1,383 words / 10:02

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From the picture I’ve seen, the cow who unwittingly found herself being milked for yet another painfully tiresome national conversation about race has markings that are only about 20% black and 80% white, so I’m not sure whether black people or white people should be more offended by the fact that one of its names is Jigaboo.

The unlucky beast’s full official “cow name” — I’ve never claimed to be a cowboy, and I reckon that the proper term isn’t even “cow name” — is Milgene Tatoo Jigaboo. Its cow parents were Duckett Crush Tatoo (sire) and Milgene Beemer Jiggly (dam). The hapless cow was bred by the Hildebrandt family from Hustisford, Wisconsin, and rumor has it that the family’s kids traditionally name their cows.

I’d be surprised — and somewhat pleased — if one in 1,000 white American children these days has ever heard the word “jigaboo” used as an anti-black slur. It’s probably much more likely that if it was indeed one of the kids who named the predominantly white cow, they were probably combining “Jiggly” and “Tatoo,” and possibly even adding the urban black term of endearment “boo” on the end rather than saying, “This cow is a violent, rape-prone pickaninny who needs to be lynched.”

Naturally, hardly anyone else seems to see it the way that I do.

Earlier this month at the Wisconsin State Fair, which apparently holds some kind of yearly cow contest, Ms. Milgene Tatoo Jigaboo won the top prize in the Senior three-year-old category.

David Blake is a bovine-sized white Wisconsinite from the town of Pewaukee, which is a mere four miles from Waukesha, where Darrell Brooks, a man with a history of making anti-white statements, plowed through a crowd at a Christmas Parade in November 2021, killing six white people and injuring dozens more.

This past Thursday, Blake was attending the Wisconsin State Fair, saw the cow’s name posted in a barn, and was so offended on behalf of all black people that he took positive action. He posted a picture of the cow’s nameplate onto social media, it stirred the outrage and attention that he was obviously seeking, and when a news station contacted him, he told them:

We’re walking through the dairy barn, enjoying ourselves, and came across the nameplate and [I] was kind of taken aback. . . . It’s one of those words, one of those few words that should be totally off-limits. I mean, there’s a big one that we all know, and I think it’s on the same level. . . . Disgusting, and definitely not something people should be using. And shame on the State Fair. I’d assume there’d be policies in place where they kind of look at the names and everything. . . .

Many early news reports dared not print the highly offensive word, instead describing it as a “seven-letter” slur referring to black people, which had me reaching for the ever-handy Racial Slur Database’s section on blacks —  which, in addition to “jigaboo,” yielded the following seven-letter epithets:

African
Bootlip
Brownie
Gorilla
Hambone
McNigga
Milk Dud
Negroid
Primate
Suspect
Tar Baby

Some speculated that the cow’s seven-letter name was “Scholar.” Later reports confirmed that the unspeakable and largely unprintable slur was “Jigaboo,” which had online pranksters suggesting that the cow should have been named “Jiga-Moo.”

The Online Etymology Dictionary says that the word “jigaboo” first appeared around the year 1909 and may have been a portmanteau of “jig” and “bugaboo.” Wiktionary says it’s “Possibly an African word akin to [the] Bantu tshikabo (‘they bow the head docilely’).”

Vaun Mayes is a “community activist” who bills himself as “Milwaukee’s Malcolm X.” Last Friday, the day after the fat noble white man named David Blake alerted the world to the ongoing hate crime at the Wisconsin State Fair, Mayes posted on his Facebook page:

Ummmm Wisconsin State Fair this shit has to come down. ASAP. Quit playing in our face. We KNOW this term is derogatory.

Almost immediately, the State Fair ousted the Hildebrandt family from the fairgrounds, changed the cow’s name on official documents from “Jigaboo” to “Puzzle,” and issued a hurried apology:

We do not tolerate or condone this behavior and took swift and deliberate action to rectify this situation. The animal has been removed from State Fair Park. The exhibitor who showed this animal was part of our junior show and is also no longer at State Fair Park.

Shortly thereafter, the Hildebrandt family pecked out their own rushed apologia, claiming that they didn’t know that “jigaboo” was a racial slur:

We want to extend our sincere apologies to the Black [sic] community, the Wisconsin State Fair and fellow dairy farmers about the racially insensitive term we used to name one of our cows. We now recognize that use of this word is unacceptable and harmful. Immediately upon learning the meaning of this term, we changed the cow’s name. We are committed to educating ourselves further.

Less than 90 minutes after the Hildebrandt family groveled to the entire black community — which I’ll assume includes not only black people in Wisconsin, but all across the United States, the globe, and whatever black astronauts are currently in outer space — Vaun Mayes said he wasn’t buying their claim that they didn’t know “jigaboo” was a more lighthearted way of saying “nigger”:

Well, thank you Wisconsin State Fair ousting this vendor. . . . How this got past yall [sic], I have no clue but again setting a precedence [sic] and taking a proactive stance would be smart for the future. I’m just NOT tho [sic] with this “apology” and explanation of why the cow was named that tho [sic]. Try again, there’s no way that was done accidentally. It’s a pretty specific name with a pretty specific history. Next time, the Hat Signal is liable to be activated

The “Hat Signal” is a new meme referring to the Montgomery Riverfront Race Riot, which I covered only last week. During that event, a black man named Damien Pickett signaled his willingness to fight back against a white man by taking off his hat and tossing it into the air. Subsequently, over a dozen black people took the “Hat Signal” as a sign to start punching and kicking and smashing folding chairs over white people’s heads. In effect, Vaun Mayes is saying that in the future, if any white person dares to call a cow Buckwheat or Mammy or, heavens forfend, Junglebunny, he and his armies of Mandingo warriors will get violent.

As a colored fella, Vaun Mayes has quite a colorful history. He is a convicted felon who is still facing federal charges alleging that he “Involved Children in [a] Firebombing Plot” which, according to federal documents, had “the children create a diversion by throwing rocks at police; then at the same time, adults would throw the Molotov cocktails at a Milwaukee Police Station and at residential homes in West Allis ‘where white people live.’”

But clearly none of this is as bad as naming a cow Jigaboo.

A dozen years ago at the Wisconsin State Fair, roving mobs of black youths attacked white people seemingly at random. One black teen told police that he picked out white people because he saw them as “easy targets.”

A white man named Jon Stikl told the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel:

You could just tell they were after white people. That was the main thing. If you were white, they were coming after you. . . . We noticed a group of five to 10 young black males run up and jump a young white male for no other reason then him being white.

An unnamed man told the Journal-Sentinel that from his vantage point on a Ferris wheel, he saw a group of about 200-300 people randomly attacking people down on the ground:

I’ve never seen anything like this in my life. . . . There was just this big group that kept growing and chanting, ‘Fight, fight, fight’ . . . Then when security showed up blowing some whistles, all of this mob started running. It was like a herd of cattle.

Still, 200-300 black people randomly attacking white people and then fleeing like a herd of cattle is not nearly as bad as naming a cow Jigaboo.

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