Pot Black Kettle

from the popular idiom

The pot calls the kettle black.

Hypocrisy and an aversion to self-criticism are warned against in this familiar phrase. It derives from a poem in "Maxwell's Elementary Grammar" school book (copyright 1904):

"Oho!' said the pot to the kettle;
"You are dirty and ugly and black!
Sure no one would think you were metal,
Except when you're given a crack."

"Not so! not so! kettle said to the pot;
"'Tis your own dirty image you see;
For I am so clean -without blemish or blot-
That your blackness is mirrored in me."

It is unlikely that the poet/grammarian was familiar with Black Kettle, the Cheyenne chief who evaded Custer at the Sand Creek Massacre. Black Kettle may or may not have advocated an assimilationist attitude towards the encroaching United States, but as a treaty-signing Indian he has come to represent pragmatism and victimhood.

Black Kettle's people were massacred in the name of progress. The shameful Indian Wars are often explained as a "clash of cultures," where the civilized took the reins and destroyed the unenlightened. The United States' blackness was reflected by the indigenous kettle. Maybe a better name for the chief would be "Clean Kettle."