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Is Sarah Palin Uppity?

By Jeffrey Harrison

"Uppity" is a word I have never heard used except in the context of discussions about the word "uppity." I see in the press that it is used from time to time to describe people who are asking for greater respect and deference than they somehow deserve. I think someone in Georgia was quoted as saying Barak Obama is uppity.

I looked in the dictionary for the word uppity and it was "affecting an attitude of inflated self-esteem; haughty, snobbish; rebelliously self-assertive; not inclined to be tractable of deferential." I would not have been surprised to see the same definition after the word "elitist."

Clearly this is not Barak Obama. In fact he is the opposite. He appear to be "affecting an attitude of a deflated self-esteem" so in can appeal to the rank and file.

In reality what uppity means (how can the dictionary get it so wrong?) is not knowing that one's place is below that of those calling you uppity. Thus, when applied by a white person to a black person because the person is black is it is unconditional racist.

I suspect, though, that if white upper class people ever used the word in the disparaging way is it is normally used they would be referring to Sarah Palin. In fact, most of the pot shots and eye rolling from elitist whites are clearly ways of communicating that she is uppity.

For me she is like a thousand finger nails scraping across the blackboard, two hundred cars next to me at a red light all playing the bass so loud that my fillings are rattling and a really large person next to me on a 8 hour flight but not uppity. Slap a Harvard degree on her and change nothing else and she would not be uppity to them either.

Full post as published by Class Bias in Higher Education on September 19, 2008 (boomark / email).