I’ve been binge-reading the works of English writer G.K. Chesterton lately. Given the nature of the bulk of his writing, I’ve been a bit surprised by his occasional, casual use of the word “nigger”.
My first encounter with it was in the name of a character in one of the Father Brown stories. One of the characters was a boxer called “Nigger Ned”. I shrugged it off, thinking, “Well, it was a different time, and perhaps it wouldn’t have been unusual for a black boxer to be billed in such a way.”
Since then, in Chesterton’s works of non-fiction, I’ve seen the word used casually several times, without any apparent malice. For example, in a list of good, enjoyable activities, he includes “listening to nigger songs”.
Chesterton died in 1936, so my question is this: Did the word, as used in England in the early 20th century, simply not have the offensive, derogatory meaning that it had, and still has, in the USA?
According to the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang,
This doesn’t directly answer your question, since the Chesterton works you refer to seem to be during the period (“20th century”) when the offensiveness of the term was increasing, so from this evidence it’s hard to say whether his non-offensive use of the term was normal for the time or something of an obsolete usage.
From Wikipedia (in a section marked “citation needed,” FWIW):
The fact that, in 1939, a certain Agatha Christie novel was published with different titles in the US and the UK suggests that the N-word was significantly less offensive in the UK earlier in the 20th century than it was in the US.
You’ve got to remember that British English is not the same as American English. I’ve seen that same casual usage too. It was either Dorothy Sayers or Agatha Christie, possibly both.
It was derogatory, or at least patronising, but it was a much less loaded word than in the US, if only because Britain didn’t have quite the same toxic race relations culture (in Britain itself, at any rate).
In the early twentieth century, a “nigger minstrel” was a white artist in blackface. (The term was dropped the phenomenon itself disappeared; the “Black and White Minstrel Show” featured on British television into the 1970s.)
“Nigger brown” was a shade of brown until well into the second-half of the twentieth century.
In British colonial contexts, “Nigger” was used of colonial natives (sometimes even outside Africa; Indians could occasionally be “niggers”, for instance). It wasn’t always derogatory in intent. Grahame Greene’s The Heart of the Matter (1948) has the line “A clerk knocked and said, ‘There’s a nigger for you, Wilson, with a note.’”
I am often surprised by the casual racism in older writing. For example, I was recently reading some sport fishing stories from the 1920s and the writer kept referring to coral heads as “nigger heads.”
Even in 1955, the British war movie The Dam Busters frequently referred to the air squadron’s mascot Nigger by that name. The word didn’t come to be considered as objectionable (at least to a white British audience) until the 1960s.
I’m just reading a PG Wodehouse book where he uses the word frequently in reference to a touring American banjo band. It’s descriptive and derogatory, but obviously not carrying the same heavy load that the word has acquired subsequently.
Many Golden Age (20s-40s) British mysteries used nigger in ways that didn’t necessarily refer to African-Americans. Use of it to refer to Indians was frequent. I remember one instance in which a dark-skinned Italian was called that.
There are authors whose mysteries are instantly solvable because any dark-skinned Mediterranean or descendant of one was going to be the murderer. It was never said outright it was because of their “bad blood,” i.e. non-Nordic heritage, but certainly implied.
African-Americans performers toured Britain frequently. Bert Williams, the most famous black comedian, toured Britain in 1903 and gave a performance at Buckingham Palace. That was about when Wodehouse started writing. His entire career would have taken place in the era of touring black American entertainers.
Yes, he would. A “nigger minstrel”, “nigger singer” or “nigger band” were so called because they played “nigger music” in a “nigger style”. The term was commonly used for white performers in blackface. In the UK a “nigger minstrel” could be either a black performer or a white performance in blackface but, statistically, was more likely to be the latter.
Here, for example, is the Wikepedia article on the music hall performer Herbert Campell, who initially performed in blackface in the “Amateur Nigger Band” (all of whose members performed in blackface).
To make the obvious point - in conversation and writing until say the early 60’s the UK “nigger” could be replaced by “black” almost without any change in meaning. The derogatory and demeaning component can be read as any time that someone feels it necessary to make mention of a person’s race. But little more.
‘There’s a nigger for you, Wilson, with a note.’ perfectly illustrates this - there is no reason to mention the race of the messenger, except to provide a tag of the person’s social class. In other circumstances “There is a gentleman here to see you” would have indicated a totally different scenario. “Nigger gentleman” being an oxymoron in those times. As indeed “foreign gentleman” would have been also, unless said gentleman spoke perfect English and had been educated in a British public school. (And even then you wouldn’t actually go so far as to trust them. As noted above, they would invariably turn out to be the villain.)
Deep social issues with the work “nigger” simply weren’t on the British radar. They had the Irish for that.
Yes, basically, but depending on context could also be used to offend, like many another racial/ethnic epithet, and all such words, whether meant to offend or just assumed to be neutrally descriptive, reflected a taken-for-granted sense of racial/ethnic group identities and hierarchies.
That didn’t start to change until, I suspect, WW2 and thereafter. The arrival of black US troops and the enforced segregation in the US Army, and to a lesser extent awareness of the arrival of volunteer troops from the West Indies, raised the general issue in the public consciousness, where previously non-white people were a very small minority in the UK, with relatively small communities in port cities, and otherwise small groups of students, some professionals and entertainers, and other individuals mostly seen as “exotic”.
The development of substantial communities of immigrants from the West Indies from the late 1940s onwards made racism and racial assumptions more of a long-term domestic issue; but for the N-word to become a total no-no word, it took the 1960s or so for those debates to be influenced by the US civil rights movement and the battles over de-segregation, and our own problems over attitudes to apartheid in South Africa and the white supremacists in Rhodesia.
I think that’s the point - it’s not that Britain remained unaware of the inappropriate nature of the word, it’s that the background culture was different in such a way as to make the word (I guess) not the biggest problem - there were lots of good changes afoot in terms of driving towards equality, it’s just that they weren’t especially focused on language.
In the original Jeeves and Wooster story, it’s clear from the text and the context that they were African-American musicians. On the television adaptation they changed it to white Englishmen on blackface.