IIII. In my Brooklyn neighborhood,
some Italians and Jews used code:
Black people were moulinyans (eggplants)
and shvartzers (blacks).
When those epithets became
familiar to their subjects,
my Jewish mother spoke of kuzines.
“They won’t know it’s them,” she explained,
“if we use the word for cousins.”
Gyroscope Review 16-4
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