I must be out of my Cotton Picking Mind, I never knew I was a Racist

It is amazing how my history and culture are being stolen from me.  I listened to a news commentator use the phrase "cotton pickin mind" and later discovered that he was suspended for using the term.   I grew up in the south and that phrase was used in daily conversation and never had any racial context.  But in today's atmosphere of political correctness, my way of using language and symbols is being re-characterized as racist.  "You're out  of your Cotton Pickin Mind"  is now a racist statement?  It must mean that only slaves picked cotton.  There were no white people ever in a cotton field.  Somebody ought to tell Sally Fields that her movie Places in the Heart is historically inaccurate. 

It's really insanity, these land mines that populate our culture.  My grandfather used the word "boy" when he spoke of someone.   It was almost always in reference to a white person.  "That old boy" was a way he most often use the word and usually referred to a friend.  If he was alive today and someone heard him use the phrase, he would be attacked as racist.

It seems to me that African Americans don't want the past to be the past.  One hundred and fifty five years ago, slavery came to an end.  But African Americans will not let it become the past.  They hold on to the affront and use it as currency in their dealing with society.  I personally am tried of being told that I bear some responsibility for the abuse of someone's great, great, great grand parent.  Get over it already!