Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2015 January 20

= January 20 =

Golfan/Khalfan tribes in Sudan
Hi, I can find almost no info on the Khalfan and Golfan tribe(s) or ethnic group(s). Are these two spelling for the same group? Thanks. Apokrif (talk) 20:52, 20 January 2015 (UTC)


 * The Hawazma are Arabs. The "Golfan" are Ghulfan, one of the Hill Nubian peoples.  The Khalfan are said to speak the same "dialect" as the Kadaro, Karko, Dilling, Kasha, Wali Boboi, Habila, Kodor, Ferla, Tabag, Abu Gonouk and Fonda.  Most of these I can ID as Hill Nubian peoples.  From this, I strongly suspect "Khalfan" is the Arabic rendering of "Golfan", or that "Khalfan" and "Ghulfan" are both Arabic renderings of the same people.  — kwami (talk) 03:23, 21 January 2015 (UTC)


 * At a guess, the name could begin with the Arabic "q" letter ق, which has a wide range of pronunciations in spoken vernacular Arabic dialects (that's how the beginning of the name of the former Libyan dictator had so many different spellings)... AnonMoos (talk) 18:46, 21 January 2015 (UTC)

Were 1950s American colored drinking fountains safe?
Were they safe to drink from? 140.254.70.33 (talk) 20:53, 20 January 2015 (UTC)


 * Safer than drinking from the "white only" ones. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 21:09, 20 January 2015 (UTC)


 * I would expect so, at least from bacterial/viral/fungal contamination, since they typically would use the same water supply as the "whites only" fountain. Even if the segregationists wanted to connect them to unsafe water, they lacked a ready supply, and it would be very expensive to add additional plumbing and pumps, just to bring in untreated water.  Now, there could have been lead pipes in the "colored" water fountain that they didn't bother to replace after finding out that this can be harmful, but the lead exposure from that would be minor.  I suspect that in many cases, the "colored" drinking fountains were former "whites only" fountains, repurposed after a new "whites only" drinking fountain was installed (say with a cooling unit).  StuRat (talk) 21:20, 20 January 2015 (UTC)


 * Not being familiar with the usage on this side of the pond, I was puzzled as to why the colour of the fountain made a difference to the safety of the water coming out of it. It wasn't until I re-read Stu's use of the plural "whites" that I realised what was being talked about!    D b f i r s   22:16, 20 January 2015 (UTC)


 * The British might consider Hyacinth Bucket's demand of the meter-reader that her electricity not pass through any homes of lesser social standing than her own before she received it. μηδείς (talk) 04:25, 21 January 2015 (UTC)


 * Here's a pic showing that they shared the same water supply: . (I agree that "colored" was a strange word to use, since black, white, and brown are not "colors" but rather neutrals.  Yellow and red are, so perhaps "colored" might have better been applied to East Asians and Native Americans.) StuRat (talk) 22:31, 20 January 2015 (UTC)
 * "Colored" was considered relatively polite, compared with some other things. It was also the standard indicator in documents such as city directories: name, followed by (c) if "colored". And it's interesting to look at census records from that era. Under "race", white is white, but black might be black, colored, or Negro. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 22:38, 20 January 2015 (UTC)
 * Yep, like National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.  St ★ lwart 1 1 1 23:07, 20 January 2015 (UTC)


 * Putting your whole mouth over the spout, as seen here, isn't exactly sanitary. Can catch viruses from other mouths, or just homegrown bacteria. I've seen real people (kids, anyway) do that post-Segregation, so it seems likely some did back then, too. Herpes doesn't discriminate. InedibleHulk (talk) 08:44, 21 January 2015 (UTC)
 * Actually, wait, it does. Lives best in humidity, so a bit more dangerous drinking in the South. InedibleHulk (talk) 08:48, 21 January 2015 (UTC)


 * Yes, as Baseball Bugs notes (tongue-deliciously-in-cheek), Colored fountains were safer to drink from than the White ones -- if you were colored! My attempt to drink from a White one in a Sears in Birmingham, Alabama, on the dare of a pass-for-white cousin who had just done so, was thwarted by a clerk who summoned my shopping grandmother's attention to my not-so-stealthy approach with a politely drawled "Ma'am" and an amused nod in my direction (it was my guilty loitering which must have evoked her suspicion, since the two labelled fountains were side-by-side and she could not have known beforehand which I intended to drink from -- that, and my conversation with what liked like a white girl). I think we all just assumed that the water was the same in both fountains (also in the Colored bathrooms) because it was inconceivable that proprietors would incur the extra expense of separate plumbing and water sourcing. Besides, what would have been the point? The purpose of such segregation, reflective of pervasive and deeply ingrained local culture, was not so much to deprive blacks as to comfort whites (cf., The Help), to whom it probably no more occurred that it was intrinsically humiliating to the other race than people today think restrooms are sex-segregated to humiliate the other gender. We liked going downtown to Sears and seeing "Colored" labels because we could drink and use the restrooms -- especially important when a shopping adult is accompanied by children: most places of business (e.g., restaurants, fuel stations, but excepting government buildings since Plessy v. Ferguson) only had one fountain and one set of men's and women's restrooms which meant, in the American South blacks could not use them at all. From the pov of businesses which could afford to do it, installing "Colored" anything drew in more black customers with green dollars -- no one perceived any political implications of what was an obvious and effective marketing strategy. Structural racism doesn't depend on personal bigotry to pervade inferiority, just compliance with prevalent arrangements. The system, not merely individual attitudes, must be changed to eradicate it: as near as I could detect, that Sears clerk intended no disrespect to me or Grandmother as she enforced racial segregation upon us. FactStraight (talk) 15:17, 21 January 2015 (UTC)


 * Thanks for that; I'd never thought about the economic advantage of installing "colored" facilities. --jpgordon:==( o ) 17:13, 21 January 2015 (UTC)


 * Do you recall if the fountains were identical or if the "colored" fountain was inferior ? I get the impression that was often the case, either because the owner wanted to make blacks feel inferior, or because, if they didn't, then Klansmen or other whites might give them a hassle for encouraging blacks to get "uppity" and act "above their station". StuRat (talk) 17:41, 21 January 2015 (UTC)


 * Could it not also be, as FactStraight sort of hinted at, that because this was an additional expense, and for people who had far fewer choices, they installed inferior facilities because they were cheaper and the target market couldn't do much about it and probably also had lower expectations? And perhaps also the market while providing some financial bonus, was still small enough that those involved didn't feel it worthwhile spending too much money (this is complicated, on the one hand in terms of population size and economic status, they would generally be lower than the white clientale, on the other hand, as said earlier noting FactStraight's point, they had fewer options but I suspect it was rare that the the amount of money they spent came close to the white clientale). Also I presume some of these were retrofitted, which would often mean more difficult or greater expensve achieving the same level of facility. To be clear, I'm not defending the practices in any way, simply suggesting particularly in light of FactStraight's points, in some cases, it may have been they did it mostly based on other financial considerations without intending to send a message (for themselves or for other people, the later of course could also bring in financial considerations). Nil Einne (talk) 21:32, 21 January 2015 (UTC)


 * I failed to make my point if I left anyone in confusion about this: in my recollection, the facilities were identical. I presume there were exceptions (of course, I never entered a White restroom, where differences in upkeep would have been more likely, although blacks who cleaned or served handcloths in them and those nannying White children -- in other words, workers -- did go in), but I don't recall ever noticing any. If a facility was likely to offer Coloreds the amenity (and most did not) it was presumably a minor marginal cost to keep them in similar states of cleanliness and repair for their customers. But, as you note, there would have been no recourse if the Colored ones were filthy or in poor repair compared to the White ones. Yet the notion that the proprietors (or, for that matter, Klansmen) would have deliberately left them in visibly inferior condition misunderstands the nature of this kind of systemic racism, in my opinion, which was not driven by malice or punitiveness, but by a fundamental system of separating the races because one was understood to be inferior -- not because there was a need to make us feel inferior: do you deliberately give a dog dirty water to drink to remind it that it should not expect what you have? No doubt such behavior occurred, but it misunderstands how racism and segregation worked to imagine such animus as the point of rather than incidental to the system: one doesn't need to prove a point that is widely taken for granted. FactStraight (talk) 22:03, 21 January 2015 (UTC)


 * It should be remembered that Jim Crow laws were political, and not necessarily supported by major businesses or common carriers. The privately held railroads fought against segregation of facilities.  It was the state governments that enforced these laws.  As for the facilities, separate but equal was the law of the land since Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896.  But that didn't mean that the states north of the Manson-Nixon Line were required to segregate.  My father, who grew up in Philadelphia, reports being shocked to see signs of Jim Crow the first time he entered Maryland.  From a business standpoint, it simply doesn't make sense to pay for two separate installations when it's cheaper to have the work done at the same time (on a new construction) in bulk, as it were, and hang up signs.  Picture on Google (which have a selection bias for egregious looking cases) show plenty of cases where the black fountain has a smaller bowl, but in these pictures the water comes from the same pipes. μηδείς (talk) 19:20, 22 January 2015 (UTC)