I said I’d never heard anyone say it IRL, but I just remembered one time. It was my great grandpa. When my daughter was about 4, he told her that version of that rhyme “eenie meanie minie moe”. He was very old and blind and I’m sure he didn’t even know my daughter was biracial. She didn’t know the word and didn’t think anything of it, but it was very awkward to everyone else around. He was a bit senile and meant no harm, so of course no one said anything about it to him.
But anyway, I’m sure that wasn’t the only time in his life he said it.
For example when you hear “China man!” in stores from small children when you are there with your Asian friend and the parents either shhhs them or simply shows no reaction… granted I rarely see this kinda thing much anymore but it depends on locations.
The “hidden America” must be really hidden, because I’ve never found it here. I honestly can’t recall *ever *hearing any of my friends (of any color) use the word ‘nigger’ in any context other than a discussion of the word (as we are having here) or when quoting from a movie or something of that nature.
I don’t know anybody anymore who uses it to actually refer to a black person - my last relatives who were *that *racist died in 2008.
But I do know people - including myself - who will say “nigger” instead of “the n-word” in discussions *about *the word. “The n-word” strikes me as kind of like “He Who Must Not Be Named” in the Harry Potter series.
I live in one of the most racially-mixed places in the world and I’ve still never heard this word said in a racist context. I’ve heard black people use it among each other, and the very occasional white person use it with black friends, but never anything negative. The number of times I’ve heard the other racist slurs said aloud are so few that they approach zero, too - and that’s with working in racially-mixed inner-city secondary schools. There’s racism, but its rarely as blatant as that.
Come to think of it, I have heard the word nigger shouted at from a passing car, but those strangers hardly count as ‘people I know.’ And they were black men shouting ‘nigger-lover’ at me, a white female, and another white female; perhaps it was a request?
I think it’s likely that the ones clicking 100% and 90% misread the poll (missing out the word 'non), unless they really mean that every single non-black man they know is an avowed racist.
Indeed. 83% of those polled say 0-10%, and there have already been several respondents who said they misread the OP and clicked a higher percentage when they actually meant 0%.
Nigg is a suburb of Aberdeen so we’re perhaps a special case. But I only know one person who uses it as a term of racial abuse, and he got fired a while back.
I hope I don’t come off as an Internet Tough Guy, but I’m a largish black man, a manager at work, and sometimes said to be short-tempered and humorless in the real world. Thus the fact that I can’t think of any white men who use the word “nigger” in my presence doesn’t mean much.
I heard it occasionally as a child in the 70s, but haven’t heard it any by anyone I know since then. If someone I just met did the we’re-in-this-together racist bit, I always told them that I didn’t believe that way and any further comments of that nature stopped. And now days, people like that tend to try to do it more with Hispanics (at least in my area of N. Dallas) than blacks and they get the same response.
So put me down for basically zero too. I just can’t vote myself though, as I’m posting from my phone and don’t see the poll.
Same here. I can really only think of two times in my life I’ve heard this word used as a slur, and both were 15+ years ago. In one case it was my very elderly (now deceased) great-grandfather, and once it was some 13-14 year old boys at a party back when I was that same age. This makes up a fraction of a percent of all the men I’ve ever known, but it’s more than zero so I clicked 10%.
I live in Atlanta, and my roots are in rural Georgia, and I think I have heard exactly one person use the word as a racial slur in the past 15 years. Even people I know to be racists are at least polite enough to avoid that word in social settings.
There is no “more than zero but less than 10%” option, so I said 10%.
I am very much encouraged by the absence of N-sayers around Dopers. Seriously, when I was growing up in my segregated town in West Texas, the word flowed like water all around me. True, that was long ago, and I have my doubts that it’s changed all that much in that particular area. But I can only take this thread as a sign of an improved situation overall these days, and I’m not joking.
