As with many other racialized terms, there were efforts to reclaim the word after it had become a slur. Four years after Malcolm X was killed in 1965, poet Ted Joans eulogized him in his poem “.” The artist David Hammons also explored the negative connotations to the word in his 1973 sculpture “.” Hammons that he began to incorporate spades into his work because “I was called a spade once, and I didn’t know what it meant… so I took the shape and started painting it.” And a character in 2009’s Black Dynamite (a spoof of the Blaxploitation films of the 1970s) that he’s “blacker than the ace of spades and more militant than you.”
So what does all of this mean for people who want to, well, “call a spade a spade”? I urge caution. Mieder concludes his case study with the argument that “to call a spade a spade” should be retired from modern usage. “Rather than taking the chance of unintentionally offending someone or of being misunderstood, it is best to relinquish the old innocuous proverbial expression all together.”
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