Eyeless on Campus: KUNGFLU--Essay: White Privilege Innuendo--UNIV OF NEVADA, RENO, FALL 2020

Monday, June 22, 2020

KUNGFLU--Essay: White Privilege Innuendo--UNIV OF NEVADA, RENO, FALL 2020

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"...a weather brief from "Joe Crow," which sounds suspiciously similar to "Jim Crow," noted..."

(CHINATOWN, L.A.)-- Where and when an expression was coined and how it was originally used is an indicator of the insensitivity that exists in relation to it. Recently the phrase "kung flu" has resurfaced and is certainly not original. Various online urban slang dictionaries and wiktionaries have their own definitions for the phrase but it is necessary to trace at best its history.

One newspaper search reveals it was used by the film critic Gene Siskel in 1973 in a Chicago Tribune article under the title "Click, chop, ring, chop, chop..." which in itself has charged meaning;
" He was referring to 'Five Fingers of Death,' the fabulously successful karate flick that has generated a film business stampede or if you prefer a worldwide epidemic of kung-flu."
Siskel notes in his closing paragraph that "approximately three-fourths of the audience has been black."

   A year later, the white privilege gossip columnist Marilyn Beck reported in the San Bernardino County Sun that the martial arts star David Carradine had contracted a virus which she referred to as;
   "The flu epidemic has gotten so bad around these parts that even David Carradine has come down with Kung flu."

   Yet again, the white columnist Bob Talbert for the Detroit Free Press used the expression in an article dated a week later;

   "THAT NEW type of Asiatic virus that seems to be paralyzing lots of people could well be called 'Kung Flu.'"
Apparently, there was a rash of ill-humor circulating among white columnists in that politically incorrect narrow time frame where it was a polite laugh referring to the misery suffered by others at the expense of the Asians.
Jack O'Brien, in his Wilkes-Barre Times Leader column, "The Voice of Broadway," mentioned;
   "Westerns are sure popgun flicks; Kung Flu is the new screamage rage so-what do you expect? A Kung Fu western? You got it: 'Blood Money,: starring Lee Van Cleef of the cowpoke flicks and Lo Lieh of the Kung Fuies."
   Clearly, the white columnist crowd of the early Seventies was getting a kick, literally, out of insulting the Asians. Small town Lehi, Utah referred to a play titled "Kung Flu," written by Sue Ellen Baum and starring Glen Smith as the villain who was eventually "chop-sticked" and "karate-chopped" to be "demolished." The phrase had come full circle from an obscure side comment in a Gene Siskel note to a full blown production in the Mormon West.

From Page 1 of the Indianapolis Star in early February 1975, a weather brief from "Joe Crow," which sounds suspiciously similar to "Jim Crow," noted;
"One sufferer of the current influenza says the way it makes him feel it ought to be called Kung Flu."
The brief failed to explain why it ought to be called that and left it up to the reader to translate the meaning.

"Innuendo" is defined in the Oxford dictionary as "an indirect remark about somebody/something, usually suggesting something bad or rude; the use of remarks like this." Certainly, in spite of its offhand comment in today's news, there can be no question from its early use in the politically incorrect climate of the past, that its meaning is tasteless designed, intentionally or otherwise, to undermine a particular ethnic part of society. Initially popularized by what appeared to be an elite circle of white film-gossip critics, it has now been brought back from the dead by the Oval Office.

References
Gene Siskel, Chicago Tribune, 17 May 1973, Section 6, Page 4.
Marilyn Beck, San Bernardino County Sun, 31 Jan 1974,
Bob Talbert, Detroit Free Press, 09 Feb 1974, Page 15-A
Jack O'Brien, Wilkes-Barre Times Leader, 24 May 1974, Page 10
Sue Ellen Baum, Lehi Free Press, 24 Oct 1974, Page 1.
Joe Crow, Indianapolis Star, 03 Feb 1975, Page 1.
innuendo definition, https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/us/definition/english/innuendo
Chinatown image, original photo taken in Los Angeles, 2010
Grasshopper Lighting Candles, https://metsmerizedonline.com/2015/03/who-are-these-swagger-iffic-2015-new-york-mets.html/kung-fu/

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