|
Legend: A nervous old lady dives for the elevator floor when a black man gets on and gruffly asks her to 'hit four.' The man turns out to be Eddie Murphy, and as a gallant gesture he pays the lady's hotel bill.
Example: [Collected on the Internet, 1997]
Variations:
Back in the 1980s the celebrity this canard was most often told of was Reggie Jackson; these days it's Eddie Murphy. You'd think a denial from Murphy himself would put matters to rest, wouldn't you. Ah, but you'd be wrong.
Perhaps most damaging to his reputation was what Murphy calls "The Elevator Story." He explained:
It's possible this particular urban legend grew out of a skit on the Bob Newhart Show (an American sitcom, aired "There's a story I was on an elevator with 
man is seen in the reception area trying to control his none-too-cooperative dog. The black man shouts "Sit, Whitey!" at his dog and Jerry (the dentist character) quickly but briefly seats himself on a desk.
It's equally possible it happened the other way around and a current urban legend worked its way into the script of a TV show. Or one might not be related to the other at all. In the Newhart skit, there's no elevator, a key element in every extant version of the legend. Also, although "Sit, lady!" and "Hit the floor!" versions abound, no "Sit, Whitey!" versions have surfaced in oral or written form. Had the Newhart skit truly been what sparked this legend, one would expect to find at least a couple of early tellings which feature this line. The joke concept of the shouted-at dog and the human who thinks the command is meant for him show up in other forums.
[Reader's Digest, 1974]
The Reader's Digest and New York Times versions aside, this is one racist legend. It's color-driven: no versions have been recorded where the famous person assumed to be a potential attacker is not both male and black. Were race not the heavy-hitting factor it is in this piece, one could hardly imagine someone as innocuous as Lionel Ritchie being mistaken for a
During a temporary shutdown of operations at a large plant, trained police dogs were hired to protect the building from vandalism. A company executive who was unaware of the new regime arrived at the plant early one morning. As he was walking down the corridor to his office, he came face to face with one of the dogs, accompanied by his trainer. The dog reacted to the presence of the stranger by baring his teeth and uttering a menacing growl. The executive froze to the spot. The trainer shouted in an authoritative tone the command: "Sit!" Whereupon, the unnerved executive promptly sat down on the floor. [New York Times, 2006] Armed with instructions from the dog trainer, I took my canine grandson, Lucky, a 5-month-old Havanese, for a walk on Amsterdam Avenue. He was forever eating everything on the sidewalk, and the instructor had said to use only one phrase, once, very firmly and loudly. When the dog started to pick up some form of food, I loudly and firmly said, "Drop it." At that moment, a well-dressed man in front of me was bending down to pick up a stray glove, which he immediately dropped and walked briskly away. Lucky proceeded to eat the garbage, but the command certainly worked on a stranger.
It has become fashionable to recast this legend as a liberal morality tale by claiming we, the tellers, are guffawing at the older lady's inappropriate reaction to finding herself in an enclosed space with a black man. Yet this flies in the face of what is known about contemporary lore — central figures in urban legends represent us and our fears; they are rarely (if ever) presented as at-arm's-length characters. We are the little old lady who throws her bucket of quarters in the air; we're not an absent third party who observes the action from a distance and finds the whole thing a telling comment on the human condition. Times are changing, and one of the changes being wrought is the recognition that programmed reactions to black men that characterize them as lurking menaces are wrong. We're not yet far enough advanced to completely shed ourselves of this association, however, so we continue to guiltily share this apprehension with others under the guise of pointing out someone else's color biases. That we now tell this tale in a more distanced fashion speaks to progress being made on this perception, but by the same token, the underlying perception is still very much with us even as we try to deny it by claiming it's other folks who think this way, not us. For what it's worth, people generally don't pick up on the inherent racism in this legend the first couple of times they hear it. The focus is too much on it being a windfall legend brought about by a brush with a wealthy celebrity, one of those everyday miracles that someday, God willing, should happen to us. Barbara "miracle whipped" Mikkelson Last updated: 3 May 2007 Urban Legends Reference Pages © 1995-2010 by Barbara and David P. Mikkelson. This material may not be reproduced without permission. snopes and the snopes.com logo are registered service marks of snopes.com.  Sources:
; Also told in:
|
|
