SELECT 'name' FROM 'slave owners' BY 'gender'.

January 12, 2001 3:57 PM

SELECT 'name' FROM 'slave owners' BY 'gender'. It's an SQL joke. Geddit? Geddit? Oh never mind.
posted by holloway (24 comments total)

a broken SQL joke. I think you meant SELECT 'name' FROM 'slave owners' ORDER BY 'gender'. or perhaps GROUP BY.
posted by quonsar at 4:02 PM on January 12, 2001

a broken SQL joke. I think you meant SELECT 'name' FROM 'slave owners' ORDER BY 'gender'. or perhaps GROUP BY.

posted by quonsar at 4:03 PM on January 12, 2001

oh, crap!
posted by quonsar at 4:03 PM on January 12, 2001

arghh... my SQL ain't so kewl.

It's a rhyming joke? Geddit? Geddit?
posted by holloway at 4:14 PM on January 12, 2001

I did SQL ages ago but I don't actually remember any of it. Would you care to explain how it relates to the article (which is a worthwhile link IMHO)?
posted by davidgentle at 4:14 PM on January 12, 2001

First, a note on the SQL statement. I'm assuming ORDER BY, because that would return an entire list of slave owner names, females first then males. (Females first because default in most database systems is alphabetical).

GROUP BY would only return 2 records, assuming it even worked without an aggregate on the field by.

Question: Which DBMS do you usually use? In the ones I'm familiar with (MS SQL Server and MySQL) quotes around object names, and spaces in object names, is generally frowned upon. That's just pure geek curiosity there. :-)

The article points out that slave owners weren't just males, and that myths of white women being kinder to their slaves are untrue.

The SQL statement is intended to select all slave owners and, as mentioned above, order them by their gender. Some of the records of the theoretical table 'slave owner' would be female, as revealed in the article.

Going out on a bit of a limb, I'd say he's saying "Well, duh, look at the records and you can SEE that there were female slave owners."

And it was indeed a good article, thank you.
posted by cCranium at 4:57 PM on January 12, 2001

Perhaps: "SELECT name,racism FROM slave_owners WHERE gender IS LIKE 'female'"
posted by rschram at 5:02 PM on January 12, 2001

"...WHERE gender IS LIKE 'fe%'," even. Oh, the raging dorkitude.
posted by snarkout at 5:07 PM on January 12, 2001

Yeah; it's amazing what you can learn about people from, oh, their reactions to an Al Gore/Internet posting; eh? :-)

Definitely, the last couple. But it would be SEX; gender is an attribute of words; and it would be =; SEX would be CHAR(1).

If not DECIMAL(1); there *is*, believe it or not, an ISO standard numeric mapping for SEX.
posted by baylink at 5:20 PM on January 12, 2001

better yet, a table called gender with numerical id's that are foreign-keyed from slave_owners so you don't have to do string comparisons.
posted by cCranium at 5:21 PM on January 12, 2001

But wait! SQL supports statistical calculations. We can compare the AVG racism for gender="M" to that of gender="F". Let me grab my Pink Bird Book!
posted by rschram at 5:26 PM on January 12, 2001

weirdest thread ever.
posted by sudama at 6:07 PM on January 12, 2001

Certainly the fastest, most prolific topic drift I've seen here. :-)
posted by cCranium at 6:15 PM on January 12, 2001

Dear sweet Jesus. Threads like this make me wish I was in, say, marketting instead of tech. Or a taxi driver. Yeah, I can be a taxi driver.
posted by littleyellowdifferent at 7:45 PM on January 12, 2001

Wonderfully odd thread. As a one-off I likes it. I likes it a lot.

If anyone was thinking aloud to themselves, "why the SQL?". I was making a completely hack reference to a certain news site that's boldest attempt at humour is pseudo code with HiLaRiOuS variable names. For example:

if ($punter's_wallet > 100) {$amazon_price = 49.95} else {$amazon_price = 45}

In rather poor fashion it's soon followed by people correcting the syntax! :)

It's not funny. Stop it. I hate you.

Now, on-topic and less bitter. I do think there's a general myth that woman are kinder or more sympathetic than men (more in touch with their feelings, while men are in touch with power tools, ARRF! ARRF!).

I have read that sea-going slave owners (oar rowers I assume) were mostly black. I don't quite believe that.

ps. I blame Doctor Quinn and others that try to rewrite history. As if 50% of the people in that town wouldn't have been vile racists.
posted by holloway at 8:18 PM on January 12, 2001

A useful corrollary to this paper (the one quoted in the link) is the Mammy myth: how the image of the Aunt Jemima female house slave was developed in reaction to the dialectic of Southern slave-owning society. A Mammy was a safe image and a comforting one which took the edge off of slavery.
posted by dhartung at 10:33 PM on January 12, 2001

I used to use stupid variable names in my code.
youarejesus:=rhesusmonkey+nonokeepoutofmyheadphantomboy
Then I started trying to maintain my code. I learnt my lesson.
Yes I realise this is even further off topic. Sorry. Allow me to try and guide myself back on topic by asking this question:
What does the general (and, according to the article, false) assumption that female slave owners treated their female slaves better than male slave owners say about our society?
posted by davidgentle at 10:57 PM on January 12, 2001

How much of it is related to Uncle Tom's Cabin and the fact that abolition was the first widespread political movement that encouraged women to be active participants (speakers, organizers, petition-circulators, etc.)?
posted by snarkout at 8:11 AM on January 13, 2001

When you're out in the field picking cotton and feeding the chickens and then forced to have sex with the master at night. How can the black slave woman follow the traditional rules of what it means to be feminine. And how can the white women like the black women especially when she sees her husband fathering "mocha colored children" right in front of her face. Then turns around and calls the slaves inferior and savages.


posted by passionblack at 11:58 AM on January 13, 2001

"nonokeepoutofmyheadphantomboy"?

Jeezus...

:-}
posted by baylink at 1:46 PM on January 13, 2001

Hey, now you STOP that off topic business.
posted by davidgentle at 5:42 PM on January 13, 2001

I used to use stupid variable names in my code.
youarejesus:=rhesusmonkey+nonokeepoutofmyheadphantomboy
Then I started trying to maintain my code. I learnt my lesson.

Did you also stop using Pascal/Ada? I hope, I hope. :)
posted by daveadams at 10:14 AM on January 16, 2001

It was COBOL but I don't remember how to do assignments in that. I have programmed in ADA and Pascal as well, though. And Amiga E. And java. And c++.
I am obviously L33t.
posted by davidgentle at 1:40 PM on January 16, 2001

In COBOL you would do it like so:

ADD RHESUS-MONKEY TO NO-NO-KEEP-OUT-OF-MY-HEAD-PHANTOM-BOY GIVING YOU-ARE-JESUS.

posted by kindall at 5:15 PM on January 16, 2001