a day in court

I was in court yesterday and although I recently graduated law school I wasn’t there to represent anyone, nor was I there to chat with a judge or observe lawyers in action. I was there because I had to drive my mother. It wasn’t for anything too bad. She just had some tickets or traffic violations that hadn’t been paid and were probably some kind of violation of probation, I don’t really know because I didn’t really ask. Anyway, I go to take her and my uncle wanted to come along for the ride. We get there and it’s a small, town court in another county. Really small. My mom has to sign in and she sits in front waiting on her lawyer. My uncle and I pass through security behind her and for some reason unbeknownst to anyone, my uncle signs his name too. My mother yells at my uncle to quit writing his damned name because that’s the list that goes to the judge which he’ll use to call on the people there to go before him. With this knowledge, my uncle starts frantically crossing his n ame out. See, this idiot has been before this particular judge before and from what I could gather, they don’t have that great of a relationship. Plus my uncle thinks there’s a possibility that there could be a warrant for him in this county or some reason they’d wanna lock him up. Basically, signing his name down there was tantamount to turning himself in. What a retard, right? I don’t even know why he would volunteer to walk up in the courtroom knowing all of this ahead of time. Now, nothing happened. My mom got called, she and her attorney went up to the bench and got a continuance. Womp womp. I just had to point out my uncle’s stupidity for the gazillionth time.

babydaddy/babymama

When speakers use the phrases “baby daddy” and “baby mama” in non-colloquial contexts, do they mock African-Americans or do they embrace one way that the American vocabulary has been enriched by the contributions of African-Americans?  Both?  Neither?

The above query comes from the post “White People’s ‘Baby Daddy'”on the Feminist Law Professors blog and I must admit that I’ve often wondered the same thing – do the terms ‘baby daddy/father’ and ‘baby mama’ take on a different meaning or carry a different connotation when used by white people? I want to say no because I don’t want to think that any particular group has ownership or privilege over certain words. Yet regardless of what I want to believe, I know that’s not true. We only need to look at the ‘nigga/nigger’ debate to understand how a word can have different meaning and impact depending on who is using it. For the most part, Black people own that word and, until recently, have been able to say it without being demonized or called racist. Bridget Crawford continues…