of their own English professors (rather less committed to historical revisions than RMC's Dr. Robinson) pointed out, the word "picnic" actually comes from a 17th century French word that denotes a party at which everything brings food. But Zaheer Mustafa, the equity officer, nevertheless decreed that "picnic" not be used because "the point is --the word offends." So the university decided to call it an "outing". The homosexual students took objection to that, and SUNY decided to publicize the even without using any noun to describe it."

The article does on later to say that Black people tend to believe negative stereotypes, and I pursed my lips that one--as if all of America and the Western world doesn't believe that Black people are lazy, crazy, and the absolute worse thing to be. But putting that aside, what does it mean that it was so easy for me and others to accept that piece of information? And frankly, it didn't seem all that far-fetched (Eenie-meenie-miney-mo, catch a nigger by the toe is actually true) all things considering. Secondly, so did I expect all of the people I told to stop using the word "picnic"? What about the term "the itis" from "niggeritis" (an ignorant term used to describe the feeling of lethargy after having a big meal)? Should we stop using all terms that are deemed problematic, or can we use them and just be conscious when we use them?

And, more to the point of this post, how can we ever really know, when even the most educated get things wrong too?

Now I'm simply rambling. Lessons learned:
1. Don't take information at face value (and after a year of graduate school, I figure that out only now), and
2. Don't take it upon myself to educate the masses. Let's stick to educating myself first.

Here's to picnics and the inevitable itis.