Nigger is a noun in the English language, most notable for its usage in a pejorative context to refer to black people, and also as an informal slang term, among other contexts. It is a common ethnic slur. The word originated as a term used in a neutral context to refer to black people, as a variation of the Spanish/Portuguese noun negro , a descendant of the Latin adjective niger , meaning "black".
Etymology and history
Main article: NegroThe variants neger and negar , derive from the Spanish and Portuguese word negro (black), and from the pejorative French nègre (nigger). Etymologically, negro , noir , nègre , and nigger ultimately derive from nigrum , the accusative form of the Latin niger (black) (pronounced ; the r is trilled).
In the Colonial America of 1619, John Rolfe used negars in describing the African slaves shipped to the Virginia colony. Later American English spellings, neger and neggar , prevailed in a northern colony, New York under the Dutch, and in metropolitan Philadelphia’s Moravian and Pennsylvania Dutch communities. To wit, the African Burial Ground in New York City originally was known by the Dutch name "Begraafplaats van de Neger" (Cemetery of the Negro); an early US occurrence of neger in Rhode Island, dates from 1625. Among Anglophones, the word nigger was not always considered derogatory, because it then denoted “black-skinned”, a common Anglophone usage. Nineteenth-century English (language) literature features usages of nigger without racist connotation, e.g. the Joseph Conrad novella The Nigger of the 'Narcissus' (1897). Moreover, Charles Dickens and Mark Twain created characters who uttered the word as contemporary usage, and Mark Twain, in the autobiographic book Life on the Mississippi (1883), used it frequently.
In the United Kingdom and the Anglophone world, nigger denoted the dark-skinned (non-white) African and Asian peoples colonized into the British Empire, and “dark-skinned foreigners” — in general. To wit, in A Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1926), H. W. Fowler states that applying the word nigger to “others than full or partial negroes” is “felt as an insult by the person described, & betrays in the speaker, if not deliberate insolence, at least a very arrogant inhumanity”; this anti-racist linguistic prescription was deleted from the later editions of Mr Fowler’s Dictionary .
By the 1800s, because nigger had become a pejorative word, in its stead, the term colored became the mainstream alternative to negro and its derived terms. Abolitionists in Boston, Massachusetts, posted warnings to the Colored People of Boston and vicinity . Established as mainstream American English usage, the word colored features in the organizational title of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, reflecting the members’ racial identity preference at the 1909 foundation. In the Southern United States, the local American English dialect changes the pronunciation of negro to nigra — a pronunciation most famously used by the Texan-accented US President Lyndon B. Johnson (1963–69), a proponent of Black American civil rights. Linguistically, in developing American English, in the early editions of A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language (1806), lexicographer Noah Webster suggested the neger new spelling in place of negro .
By the late 1960s, the social progress achieved in US society, by such as the Black Civil Rights Movement (1955–68), had legitimized the racial identity word Black as mainstream American English usage to denote black-skinned Americans. In the event, the “political militant” connotations of Black displaced it in favor of the compound blanket term African American — especially in politically correct usage and context — a linguistically compromised usage, because it either inaccurately denotes or excludes non-black African people, (cf. negroid). Moreover, as a compound word, African American resembles the vogue word Afro-American , an early-1970s popular usage; nevertheless, Black is the contemporary racial denomination in the US, and usually is not considered offensive usage. Contemporaneously, the word nigger often is spelled in eye dialect as nigga and niggah , as spoken among Black Americans.
Usages
British
In British English, nigger is a derogatory and racist word; however, earlier, the Victorian writer Rudyard Kipling used it without derogatory intent. Like-wise, without derogatory intent, P. G. Wodehouse uses the phrase “Nigger minstrels” in Thank You, Jeeves (1934), the first Jeeves–Bertie novel, in admiration of their artistry and musical tradition. As recently as the 1950s, it was acceptable British usage to say niggers when referring to black people, notable in mainstream usages such as Nigger Boy –brand candy cigarettes, and the colour nigger brown (dark brown); however, by the 1970s, these, and other recognised racist terms, were legally proscribed. Moreover, as recently as 2007, the term nigger brown reappeared — in the model label of a Chinese-made sofa, indicating the regional Chinese usage of an out-dated Colonial form of English.
North American
In American English, white and black people freely used the word nigger , until the Black Civil Rights Movement (1955–68) rendered its use to denote only racism.
Cultural: Addressing the use of nigger by Black people, US intellectual Cornel West said, “There’s a certain rhythmic seduction to the word. If you speak in a sentence, and you have to say cat , companion , or friend , as opposed to nigger , then the rhythmic presentation is off. That rhythmic language is a form of historical memory for black people. . . . When Richard Pryor came back from Africa, and decided to stop using the word onstage, he would sometimes start to slip up, because he was so used to speaking that way. It was the right word at the moment to keep the rhythm together in his sentence making.” Contemporarily, the implied racism of the word nigger has rendered its usages social taboo. In the US, magazines and newspapers do not use it, instead printing “family-friendly” censored versions, usually “n*gg*r”, “n**ger”, “n——”, and “the N-word”; however, historians and social activists, such as Dick Gregory, criticize the euphemisms and their usage as intellectually dishonest, because using the euphemism “the N-word” instead of nigger robs younger generations of Americans of the full history of Black people in America.
Political: Louisiana Governor Earl Long used nigger in advocating full voting rights for Black Americans; in that time, like colored and negro , it was mainstream usage in the American South. In 1948, the Washington Post newspaper’s coverage of the presidential campaign of the segregationist politician Strom Thurmond, employed the periphrasis “the less-refined word for black people”. In explaining his refusal to be conscripted to fight the Vietnam War (1945–75), professional boxer Muhammed Ali said, “No Vietcong ever called me nigger”; later, his modified answer was the title No Vietnamese Ever Called Me Nigger (1968) of a documentary about the front-line lot of the US Army Black soldier in Vietnam combat. An Ali biographer reports that, when interviewed by Robert Lipsyte in 1966, the boxer actually said, “I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong”. Moreover, on 28 February 2007, in the spirit of political correctness, the New York City Council symbolically banned, with a formal resolution, the use of the word nigger ; there is no penalty for using it. The New York City resolution also requires excluding from Grammy Award consideration every song whose lyrics contain the word nigger .
Sport: In the first half of the twentieth century, before Major League Baseball was racially integrated, dark-skinned and dark-complexion players were nicknamed Nig ; examples are: Johnny Beazley (1941–49), Joe Berry (1921–22), Bobby Bragan (1940–48), Nig Clarke (1905–20), Nig Cuppy (1892–1901), Nig Fuller (1902), Johnny Grabowski (1923–31), Nig Lipscomb (1937), Charlie Niebergall (1921–24), Nig Perrine (1907), and Frank Smith (1904–15). Moreover, the anagram euphemism Ginger was used instead of nigger , as a “polite company usage”. The 1930s movie The Bowery with George Raft and Wallace Beery includes a NYC sports-bar named “Nigger Joe’s”.
Denotational extension
The denotations of nigger also comprehend non-white and racially disadvantaged people; to wit, the US politician Ron Dellums said, “. . . it's time for somebody to lead all of America’s niggers”. In 1969, in the UK, in the course of being interviewed by a Nova magazine reporter, artist Yoko Ono said, “. . . woman is the nigger of the world”; three years later, her husband, John Lennon, published the song “Woman is the Nigger of the World” (1972) — about the virtually universal exploitation of woman — proved socia
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