The Last Repository of “NIGGER”
Posted by Warm Southern Breeze on Saturday, June 22, 2024
FAIR WARNING:
Your tender feelings & ignorantly stupid conservatively woke mind will be hurt.
Science is now prognosticating that cervids, i.e., the deer family, in United States – whitetail, mule, blacktail, caribou, elk, moose, etc. – are now, or very likely will be, the solitary repository of SARS-CoV-2, aka “coronavirus disease,” in North America.
That is to say, once the infection rate for the disease gets to its lowest point in humans, it will not have been eradicated, simply because it will remain “at large” among deer.
Q: What’s the difference between Dave Chappelle saying “nigger,” and a White man saying “nigger”?
A: 1.) None.
-or-
2.) The color of the man saying it.
Does the word NIGGER have a different meaning when a Black man says it?
No.
Then why is it verboten for the White man to say it?
It’s hypocrisy’s finest hour.
Does “cream cheese soup” have a different meaning when spoken by Russians? By Brazilians? By Africans? By Australians? By pastors, priests, rabbis, mullahs, mechanics, or morons?
Some say, “Oh, we’ll let NIGGERS use that word, while we’ll sanitize our pure-as-the-driven-snow conservatively woke white-bread mouths by referring to the word ‘NIGGER’ as ‘the N-word.'”
F-bomb that dookey.
Even the goddamn dictionary has the word “NIGGER” in it.
The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition states this about the word “NIGGER”:
n. Offensive Slang
1.
2. Used as a disparaging term for a member of any socially, economically, or politically deprived group of people.
Collins English Dictionary – Complete and Unabridged, 12th Edition writes this about the word “NIGGER”:
nigger
(ˈnɪɡə)
n
1.
[C18: from C16 dialect neeger, from French nègre, from Spanish Negro1]
Random House Kernerman Webster’s College Dictionary writes this about the word “NIGGER”:
nig•ger
(ˈnɪg ər)
n.
—n.
1. Slang: Extremely Disparaging and Offensive.
[1640–50; < French nègre < Sp negro black]
NOWHERE in ANY of those definitions is there any hint, or suggestion of a different meaning dependent upon who uses that word.
Words most often have the same meaning when spoken by different people. For example, when the surgeon talks about doolollies, s/he means doolollies. Same thing when the mechanic talks about doolollies. Same thing when the baker talks about doolollies.
A doolollie is a goddamn doolollie no matter who talks about it. A doolollie does NOT change when someone else talks about it.
When a Black man goes to a Krispy Kreme doughnuttery and orders a chocolate glazed, vanilla creme-filled doughnut, the clerk does not “translate” that into “plain” doughnut. It is not some kind of surreptitiously oblique or “secret” code used by Black men to identify a plain doughnut.
Somewhere along the way, the Latin word “niger,” meaning “black” — which also happens to be the name of a nation within the African continent — became bastardized, hybridized, and perverted into a pejorative, a derogatory epithet, as did the Spanish “negro” which also means “black.” It’s easy to see, literally see, why, simply because of the spelling. But when did it become a sobriquet to be casually tossed about, and applied to dark-skinned folks by themselves?
Well, as it turns out, we can thank Dr. Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor, PhD, of Smith College in Northampton, MA, who specializes in 19th-century U.S. history and race, for her scholarly work in 2016 entitled “The Etymology of Nigger: Resistance, Language, and the Politics of Freedom in the Antebellum North,” which was published in the peer-reviewed journal “Journal of the Early Republic,” Volume 36, Number 2, Summer 2016, pp. 203-245, published by University of Pennsylvania Press.
In it she writes,
“In 1837, Hosea Easton, a black minister from Hartford, Connecticut, was one of the earliest black intellectuals to write about the word ‘‘nigger.’’ In several pages, he documented how it was an omnipresent refrain in the streets of the antebellum North, used by whites to terrorize ‘‘colored travelers,’’ a term that elite African Americans with the financial ability and personal inclination to travel used to describe themselves. On reflecting upon the ways that the word nigger impacted colored travelers, Easton painted a picture of an urban landscape in which ‘‘little urchins of Christian villagers’’ pestered black men and women as they passed. He said white parents and teachers used the word to instruct children that blacks were deficient, but also to show how their own racial status was precarious. They disciplined white children with stories of nigger boogeymen and promised a child would ‘‘have no more credit than a nigger’’ if she misbehaved. Children absorbed their racial lessons and reacted with open hostility when they saw real black people. White children taunted, ‘‘see nigger’s thick lips— see his flat nose—nigger eye shine—that slick looking nigger—nigger, where you get so much coat?—that’s a nigger priest.’’ As he moved throughout the North, Easton experienced a cacophony of children’s voices that ‘‘continually infest[ed] the feelings of colored travellers, like the pestiferous breath of young devils,’’ and white adults were ‘‘heard to join in the concert.’’ The same year, a white abolitionist concurred and highlighted how whites deployed the word nigger to hamper black mobility, noting that ‘‘if a negro walked the street, he was often hailed by men and boys with ‘Cuffee – nigger!’ or the like.’’
“In the antebellum United States, colored travelers were acutely aware that travel at home—not the houses in which they lived, but the streets, towns, and cities they traversed—was fundamentally inhospitable. Going out in public meant confronting the verbal assault ‘‘nigger.’’ This single word—nigger—captured the magnitude of anti-black feeling and was unleashed upon free people as they moved through urban space, rode public vehicles, and even ventured abroad. For free African Americans, independent travel within their hometowns and beyond was stressful, dangerous, and sometimes deadly. The ubiquity of the word nigger illuminated the limits of their freedom. Despite the fact that by 1800 Vermont, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts were ostensibly free states and between 1780 and 1804 New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey passed a series of gradual abolition laws to end enslavement, the institution still left an indelible mark in the region. Without the racial control that slavery ensured, anti-black violence increased in the 1820s North. Prior to the 1770s, the labels nigger and slave were interchangeable, each describing an actual social category of involuntary black laborers. As African Americans became free in the North, however, nigger latched on like a shackle. White Americans of all classes and ages hissed out the word, branding free black people as foul smelling, unproductive, licentious, and unfit for self-rule. By the 1820s, blackness, not slavery, marked people of color as occupying a fixed social class. Most significantly, the word nigger became a slur in conversation with black social aspiration. In the early nineteenth century, a small but influential black middle class—a group characterized by education and activism, not necessarily prosperity—began to defy their prescribed roles as laborers. They asserted their right to equal access to the goods and services designed for public consumption, including entrée into vehicles of transportation, theaters, taverns, and inns. To prevent such freedom of mobility, nigger emerged as a weapon of racial containment, a barometer against which to measure the increasingly rigid boundaries of whiteness and a mechanism used to police and cleanse public space.
“Colored travelers such as Hosea Easton, David Walker, Frederick Douglass, J. W. C. Pennington, William Wells Brown, and Harriet Jacobs used the word nigger in their lectures and literary productions to expose and protest the complex relationship they had with the place they called home. An etymology of the word from descriptor to epithet shows how and why black activists designated it a verbal symbol of U.S. racial repression, even as African American laborers continued to use it.
“Indeed, the word became virulent precisely because black laborers integrated it into their own vocabularies, a practice that is an understudied and overlooked aspect of African American history. [emphasis added, ed.] In other words, the label carried so much discursive weight because black laborers spoke it, self-identified as such, and by so doing, subverted notions of race and class identity in the United States. In turn, whites disavowed the word’s traceable European origins, and by the 1820s largely used it to mock black speech. They placed the onus of black subordination on black people themselves, using African American vernacular to make inequality appear both logical and natural. When the transatlantic abolitionist movement was underway by the 1830s, black activists unmasked the venomous dialectics of nigger. They elevated the word to epithet, uttering it publicly with reluctance and only to demonstrate the oppressive inequality and political hypocrisy endemic to the country of their birth. [emphasis added, ed.]
…
“Scholars, in turn, have tended to interpret the black use of nigger much as the nineteenth-century foreign observers had: African American speakers were simply adopting the language of the oppressor and thus mimicking Anglo American racial conventions in the process. In turn, scholars have glossed over, justified, or condemned this behavior— calling black usage a sign of affection at its best or of class arrogance or counterrevolutionary ignorance at its worst. In his important book on who can and cannot say the ‘‘n-word,’’ Jabari Asim even asserts that antebellum African Americans who used the word were playing ‘‘into the hands of those who opposed their cause.’’ Yet, as the writings of Walker attest, the black use of nigger was more complicated than one simple explanation can neatly convey. Instead of thinking of nigger purely as a word that African Americans borrowed and mimicked from white English, it is more accurate to conceptualize it as a word and a social identity that black laborers ultimately shaped for themselves.”
Major League Baseball Hall of Fame member Reggie Jackson at Rickwood Field, Birmingham, AL, baseball’s oldest professional ballpark, 21 June 2024, where he recounted years of horrifying abuse and mistreatment because of hatred of the color of his skin, which notably included Alabama.
Again, use of the term “nigger” even into the 1960’s, and later, was clearly meant as a castigating slur, a denigrating derogatory epithet, as evidenced by the remarks made by legendary baseball great, Hall of Fame member Reggie Jackson, who stated — on live national teevee, no less — from Birmingham, Alabama’s historical Rickwood Field, where Negro League Baseball team Birmingham Black Barons played — and where baseball’s renown, legendary “Say Hey Kid” Willie Mays, a native Alabamian, who died recently, got his start.
The event was a celebration commemorating and memorializing Willie Mays, and was MLB’s Negro League tribute game between the St. Louis Cardinals and San Francisco Giants.
Reggie was asked about returning to Birmingham, Alabama’s Rickwood Field — America’s oldest professional ballpark — and how it made him feel, and how his experiencing racism while playing Major League Baseball affected him. Present were Alex Rodriguez, David Ortiz, and Derek Jeter.
[NOTE: Reggie Jackson’s professional baseball career began in 1967 with the Birmingham A’s, formerly Birmingham Black Barons, and Birmingham Barons, which was the “farm team” for the Kansas City Athletics, aka Kansas City A’s. With the advent of integration, and enforcement of equality under law for all, the segregated Negro League Baseball, minor and major leagues, had totally ceased operations by 1966 with the exhibition game by the last remaining Negro League team, the Indianapolis Clowns. “The Kansas City (later Oakland) Athletics, which was owned by Charlie Finley, brought baseball back to the Magic City (Birmingham’s nickname) in 1967 with the Birmingham A’s. Right out of the gate the A’s took the Southern League title in 1967 by 3 1/2 games under John McNamara. During this time (1967–1975) the A’s featured Hall of Famers Reggie Jackson and Rollie Fingers, who went on to be mainstays of the Oakland Athletics 3 consecutive World Series titles (1972–1974). The A’s moved after the 1975 season and Rickwood did not see Southern League baseball again for 5 seasons.” Reggie was inducted into the Birmingham Barons Hall of Fame in 2007. ed.]
Q: “Reggie, the baton has been passed for over a century here. We’ve been talking earlier about, if it wasn’t for the Willie Mays, the Jackie Robinson, the Reggie Jackson… the three of us wouldn’t have had an opportunity to play. How emotional is it for you to come back to a place where you played for one of the greatest teams around?”
A: “Alex, when people ask me a question like that, it’s like, coming back here is not easy. The racism that I played here… when I played here, the difficulty of going through different places where we traveled…
“Fortunately, I had a manager, and I had players on the team that helped me get through it.
“But I wouldn’t wish it on anybody.
“People said to me today… I spoke, and I said, ‘Do you think you’re a better person, do you think you won when you played here and conquered?’ I said, ‘you know, I would never want to do it again. I walked into restaurants and they would point at me and say, ‘the nigger can’t eat here.’ I would go to a hotel and they say ‘the nigger can’t stay here.’ We went to Charlie Finley’s country club for a welcome home dinner and they pointed me out with the N word. ‘He can’t come in here.’ Finley marched the whole team out. Finally they let me in there. He said, ‘we’re going to go to the diner and eat hamburgers. We’ll go where we’re wanted.’
“Fortunately, I had a manager in Johnny McNamara that if I couldn’t eat in a place, nobody would eat — we’d get food to travel. If I couldn’t stay in a hotel, they’d drive to the next hotel and find a place where I could stay. Had it not been for Rollie Fingers, Johnny McNamara, Dave Duncan, Joe and Sharon Rudi… I slept on their couch three, four nights a week for about a month and a half. Finally, they were threatened, that they would burn our apartment complex down, unless I got out.
“I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.
“The year I came here, Bull Connor was the sheriff the year before. And they took — finally — they took baseball outta’ here. ‘Cause in 1963, the Klan murdered four black girls, children — eleven, twelve, fourteen years old — at a church here, and never got indicted! It was there, from the Klan. Life magazine did a story on them like they were being honored!
“I wouldn’t wish it on anyone!
“At the same time, had it not been for my white friends, had it not been for a white manager… and Rudi, Fingers, Duncan, and Lee Myers, I would have never made it. I was too physically violent, I was ready to physically fight someone. I’d have got killed here because I’d have beat someone’s ass, and you’d have saw me in an oak tree somewhere.”
As we can see, even today, the word “nigger” has a complex history, one that was hijacked, misused and abused as a cudgel to belittle, to demean, denigrate, impugn, besmirch and belittle, and today, depending upon context, can be, in some instances, almost a mere term of endearment — again, depending upon context, although it’s widely considered in poor taste to be used.
But clearly again, the term was hijacked and bastardized from perfectly good words — niger, and negro — both of which mean black.
As residents and citizens of a free nation, where “with liberty and justice for all” reign supreme under a rule of law applicable to every man, woman, and child in this land, are we to imagine, think, or believe, that certain words or ideas should be made non sequitur, or even “cancelled” merely because we don’t like them, find them abhorrent, offensive, or injurious to our tender sensibilities, and like the last living animal of any species, practically extinct, save for one ensample, only to have the last remnant, the last repository of the word to be found in the Oxford English Dictionary?
Words and their meaning change over time, and sometimes, become extinct; such as the use of the word ensample in lieu of example, which means the very same thing.
What should become extinct, is hatred of one’s fellow man.
Warm Southern Breeze 
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