OPEN UNIVERSITY JUNE 19, 2007
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by John McWhorter
Discussion in the media and in forums on race tends to imply that the use of "nigger" among blacks as a term of affection is roughly twenty five years old, and that it has its origins in rap lyrics--or at least that rap created an explosion in its usage. The assumption seems to be that this in-group use of the word is roughly 25 years old. This occasions three useful observations.
One: "Nigger" was used this way long before rap. Exhibit A: Claude Brown's biographical account of growing up in Harlem in the 1940s and 1950s, Manchild in the Promised Land. Here is someone warmly counseling Brown in the fifties:
You're one of these complacent niggers out here who managed to get by and not have it bother them directly...when the shit comes down on you, you're going to be one of the angriest niggers out here on this street, man...you see all these niggers running out here talking about they want some white girl. Damn, I don't want me nothin' but a nigger woman.
Examples like these are hardly rare. And furthermore:
Two: "Nigger" wasn't the first slur against blacks that shifted from slur to term of affection. "Coon" began as a comparison of blacks to raccoons for reasons of coloring, and today it is thought of as a nasty, albeit rather archaic, equivalent to "jungle bunny" or the like.
However, one hair out of place has always been that black songwriters a century ago so regularly used the term in their own work. Ernest Hogan had a mega-hit with "All Coons Look Alike to Me." Scott Joplin put words to one of his rags and referred to "coons" as if he were a white writer.
They were knuckling under to the conventions of the era in the only way they could achieve financial success just after Plessy v. Ferguson? A reasonable explanation, but it frays when even someone as tripwire-sensitive to condescension as composer, conductor and world-class violinist Will Marion Cook was also casually stuck coon into his lyrics.
Could it be that "coon" was transmogrified into a term of affection by gaslight-era blacks just as "nigger" would be decades later? One hint that it was is an old-time expression among blacks, that a friend was "my ace boon coon." But to learn more, today there is no one living to fill us in.
However, my friend and ragtime historian extraordinaire Edward Berlin dug up smoking-gun evidence leafing through ancient numbers of the Indianapolis black newspaper the Freeman. Sylvester Russell, the main drama critic, knew his racism quite well, deplored it, and staged a sit-in sixty years before they became common. He had no use for "nigger." Yet he casually noted in 1904 that "The Negro race has no objections to the word "coon."
To be sure, the word elicited controversy just as "nigger" does now. The following year Russell interviewed black stage composer superstar Bob Cole. Cole, dedicated to showing whites blacks' dignity by doing his vaudeville act in black tie and writing gem-like "genteel" songs (the one with any resonance today is "Under the Bamboo Tree"), said "The word 'coon' is very insinuating and must soon be eliminated." But then, Cole had no problem with, of all things, "darkey"!
Three: It is a human universal to transform slurs in this way. Quite commonly, people use a disparaging term joshingly as an in-group equalizer. In Russian, "muzhik" means "peasant" and has also come to mean "good guy." Recall the businessmen George Costanza runs in with in a "Seinfeld" episode who use "bastard" as a term of affection. South Sea Islanders have made the initially insulting "kanaka" into a term of ethnic pride.
And we can give the last word to an Italian restaurateur in the twenties described by Michael Lerner in his new Dry Manhattan on the follies of Prohibition in New York, who in court hollered "Every wop around here is selling drinks, why can't I?"
12 comments
Quite commonly, people use a disparaging term joshingly as an in-group equalizer. In Russian, "muzhik" means "peasant" and has also come to mean "good guy." More like "bloke", I think - no suggestion of either good or bad, though it can also be used as a semi-ironic form of address a la "buddy" or "boyo". Maybe a better equivalent would be the northeast US irish-american usage of "harp." Perhaps also "desi" among Indians.
- teplukhin2you
June 19, 2007 at 3:18pm
"Paddy" has a range of meanings among the Irish, but any use by Anglos (other than as somebody's actual name, of course) is treated with instant hostility.
- ironyroad
June 19, 2007 at 3:56pm
Clea-, I mean, Iggy, do the Irish really use mexican slang to describe the English?
- teplukhin2you
June 19, 2007 at 4:23pm
If a large segment of the African-American population is so offended by this term, it should be a taboo word even if some members of this population use it affectionately. I think that's true also for Jews and "kike" or "Jewboy" or, as ironyroad has pointed out, Irish and "Paddy", whites and "WASP" or "rednecks" and so on. Let live.
- sleepyavl
June 19, 2007 at 8:08pm
It is possible that the use by certain groups within their group of derogatory words is not affectionately but somewhat more complex. "Defiantly" may be closer to the truth -- you can't use a word to hurt me/put me in my place, because it is my word, not yours. The gays seem to have adopted the word "queer" for the same reason. In any event, I agree with sleepyavl. Whatever the reason, the use of terms of bigotry should be off limits. By the way, I'm not sure "redneck" is in that category. Any clarification?
- PeteBeck
June 20, 2007 at 11:53am
about some elements of this. Think of that other word than no one uses any more -c-nt. Now think of two liberal women calling one another that, as a sisterly, ironic, expression of the Sisterhood. BS, in other words. You've all seen the multiple reviews of Ralph Ellison being circulated and his expression of race through music. I remember the piece on Bird quoted in this issue of TNR well, and how Jazz and the Blues allowed at least some White people to appreciate an respect Black culture. Compare that to Hip Hop and Black culture today. Something has become terribly lost in non-translation. You wonder if the cover blew off and everything, every sort of thing, got out, and we are watching the cahos from which will come something new and better. Or so I hope.
- raycon
June 20, 2007 at 3:08pm
I'm American, so I can't use it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canuck . It's always a victory for the underdog when the underdog takes a term of derision from the "overlord" (a loaded term, but I don't have a better alternative) and uses it as a point of pride.
- akjacobson
June 20, 2007 at 3:14pm
- SMacEachern2
June 20, 2007 at 3:19pm
I don't think that too many Canadians would be offended by 'Canuck' - it's more like 'Yankee'. (Maybe 'Soviet Canuckistan', but there it's the user, not the term.) 'Newfie' or 'Pepsi' might be more offensive regionally. I work in northern Cameroon, where the Muslim term of insult for local non-Muslim/non-Christian montagnard people is 'kirdi' ( a mix of 'hillbilly' and 'nigger' in meaning, extremely pejorative). Lately, young people from the mountains have started calling themselves 'kirdi' quite defiantly, and there's even a newsletter now called 'Kirditude'.
- SMacEachern2
June 20, 2007 at 3:32pm
and I'm half that and half Irish. I've spent a tremendous amount of time -probably a couple of years in total- in Canada, and I've never given it a thought. Although, My Mother being French-Canadian (just barely born in the US), I've always thought of as coming from that side originally. I did not know that the root included an Irish refrence, which would have shocked my mother's PaPa. He was generous to a fault. He would give anything away but my mother to my father at the altar.
- raycon
June 20, 2007 at 3:34pm
A Mexican-American acquaintance of mine who grew up in Texas hated being referred to as a "chicano," saying it was like calling him a "nigger." The term was used pridefully, especially among La-Raza activists. Was my friend's feeling unusual? I'm curious.
- James Mauch
June 20, 2007 at 3:54pm
I don't know that much about your friend obviously but in the LA area where I grew up, Chicano was definitely split along generational lines. The Old Guard in my family frowned upon it for sure but among the boomer set, it was certainly a prideful tag, suffused with political, social, and interpersonal connotations.
- MrCookie1
June 21, 2007 at 9:04pm