I think Chesterton used the term because
[list=A][li]There were hardly any black people in Britain at the time, and[/li][li]Black people can’t read anyway, so they won’t see it, and[/li][li]Even if one of them reads it and is offended, who cares? They’re just niggers.[/list]Is that racist? Of course it is. Was it a reflection of the casual racism of British society at the time? Yes, it was. Was British society any worse than other societies? No, they were just more powerful. Was it any better? No. [/li]
Thinking of, and referring to, strangers who are outside your own ethos as inferior is nearly universal. And wrong.
[QUOTE=Shodan]
Even if one of them reads it and is offended, who cares? They’re just niggers.
[/quote]
As a very devout christian, and not a retired colonel living in a Bloomsbury lodging-house on half-pay, it is kinda impossible Chesterton would have thought this way.
Thank you for speaking out so courageously. We needed that.
There was a dog with that name in Sinclair Lewis’ 1947 novel Kingsblood Royal. In a memorable scene, the clueless (and casually racist) white couple who owned the dog were at the back door calling for him by name, only to get bawled out by their black maid.
Using the word probably hung on longer in Britain because there were relatively few black people to call out the offenders.
Not knowing much about him, I wouldn’t jump to call Chesterton a racist, any more than I’d attack Mark Twain for using the word “nigger” in Huck Finn.
This thread reminds me of 8th grade English class, where we were assigned Booth Tarkington’s “Penrod and Sam” (the book featured two “Negro boys who lived across the alley” and were named Herman and Verman). I remember the teacher cautioning us to notice the racist implications of the book, while appreciating its literary qualities.
I sort of doubt that any of the Penrod books are assigned reading for students these days.
I should imagine that 60% of devout American christians are so bigoted, and as many devout jews. And maybe more devout muslims.
On the other hand Chesterton took Papal Encyclicals immensely seriously — instead of as I would were I christian take-it-or-leave-it suggestions — plus he came from an artistic family background and milieu ( rather as Kipling did ) which generally includes racial inclusiveness and tolerance. Plus he early protested against Empire , especially the 2nd Boer War.
No, it’s G.K. Read The Everlasting Man, where he refers to “niggers worshipping JuJu” (quoted from memory). Maybe if somebody were around to call him on it, he would have cared or noticed, but nobody was.
It’s just the way things were. It never occurred to anyone that anyone would be offended.
‘Did a man whose totem was a wolf feel like a were-wolf or like a man running away from a were-wolf ? Did be feel like Uncle Remus about Brer Wolf or like St. Francis about his brother the wolf, or like Mowgli about his brothers the wolves ? Was a totem a thing like the British lion or a thing like the British bull-dog ? Was the worship of a totem like the feeling of blacks about Mumbo jumbo, or of children about jumbo ?’
Firstly, blacks. Secondly, nothing disparaging. Actually has a touch of the melancholy of Thomas Browne.
Anyway, had it been, ‘nigger’ to a late 19th century/early 20th century Briton, which was when he grew up would have been as inoffensively meant as the slightly earlier construction ‘blackfellow’. Unless purposed as an epithet by a fucking foreman.
Still, cutting sugar-cane was rather more offensive than the insults of the ignorant.
Which reminds me, had an old cook-book, or vade-mecum from the 1850s that gave a Blackfella’s Guide to Cooking Rice.
I don’t agree. He refused to use the word because he said he didn’t like the word.
If it was a neutral word that was merely inaccurate because not all Blacks fell within that “class”, why would the narrator claim he didn’t like the word itself?
I don’t dislike the word “gardener” just because someone uses it improperly.
The evidence makes much more sense if the word itself had a derogatory connotation.
Edit: moreover, I don’t think he was using the term “gentleman” in the sense of a distinct class. He appears to mean something more like ‘man of superior ethics and courage’.
It is “niggers” in every other edition of The Everlasting Man that I have ever seen, such as this one:
I suspect Evan Drake’s online edition was bowdlerized in transcription/editing (in addition, the original “savage niggers” in the second excerpt becomes “savage Negroes” in Evan Drake’s version, and the editor doesn’t seem to have realized that the “jumbo” that entranced children was the proper name of Jumbo the famous elephant).
Don’t forget Joseph Conrad’s book The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ (1897).
This is regarded as one of Conrad’s best works, and in a recent online discussion an English lecturer was lamenting that it’s simply not possible to teach it these days. But the word was not used in a derogatory way. It was similar to Mark Twain’s use in Huckleberry Finn.
We shouldn’t make the mistake of thinking that words that are offensive today were always offensive. In origin the word comes from Latin ‘niger’, Spanish ‘negro’, simply meaning ‘black’.
And indeed, Engels, on the atrocious behaviour of Governor Eyre of Jamaica — a cause celebre back home with Eyre attacked like many imperial heavy-handed tyrants by most of Britain — wrote and asked old Karl what he thought about the Nigger Question in Jamaica ( actually, it was slightly complicated, as just as the British treatment of the Thugs in India was disgraceful, so were the Thugs themselves ).
Marx — who was not a Jew — condemned the British as one would expect, but both he and his friend, representing as far left as one could go back then before hitting Kropotkin, regularly spoke of Niggers and Yids.
Particularly when discussing Lassalle.
