This is an amazing article by writer and professor William Jelani Cobb:
http://www.ebonyjet.com/politics/index.aspx?id=1290
Equal Opportunity Epithets
when the name calling started, we responded with more than redemption songs
08/20/2007
By William Jelani Cobb
Nigger, as you have no doubt heard, was buried last month in a public homegoing ceremony organized by the NAACP. Despite his advanced age (at least 400 years at last count) the announcement of his funeral services was unexpected. He leaves a litany of surviving family members and close relations (coon, jigaboo, spade etc.). We won’t dwell on the fact that, in an amazing display of resilience, nigger has been sighted more times since his funeral than Elvis Presley.
Had we the opportunity to provide the term with a proper obituary, before it jumped out the casket we would have noted the long, storied career during which he found favor with the Presidents (Lyndon B. Johnson was rumored to toss the word around in the White House), commoners (you ever wander into Bay Shore, Brooklyn by accident?) and lent his name to Dick Gregory’s autobiography, Carl Van Vechten’s novel about Harlem and too many rap songs to bother counting. In a culture where the highest laurel of celebrity is to be known by a single name (Madonna, Usher, Beyonce) Nigger was ubiquitous enough to be recognized simply by his first initial.
We have, by this point tired of the ceaseless debate on the usage of alleged “N” word. (For what it matters, Richard Pryor settled the matter three decades ago, but I digress.) But what remains amazing about that jewel of dehumanization is the sheer amount of energy invested in it. I’ve long suspected that had America devoted the amount of energy to socially useful causes that it did to finding ever more inventive deployments of nigger, they would have long ago cured cancer, ended global warming and figured out that evolution is not a cynical ploy hatched by Al Gore and designed to turn your children against Jesus. The few footnote-worthy highlights include its use as a verb (to “nigger” something means to char or burn it.) Brazil nuts and the candy Sugar Babies are colloquially referred to as “nigger-toes” and there are a number of ambivalently named forms of wildlife which include the nigger fish (Grouper) and the nigger bug (the black caterpillar that evolves into the sawfly.)
But perhaps in focusing on that single word, we are missing a bigger point. Among the stickier elements of old school white liberalism is the comfortable idea that black folk were simply the passive recipients of racism, opting to respond ? only when response was absolutely necessary ? by launching into song and prayer. The fact is that the fame of the N word has largely overshadowed African American contributions to the glossary of American epithets.
If African Americans did not originate every term of racial derision directed at white people, we have certainly employed them vigorously. Take a random survey of black folk in other global contexts and you’ll probably find that they have nowhere near the number of white epithets in their common parlance as African Americans do. (For what it matters, every new group in America seems to have been assigned its share of ethnic insults like kids receiving a bus pass the first day of school.)
But in the spirit of equal airtime, it might be worth noting the roots of a few other choice terms: “Cracker,” the old standby of Anglo insults was first noted in the mid 18th century, making it older than the United States itself. It was used to refer to poor whites, particularly those inhabiting the frontier regions of Maryland, Virginia and Georgia. It is suspected that it was a shortened version of “whip-cracker,” since the manual labor they did involved driving livestock with a whip (not to mention the other brutal arenas where those skills were employed.) Over the course of time it came to represent a person of lower caste or criminal disposition, (in some instances, was used in reference to bandits and other lawless folk.)
Similarly “peckerwood,” which started out as a term for a woodpecker, was applied to poor whites in the early 1800s and eventually became associated with whites in general before fading from common usage in the mid 20th century. But if you’re looking for durability, “Buckra” wins hands down. Though it’s scarcely used today, it is easily the most widely employed anti-white term, showing up throughout the Caribbean, South America, the United States and the West Coast of Africa. It is believed to have originated in the Calabar region of southern Nigeria and literally translates into “demon.”
“Ofay,” that staple of blaxploitation flicks and your Uncle Junior has obscure roots. But it dates back at least to the early 1800s and is possibly a corruption of a West African term that simply meant “white man.” “Honky,” George Jefferson’s identifier of choice, was likely derived from the term “Hunky” which was hurled at immigrants of Eastern European extraction early in the 20th century. And in addition to the bean pie, the Nation of Islam likely holds the copyright for the term “blue-eyed devil,” which came into common usage in the 1950s.
“Miss Anne” and “Mister Charlie” date back to the late 19th century when they became generic versions of the formal address even the most lowly white person warranted. Then there are those low-octane derisives whose roots are even more clouded but which never stopped them from being tossed around at a Spades tournament (greyboy, pinktoe, snowflake and whitey for instance.)
None of those terms carry the weight of nigger and we will not ever see a mass of wounded white folk holding a futile funeral for a single word in this list. At their heart epithets are designed to strip the humanity from a person and leave them eligible for all manner of injustice. Long after it has gone to its grave for real, the history of black folk in this country will still attest to the devastating efficiency of nigger. But on that score, perhaps there is something oddly virtuous about not having authored a term with the vicious pedigree of the so-deemed “N” word. Surely there is karmic hell to pay for those who first uttered it ? and those who have worked so diligently to keep it in circulation. Still, there is something comforting about knowing that in the battle of hurtful words, black folk weren’t on the front lines completely unarmed.
(NOTES: The curious reader can check the Oxford English Dictionary, Bartlett’s Dictionary of American Usage, Clarence Major’s Juba to Jive dictionary and the Racial Slur Database for the roots of these and other terms.)
William Jelani Cobb, Ph.D. is an associate professor of history at Spelman College. His third book, now available from NYU Press: To The Break of Dawn: A Freestyle on the Hip Hop Aesthetic
Comment(s)
great piece!