I first heard it as “tiger” when I was a kid growing up in Pennsylvania and I couldn’t understand why an animal that roars would holler instead.
I’ve spent a lot of time in very mixed class groups. Upstate New York mostly, but also travelling around the country, though mostly in the northern half. Didn’t seem to me to be common use, “lower” class or not. Some people did use it; but not most – and I don’t remember its being ‘lower class’ people specifically who used it; I think if anything I associated it with people who thought they were in charge. (Plantation owners would have been very much upper class, after all.)
I’m not saying that it wasn’t common anywhere; but I do think that, in the last fifty years or so at any rate, common use was regional – though the regions were probably spotty around the country, not all of them consolidated in one part of the country.
I think that, growing up hearing ‘tiger’, I just took ‘holler’ to mean any sort of objection. And cats do howl; though it occurs to me that I don’t know whether tigers howl if hurt like some housecats do.
If I thought about it at all, I probably thought ‘roar’ didn’t have the right number of syllables to fit the line.
My experience is similar to that of kenobi_65 and Icarus.
When I was in grade school in the Chicago suburbs circa early 1970’s, whenever two kids started fighting in the playground, the other kids watching would start chanting “A fight! A fight! A n***** and a white!”
This is the kind of thing that passes for clever in the third grade. I had not been taught that the word was offensive, and there were zero black students in my small school so there was nobody there to offend anyway.
I probably used the word in dumb contexts like this until about junior high, when I began to catch on that it wasn’t cool. As an adult, of course, I never go near it.
By the way, did anybody else ever “catch a pickle by the toe”? Yes, I realize that makes no sense, but it’s the way my mom taught me the rhyme and was how I said it all through childhood. And Brazil nuts were just Brazil nuts.
I listen to a lot of hip hop music and sing along with a lot of hip hop music and I will admit that I do not edit myself when singing along.
I can’t say I’ve ever sung along to hip hop music in the presence of others, or if I have it didn’t happen to contain THE WORD so I haven’t had to worry about it. I am co cioisly aware that I am not to use it even when singing along (there was a whole storyline of the show “Dear White People” about this).
Somehow even though my parents are racist they never used that word around me and I seem to have always known it was a bad word so I’ve never used it as a pejorative to describe other people or even a word to describe other people. It boggles my mind that any white person would be upset that we can’t use this word.
I remember that exact chant, and I was in grade school during that same time period.
Chicago north shore suburbs mid-'60s, never heard that once.
I have said the word in my lifetime, but never as an epithet. I am old enough to remember when it wasn’t yet referred to as “the n-word,” so if you had a discussion about its use in Huck Finn, or PG Wodehouse, you just came out and said it.
When I was a small child, there were times when I would say things to my mother like “Why is ‘n!gg+r’ a bad word, and ‘black’ isn’t?” I was probably about 3 yrs old when I said things like that. I’m pretty sure may mother came out and said the word in her answer. I distinctly remember once asking which word was worse, “n!gg+r” or “shvartzer”? both were words I was forbidden to say. The answer, IIRC (and paraphrasing), was that bad words were bad words, and I should not say them, period. Ranking them was therefore irrelevant.
I also said it once as an adult. I worked with an autistic client who was white, and echolalic. One day at the park, he overheard a group of black teenagers calling one another that, and then one the way home, he started saying it.
As luck would have it, his favorite aid at school was black. On Monday morning, I went into the school to tell her this had happened, so if the word popped out, that was how he learned it. I wanted her to know he hadn’t learned it from staff at our agency, or his family, and I wanted to apologize, even though it was a serendipitous event. I came out and said the word, because I wanted to make it clear he had heard the word full-out, not literally heard “the n-word.”
So that’s my history with it. I think the last time I said it in the context of a discussion of censorship, Huck Finn, etc., was in the 1990s, so “the n-word” has been around for a while.
If it goes back to a specific event, it may go back to the OJ Simpson trial.
I’ve heard of the n-word, f-word and c-word, but not s-word. You must hang out with very polite people.
We said ‘catch a baby by its toe, if it squeals let it go’. Didn’t know there was another version until the Clarkson incident.
I don’t think I’ve ever said the word in my life, and I can only think of one occasion when I heard someone else use it.
We moved from the far western suburbs of Chicago to Green Bay in early '75, when I was partway through 4th grade. I can’t specifically remember hearing it at the two schools I went to in Illinois, but I definitely remember it being used in Green Bay.
That chant was my first exposure as well, with the following verse “if the white don’t win then we all jump in”. Us having no idea what it meant at all.
“Yeah, if you can find that in a song…”
I grew up not too far from a river in the 60-70s. The cross street near my house deadended into a dirt road that lead to the “bottoms”. A community of black people lived down there and, of course, this was referred to as Niggertown. Only once in my entire childhood did I see any of them, when I saw a few walking to the bus stop one afternoon. I always wondered how they managed to come and go without being seen. They certainly didn’t shop at the neighborhood stores or go to the school. But I just thought that’s how things were. Fortunately, I grew out of that mindset.
I have never used the word, even once.
When I was a child, the eenie-meanie-miney rhyme I was taught went like this:
Eenie meenie miney mo
Catch a knicker by the toe
If it hollows let it go
Eenie meenie miney mo
Both ‘knicker’ and ‘hollow’ were words I actually knew existed, and I wasn’t aware of any other words that sounded like them enough to be substituted. The fact that this made neither grammatical nor practical sense was a bit of an issue, but other kids often did or said things that made no sense to me, so I kind of let it slide. I won’t swear that every other kid in the playground was similarly ignorant, but I bet lots were.
I don’t remember learning the actual n-word, but I probably read it in a book by an American. It’s the sort of thing that might have come up in history classes when we were learning about slavery. Much muuuuuch later I was informed that some people did/had/used to use the word in Australia to refer to black people (in fact, it might have been on this board…), but I don’t remember anyone ever using it ‘live’ around me.
I have used the word out loud when portraying the speech of bigots. So I have used it in a disparaging way, but it is not African-Americans that are being disparaged, and if there is someone who might hear me and fail to understand that this is not my voice, I restate what I am saying more clearly.
It’s in some songs, but I’ve never used it in speech (except as an example with students) and now don’t sing it, either.
I have a weird relationship with the word as I was in a black foster home and went to schools/classes where I was the only white kid… and it was during the time when rap music had just started …
so when I was a kid there was a difference between the word with an er on it and it is said as “nigga” which was acceptable in everyday use and since a lot of them considered me to be the smartest person they knew (which wasn’t saying much) and id have to help a lot of them in class i was given honorary " O.G nigga" status and have a card saying so somewhere among my HS relics
there was a joke that you could always find the new kid because of us talking and they’d be shocked/pissed and someone would explain things to them …
I’ve never once used it myself, with bad intentions.
My dear mother, the nicest person ever, tells a story of when she was a little girl. This would have taken place in the late 1930’s. She and her older sister had heard the word, and when a black man walked by their house, on the sidewalk, they shouted it at him. He turned around, came up to their door and knocked. My grandmother answered and he told her what the girls had done. Then he left. Boy, did THEY ever get a chewing out!!!
Those girls weren’t bad, they just didn’t know the total significance of what they said. Years later, in the early1950’s, my mother was in nursing school with the first black student there. When the students would go to the movies they all sat in the balcony, because their fellow student couldn’t sit on the main floor. And the girls did not sit down to eat in the local diner, they all got takeout, because their fellow student could not sit down with them. Some years ago now there was an article in the local paper about that class, and ladies who had been students were interviewed, including my mom. She wasn’t what you would call an activist, but she was all about fair treatment.
My grandmother, who remonstrated with her daughters, grew up in the country and said she didn’t hear the N word used until she came into our town/city. She said there were black farmers in the area and her father exchanged work with them like anyone else. And she went to the country school with the black kids, not seeing segregated schools until her move into the city.
Someone called me out on use of the term ‘denigrate’ the other day, claiming it is a slur - it is indeed based on the latin root word for ‘black’ and it does indeed mean ‘to blacken’ in a negative sense, but as far as I am able to tell, this appears to be nothing to do with race and it seems to be ‘blackening’ in the sense of ‘spoiling by staining with ink, soot or dirt’
Random thought: a line I loved from a book I read called A Scot’s Quair, involved a person contemplating revenge, and said she couldn’t decide whether to “blacken” someone’s “eyes, or her character.”
Regarding the n-word. I think the only times I heard it up until age 8 were in the context of “don’t say this,” on seeing it in a book.
But after that, I started spending time in Indiana, because my aunt and uncle moved there, and Wow, did I start hearing it a lot. Just casually, too, not as an insult, just as the word people used to refer to something.
I mean, in New York, a lot of older people still said “colored people,” and I’d been taught not to say that-- it was outdated, and older people couldn’t help if they forgot that it wasn’t what people wanted to hear now, but I needed to learn to say “Black,” because that was polite now. My mother said the n-word was never a nice thing to say, but there was a time when it wasn’t as bad as it is now.
I was pretty shocked when I heard people saying it so casually in Indiana (this would have been around 1975-1979). It could start a fight in New York.