Is "uppity"

[Marsden]

I like where the people from Rockridge say they'll work with the Nigxxxxs and the Chixxxs but not the Irish.

 

[I'm Cleo!]

Being from the "wrong side of the tracks" refers to blacks in NJ during that states race riots.

I'd never heard this before, and I'm genuinely curious about it, since the line of de facto segregation in New Jersey is the Passaic River, not train tracks anywhere (Harrison, NJ, for example, used to pull up the bridges to Newark at sundown). Maybe it was Newark, and then the whites "fled" across the Passaic River? In Jersey City, with the Erie Cut? I couldn't find this anywhere on the 'Net. Let me know where you heard it.

Cleo

 

[Cutlass]

Because the people who declare what is and isn't racist , the north/west enlightened, don't want it to. Being from the "wrong side of the tracks" refers to blacks in NJ during that states race riots. But that term isn't racist. And it started out as a racist term unlike uppity.

"wrong side of the tracks" started out as being downwind of coal powered locomotives. meaning too poor to live upwind of them. "uppity" started out as trying to be above your assigned station.

 

[Fugitive Sisyphus]

I had an experience today that showed how difficult it is to go through life without leaving yourself open to claims that you are racist. In my Differential Equations class a black guy asked the professor a question and in the answer the professor used the term "kkk" to describe a 3x3 matrix with with all elements in a diagonal a constant 'k'. Snickering ensued.

Now as to whether the congressman had racist meaning behind the word 'uppity', I don't know. I wouldn't think so by reading the quote and assuming the worst because he is from the South sounds like something very similar to racism.