Yeah, it’s difficult to comprehend today but a lot of southerners who were certainly not Klan members and would be disgusted by the violence racists did, would still just use the word nigger very matter-of-factly. It certainly wasn’t respectful but it wasn’t always as highly and actively disrespectful as it has been for the last 50 years or so.
I remember watching the PBS miniseries ‘Eyes on the Prize’ about the civil rights movement. At one point they show an interview with a southern sheriff where he nonchalantly says how he doesn’t like “these Yankee agitators coming down here and rilin’ up our niggers”. I’m not saying this guy wasn’t a racist, he clearly was, but I was dumbfounded that he would speak openly into the camera of a northern news crew like that. How could he not be so aware that he was just proving their point for them? To him it was just a synonym for Negroes or blacks.
I know the word was used casually without a lot of animus in many times and places, but the claim at issue was that some black people in the fifties and sixties demanded to be called “nigger!”
So did these people who weren’t being *actively *disrespectful allow back people to use the same water fountains, attend the same schools, sit in the same section of the movie theater as white folk?
Of course they used the term matter-of-factly, they were also racists matter-of factly. That didn’t make it better.
We anxiously await any evidence for this, just as we anxiously await porcine aviation. In the meantime, lacking such evidence, we are obliged to call the claim bullshit of the highest degree, and suspect the claimants are highly prevaricative or extraordinarily moronic, if not both. Tell them that the next time they feel compelled to spout some provocative “factoid” to choose something that’s at least marginally believable. Foolidjits.
The OP literally only asks whether the term was ever respectful. He also makes comments and hopes for confirmation, but that’s the only question per se.
The part I don’t understand is why is it disrespectful or even obscene to use the N word when black people use it all the time among each other? I have watched movies where the N word is used 100’s of times with black people talking to each other. Don’t know if that is really true in everyday life, but films do usually reflect reality.
To say that white people cannot use the same word? That black people can use very casually?
ombre12, this question has been discussed dozens if not hundreds of times in Great Debates, and I think is beyond the scope of this thread or this forum. If you want to discuss this, please open a new thread in Great Debates (or better, do a search on the topic).
“At its worst” only if calling black people niggers is something you deeply and desperately want to do, as a matter of bare human dignity.
Racism at all? Maybe, but doubtful, and even if so, hardly a particularly egregious example.
I’ll paste in for you an explanation I just gave to some people elsewhere:
I don’t know anything about you guys physically, but let’s say I was overweight. (I am, actually, but anyway…) And let’s say I was called “Fattie” by the kids at school. I don’t like being called Fattie. It makes me cry. It makes me dread going to school. But I have a friend at school who is also overweight. One day my overweight friend calls me Fattie, during a friendly teasing conversation. And of course I don’t cry, in fact I smile, and call her “Fattie” right back. And it even becomes our standard way of referring to each other.
When we say it to each other, we’re joking with each other, taking on the derogatory term as our own way to identify between each other. Between us, it has become a term of affection, and a way to alleviate the pain of being called “fattie” by others.
But if anyone else calls either of us “fattie,” then it hurts. Because they are using the term as a way to humiliate us and shame us.
So again: my friend and I have taken over the term when talking to each other, not humiliating each other but building each other up, by transforming the hurtful term into a sympathetic one. But this does not mean others may call us Fattie, because their use of the term has a completely different significance.
“Nigger” is the same for some (but not most) black people.
But ombre I have a question for you. Have you really never thought of it this way? If you have, why ask the question? But if you haven’t, what do you suppose has led it not to occur to you? I ask you this because it seems like an immediately obvious idea to me, such that it would never have occurred to me to ask. Not in the sense that I am somehow “smart enough” to see it, but rather in the sense that it feels to me like breathing and seeing–just immediately apparent aspects of human existence. I would like to know what the difference is between people like you and people like me such that the above explanation simply doesn’t occur to you.
“General Questions” just isn’t the place for a question like yours. “Great Debates” is, though, and I’m sure you’ll get quite the discussion there when and if you decide to ask there.
Uhhh, I might be totally misrembering things (Paula Deen butter stroke doncha know), but if I recall correctly there was a time when at least SOME blacks/African americans/whatevers PREFERRED to referred to as “negro/s”. My cite is Jay Jay Walker IIRC.
So, the fact that “nigger” comes from negro doesn’t mean anything.
And I’ll agree with a few previous posters. It probably was RARELY a sign of respect, but in certain times and places (like rap music heh) it was sometimes nothing more than a matter of fact “descriptor” (which still obviously still had racial undertones). But nothing like today where a WASP yelling “nigger!” would call for being drawn and quartered by the general public.
Haha, one of them (and by the way, these people aren’t even facebook friends, let me clarify–they are fellow members of a “Christian” group I joined at the invitation of a cousin of mine…) just told me that her own personal experience with this involved being told, “on more than one occasion,” the following words:
“It’s nigger to you, bitch.”
I just explained to her (assuming she really doesn’t know this) that she was being invited to a round of fisticuffs, rather than being informed of the properly respectful way to speak. But she has already told me she will not be speaking about this matter again so I will never know whether I’ve made a difference here.
