Ladies, Men, Colored: The Evolution of "Nigger"
You are a freshman at Wiley College in Marshall,Texas. The year is 1962. You recently joined a youth activist movement and now find yourself in the middle of a non-violent sit-in at the local diner that serves whites only. Even after all of the practice runs you had with your fellow activists in the university basement, you still can't help but wince at the sting of hot coffee on your face. They prepared you for the physical and emotional abuse you would encounter in this protest. You practiced getting ketchup bottles thrown at you while your white brother called you nigger. It hurt him to let that slip out of his mouth, but he had to say it for the purpose of the training. However, nothing could prepare you for the madness of the racist white extremists attempting to tear down the diner windows. These psychos weren't actors, they were spewing out genuine hatred (the worst kind), aimed directly at you. Your crime? Being hungry and black at the counter of the only diner close to your campus. It is bad enough that you are surrounded by bathrooms like the one pictured above, but now you cannot even get a decent meal to eat. The white mob continues to torture you and your classmates. They spray whip cream in your face and throw salt in your eyes, all the while chanting "stay in your place nigger, you are not welcomed here nigger. That word, nigger, the same one your white friend reluctantly used, means that you are not on the same level with them. YOU are subhuman.
Fast forward about 50 years, and nigger is the new slang for friend, brother, or homie,--yes, you read that correctly. How did such a derogatory word, become socially acceptable? If a white person were to call a black person a nigger, it would be offensive, but between some fellow black folks, it is okay? Now that is some twisted logic. Whites don't go around calling each other crackers, do they?
Though society has progressed with time, some African Americans, predominantly males oddly think that insults derived from a color-stricken era can be revamped into compliments. When in reality, the more they continue to use the term nigger, the more clues they leave to the era of white supremacy. It doesn't necessarily represent racism in itself (since racism is a systematic institution) . Yet, it does confirm that the label has not faded with the advancement of colored people, but instead, has been further embraced.
The next time a boy with pants sagging around his ankles, decides to call his friend my nigger, he should remember Hagerstown, Maryland (coined "Hang a Nigger"town by some in the 90s) , he should remember the unfortunate fellow wrongly accused of rape whose corpse was left dangling on a tree, like strange fruit--a rotten apple. In fact, nigger was probably etched into that same tree; it was his grave marking. There are some things that we can learn from the past, and other things that should be left behind, like the term nigger. Catching my drift?
I completely understand your point of view on this topic, but I disagree. Even though your points are reasonable and make sense. Most people these days use the terms "nigger" and "nigga" in completely different ways. To say "nigger" is to firmly enuniate the rrr sound and make it clear that either, you are referencing the word in conversation, or you earnestly would like to offend and insult someone of the Black race.
ReplyDeleteThe reason some young black people started using the word "nigga" in reference to each other, was a an act of rebellion. It took the power from the white people and made a clear point: "Hey! This word you created to dehumanize and insult me? This is my word now. I've given it a new definition. You don't hold the same power with that word that you used to have."
I don't believe that if black people stopped using the word "nigga" in a casual way (that strips it of it's power to hurt and insult and dehumanize) that the world would really be better. If everyone in the whole world stopped saying it, it wouldn't change anything. If white people want to insult blacks, they can find other ways to do it. (i.e. monkey, animal, coon, etc.)
You offer a very interesting point of view. However, if the freedom riders and civil rights activists wanted to enact a quite rebellion that involved revamping the word nigger, they would have done so. Instead, they fought an impassioned struggle to shrug off the label. So, to once again adopt the word and make it ours, would be anachronistic, and of no use. It would make their efforts somewhat vain. Like you said, if people want to degrade blacks, they will use any words they find, which further suggests that we can also get a little more creative and refer to ourselves using other terms. I think the main reason why it is so offensive, as opposed to the words donkey or butter, is because it is specifically targeted toward the black race (most of the time). It's just like how Latinos and Asians would definitely be offended if they were called Spicks and Chinks.
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