I’m looking for more information on this subject.
I suspect it has been explored from various perspectives/different disciplines.
Personal comments as well as recommended sources welcome.
They usurped the term in the 1980’s and changed it to “nigga” to show that the word had lost its power of derision and belittlement.
There is a massive difference between the word “nigger” and “nigga.” Black people don’t call each other “niggers.”
I’ve told this story before:
My old high-school job, my first job ever, was in a West Texas restaurant. A popular place, the gimmick was people would phone in their orders from their table. Each table had a telephone, and just picking up the receiver alerted the counter that someone was phoning in. Quite a novelty back then.
We were a racially mixed crew, almost all high-school students, and almost all the black employees were football players. Large football players. There was a dorky little white guy named Brett – I swear this was not me – who sometimes worked the counter. He took the phone orders. When he took an order, he’d write it down on a ticket and then pass it to the cooks while saying, “Order in.”
One evening, the crew mix happened to be Brett at the counter and an all-black crew of cooks. As Blacks are sometimes wont to do when clowning around amongst themselves, they were calling each other “nigger.” Brett, who had not a prejudiced bone in his body – and even if he did, he certainly would not try to antagonize beefy football players, seeing as he made even Woody Allen seem macho – got into the spirit of things by passing the tickets and calling, “Order in, nigger.” The cooks were cool with it, because they’d been throwing the N word around like water, and Brett was considered pretty cool, so no one took offense. They knew he was just trying to join in.
But Brett was a little clueless and did not quite know when to stop. Long after the joke stopped being funny, he was still passing the tickets in and going, “Order in, nigger.” They started telling him, “Uh, look, Brett, that’s okay, you don’t have to do that anymore. Joke’s over. Haha, but joke’s over now.” Brett, who was as clueless as the day was long, and this was summertime, so the days were pretty long, still didn’t get it and kept it up. Finally, one of these large football players cornered Brett in the back and popped him a little. Not hard, just enough to so he’d know it really was time for the joke to end.
Since the OP is looking for personal comments, let’s move this to IMHO for now (although it may end up in GD).
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
Nigga is just nigger with southern accent as I understand it and was used among black folks since the slave days.
Certainly speech was thoroughly “niggerized” by the 80s but there is much history preceding that which I am curious about.
the educated blacks and civil rights people spurned the word but I think it’s deep in the vernacular.
Did jazz cats and Harlem Renaissance types use nigga casually I wonder? If you come from a ghetto or other area where it’s common and disapprove of the word, it sometimes comes out in anger or bitter sarcasm I’ve observed.
Completely incorrect, which is what tends to happen when one makes a sweeping generalization about 40 million people.
Afroamericans??? I’m thinking of an appropriate reply, but probably shouldn’t post it.
What? It’s a perfectly [del]valid[/del] term that’s important when you’re talking about Afroamerican, a Musulman, and a Pict who all take an autogyro headed to Prussia by way of Siam…
ETA: I think “cromulent” would work better, sorry.
That’s the sort of reasoning I’d expect of one of the swarthy races, like the Swedish.
I heard that ‘nigger’ was “Just the way we (Southern Whites of a certain age) pronounce ‘Negro’”.
The author of the Boondocks comic has several clips on Youtube which explore the use of the ‘er’ variant among American Blacks.
(in the 1970’s, the term ‘Afro-American’ surfaced. Haven’t heard it in many years.)
This made me suspect that OP is Michael Richards.
Check out this book - The N Word: Who Can Say It, Who Shouldn’t and Why.
It was published in 2007,but I suspect much of it is still relevant.
Usurped?
It’s pretty simple, OP.
They can use it.
You can’t.
Yeah, this. It’s such a loaded word that I’ve come to not use it in even the ways that are as innocent as I can imagine. I’d probably fill it with asterisks even if I was quoting Huckleberry Finn.
Don’t assume its usage lends itself to easy rule comprehension by people like me, historically distant from direct experience as the target of the term. We don’t automatically get to have everything simple from our perspective.
English has over a million words that are not taboo. We can get along just using those. You can build lots of competency just by reading the civil rights literature, which advantageously has more of a complete context. I think exploring use of the term isn’t a cakewalk even with good context; in a vacuum it’s closer to useless.
I have lived with many black people when I was in the Army, and worked with a lot of black people at work over the years. Some will use the word nigger or nigga quite often and others will not use it at all.
The nigger and nigga terms might come down to lazy speech habits. Think of Ebonics. A lot of the older generations of blacks and the younger “gangsta” blacks do not use normally acceptable diction. Many of the middle age blacks speak very clearly and concise. If you weren’t speaking with them in person, you probably wouldn’t know what race they were.
But in an increasingly mixed-ethnicity population, who gets to be “they?”
Will Human Resources have a brown paper bag handy, and anyone lighter who says it gets written up?
Will Black people* eventually stop using it? Because a lot of us can’t help thinking their need to “reclaim it” is a milder form of a mental disorder ham-fistedly dramatized in this video. An understandable reaction to centuries of trauma, but a neurotic and ultimately self-defeating one nonetheless.
*most of the Black people I know never use it, and are strongly against using it except in “nuclear option” situations. And for that most of the white people I know aren’t going “aw, no fair! I wanna use it too!”
Look, it’s pretty common for ethnic groups to jokingly call themselves by an offensive name. I’ve heard people of Polish descent calling each other “polacks” and people of Italian descent calling each other “dago.” If anyone outside of the group uses it, then there’s trouble. This is no different.
Yeah! Like those lazy Bostonians, dropping the “r” all in their words and the lazy Midwesterners, so lazy they pronouce “Mary”, “marry”, and “merry” all the same!
No, that would be “nigra.” “Nigger” differs in both pronunciation and meaning.