Not in Front of the Children (2)/25 Hour News
OK, the second instalment of our guide to the most taboo words in the English language focuses on what, along with ‘Cunt’, is one guaranteed to break the ice at parties…
NIGGER
Now, here’s a word that’s had more ins and outs than a Gateshead bridesmaid on a hen-night. At one time, a common slang term for anyone dark-skinned, not only in the American Deep South, but throughout the English-speaking world; it’s a word we now associate as applying exclusively to those of African and West Indian descent, but it could once be just as applicable to indigenous Australians and natives of the Indian subcontinent. It was viewed as perfectly legitimate colloquial shorthand for any non-white race, as reflected in early twentieth century ads for ‘Nigger Makeup’ (available from a joke-shop near you!) or even a colour shade from my mother’s immediate post-war childhood, Nigger Brown. Early Jazz vocal styles were referred to as ‘Coon Singing’ and Coon itself was one of the many interchangeable words with Nigger, such as Nig-Nog, Golliwog, Spade, Sambo, Sooty, Darkie, Blackie, and the slightly less-common (in Britain, anyway) Uncle Tom, Kaffir and Pickaninny, all of which could be used both as deliberate insult and non-malicious noun.
There were Nigger Boy candy cigarettes (two PC coronaries for the price of one), the Golliwogs of Enid Blyton’s Noddy series, the Black and White Minstrels Show on prime-time BBC1, and Agatha Christie’s ‘Ten Little Niggers’. Even my own childhood editions of the Rev. W V Awdrey’s railway books still retained the original 1950s text, particularly a line in ‘Henry the Green Engine’, when Henry drenches a bunch of rowdy schoolboys in dirty steam, leaving them (I quote) ‘as black as niggers’. And, of course, there is the beloved black Labrador owned by the Richard Todd character in classic British war-movie ‘The Dam Busters’, with the poor hound neutered by censor’s scissors on some TV broadcasts of late.
The word of which Nigger is a corruption, Negro, was still in common usage during the Civil Rights era; Martin Luther King used it regularly in speeches, and a clip from BBC coverage of the 1968 Mexico Olympics has presenter Frank Bough describing Tommy Smith and John Carlos as ‘Negro Athletes’. By the time Smith and Carlos gave the Black Power salute on the podium, Black was becoming a cooler alternative to Negro amongst the black community, as emphasised by James Brown’s ‘Say it Loud – I’m Black and I’m Proud’. But despite the emergence of a more militant form of black activism at the end of the 60s and into the 70s, the likes of TV sitcom ‘Love Thy Neighbour’ still drew high viewing figures, even if its hackneyed aim to present a more balanced view of British race relations than Alf Garnett had managed before it makes it arguably less watchable today than ‘Till Death us Do Part’.
In the US, the official descriptive term for non-Caucasian or Hispanic citizens went from Negro to Coloured to African-American in a generation, whereas Nigger was banished from polite conversation, only to surprisingly re-emerge with the late 80s advent of Gangsta Rap, albeit spelt Nigga; the plural was evident in Niggaz With Attitude. Reborn as the exclusive property of American blacks, Nigga was noun, insult and term of endearment rolled into one, though when appropriated by white kids aping black style and attitude, it still sounded wrong.
So overly sensitive are the white powers-that-be to what they cautiously refer to as the N Word, any use of it in books such as ‘The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’ has provoked rewritten editions with the offending word excised, despite the fact that Mark Twain’s masterpiece is one of the acknowledged Great American Novels and its language is utterly authentic. How can Americans condemn ISIS if the fanatical radicals attempt to eradicate ancient relics representing idolatry in Islam when they themselves are quite content to butcher their own artistic legacy? They become apoplectic when it appears in contemporary movies attempting to recreate the past with accuracy; but to pretend it never existed is to effectively erase the Civil Rights era from history, as the word itself became taboo because of the Civil Rights movement.
Mind you, we’re all familiar enough with the British branch of the Ministry of Truth’s tactics, so expect Nigger and its variations to vanish from all future incarnations of classic texts. When John Lennon released ‘Woman is the Nigger of the World’ in 1972 – missing from most Lennon ‘best of’ collections, curiously – he appeared on US TV’s Dick Cavett chat show to explain his employment of the word, and he quoted black American congressman Ron Dellums. It’s as good a definition of the word that there is…
‘If you define niggers as someone whose lifestyle is defined by others, whose opportunities are defined by others, whose role in society is defined by others, then good news! You don’t have to be black to be a nigger in this society. Most of the people in America are niggers.’
And on our now-customary lighter note…
Petunia Winegum
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June 6, 2015 at 9:22 am -
Oh, yes indeed Miss Winegum, or is it Ms Winegum. One cannot assume these days and everyone must pick their words with care from a PC minefield/lexicon. Not a real minefield of course, I’m speaking metabollicly. My father, knew more about this sort of thing than most and had his thumb blown clean orf in a real minefield. Why is it never the ‘pinkie’, a good man can still earn a living in heavy industry without the ‘little one’. But when you lose your ability of opposableness (not a real word) you become one with the lesser beasts. Anyway, I’ve digressed. I’ve always considered the ‘dark folk’, as soap dodgers. Perhaps one day I’ll be shot.
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June 6, 2015 at 9:33 am -
Wandering round the tourist waterfront in San Francisco a few years ago, Mrs M was tempted by an ice-cream vendor’s offering of a frozen banana on a stick, wholly dipped in chocolate, then garnished with crushed pistachios, which was indeed much enjoyed. This confection was henceforth named a “Nigger’s Knob With Nuts On” – I contend that there is no more apt description for that comestible and so it will remain in our family lexicon for life, regardless of the petty strictures of any PC lobby. It’s only a word, after all.
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June 6, 2015 at 12:22 pm -
Like every other German her age, The Bestes Frau In The World ate her own body weight in “Niggers Kisses” during her childhood. Infact I can recall buying them myself, so named, even as late as the mid 90s. Now , of course, they have been renamed “Foam Kisses”.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/71/Schaumkuss-1.jpg
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June 6, 2015 at 9:58 am -
“The word of which Nigger is a corruption, Negro,”… which is itself Spanish for black. I can’t get my head around why saying black in English is OK, but not black in Spanish. My personal hatred lies in a word you have omitted from your list: “Wog”. (I know you have included Golliwog) . It makes my skin crawl.
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June 6, 2015 at 10:23 am -
“And, of course, there is the beloved black Labrador owned by the Richard Todd character in classic British war-movie ‘The Dam Busters’, with the poor hound neutered by censor’s scissors on some TV broadcasts of late.”
Not to my ears. Channel 5 seem to show the film the whole time. Each time I saw it, the scene where the dog gets run over is preceded by a succession of characters saying things like ‘ah, Nigger old boy…’. I swear, one time the film was shown uncut around the time that BBC radio presenter was sacked for playing a song with the word nigger in it. There was no apparent uproar.
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June 6, 2015 at 10:25 am -
Apparently, an edited version with the dog renamed ‘Trigger’ has done the rounds in the US and has been shown here, though probably back in the regional ITV days. I’ve never seen it myself, thank God.
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June 6, 2015 at 11:19 am -
I was a child in 1950s north Manchester, a time and a place where “persons of colour” were at best an exotic abstraction — I fragmentedly recall a “newsreel” on what passed for television in those days showing spear-bearing African natives in grass skirts jumping up and down to greet the young Queen in one of her visits to inspect her imperial possessions. Or so I remember and reconstruct that fleeting memory. That was about as close as I got to “darkies” until my first trip through Moss Side on the number 80 bus in 1959.
There was a special showing of “The Dambusters” at my primary school in ’58 or ’59. No attention was drawn to the name of Guy Gibson’s dog or the use of its name as a codeword, and we 10- and 11-year-old boys were not felt to be threatened by this traumatically insensitive nomenclature.
“Nigger” was simply a commonly used name for pet cats and dogs blessed with all-over black fur. I have occasionally toyed with the idea of getting a black cat and calling it “Nigger”, so that I could legitimately stand on the doorstep of an evening calling it home, but have regretfully concluded that such an action might well be misconstrued by the large Nigerian population, where I now live in south east London.
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June 6, 2015 at 10:23 am -
June 6, 2015 at 10:57 am -
A few years after John Lennon’s song, later on in the punkie part of the 70s, the Stranglers had a song called “I feel like a wog”. Not, I think, about a honky boy lusting after Tina Turner, but the white popsters expressing feelings of alienation. Of course, calling yourself the “Stranglers” is pretty provocative too (though not quite as much as “The Moors Murderers”).
I’m old enough to remember when the idea of rewriting/censoring things to reflect contemporary mores was laughed about as absurd – Dr Bowlder was ridiculed for expurgating Shakespeare, and Stalin’s minions altering photographs to cut out “unpersons” was seen as deeply sinister – but that was long before PC and the fruits of Savilisation.
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June 6, 2015 at 11:40 am -
There was also a band around the same time called “Raped”. The name caused a big stink so they changed it.
They called themselves “Cuddly Toys”!!
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June 6, 2015 at 11:47 am -
Not only that, their EP was called “Pretty Paedophiles”.
http://www.terrorizer.com/dominion/band-of-the-week/band-of-the-week-cuddly-toys/
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June 6, 2015 at 1:25 pm
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June 6, 2015 at 11:04 am -
“And, of course, there is the beloved black Labrador owned by the Richard Todd character in classic British war-movie ‘The Dam Busters’, with the poor hound neutered by censor’s scissors on some TV broadcasts of late.”
Trusty Ol’ Tigger at his heels, Wing Commander Gibson entered the Officers Mess. Nodding to the Barperson he ordered three fingers of apple juice as part of his 9 a day . His fellow officers appeared to be doing the same. Gibson placed his forefinger and index finger to his lips and exhaled deeply -an Ayuverda Relaxtion technique, no doubt, that he and his fellow men spent an inordinate amount of time performing daily. “Ok People of nondefined Gender and sexual preference, tonight we will be hitting the H-word where it hurts. The Dams of the Ruhr. I know we all will feel very guilty about condemning hundreds of our fellow Europeans to a watery grave but we have to stop the K-words. Even if it means polluting vast stretches of inland Continental water ways. We can only hope that when this male-fueled madness is over , they , the politicos, will make cleaning up a priority and that future generations will forgive us. They may even name the new wet biotone after us . Tally Ho!…oh F-word! Sorry,that was an archaic cry from an antique and long forbidden evil form of animal abuse..”
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June 6, 2015 at 12:10 pm -
Surely W/C Gibson, he of the recently Bowdlerised dog, would have entered the ‘Servicemen’s Mess, Welcoming to all ranks, religions, races, sexual orientations, clothing preferences and masonic persuasions”, not a cruelly selective ‘Officers’ Mess’ of yore.
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June 6, 2015 at 12:38 pm -
Surely W/C Gibschildofnospecifiedgender
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June 6, 2015 at 2:50 pm -
You see, it’s a continuous improvement process – we’re getting there.
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June 6, 2015 at 11:09 am -
I seem to recall that a song by Patti Smith included the line “Jimi Hendrix was a nigger”. And in reply to Windsock, is not Wog supposed to be some sort of acronym, something like “worthy oriental gentleman” or “wily oriental gentleman”? At least I’m sure that’s what somebody once told me. I grew up being told by my parents and grand parents that “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me”. Kids don’t appear to be told that anymore, they just get brainwashed by the system into believing that some words are taboo. Wearing glasses and having lost nearly all my hair I often get called “four-eyes” or a “slap-head”. Does it bother me? Not one iota – just as long as they don’t kick the shit out of me they can call me anything they like.
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June 6, 2015 at 11:29 am -
I don’t recall as a child seeing any problem with Nigger Brown shoe polish or Golliwogs. They were just there, no issue. But in a sizeable town, as a child I didn’t see any black, brown or yellow people until the early ’50s, before that they were just caricatures in films or books. A different world, & one that to some extent still seems to exist in Downland villages, maybe in the Cotswolds too.
I think I’ve mentioned before the offence caused at work in RSA in the mid ’80’s when reference was made (by a white) to kaffirs in front of a black member of staff. Private companies were running Black Advancement programmes from the early ’80’s, so the bad old ways had to go.-
June 6, 2015 at 3:53 pm -
I still can’t quite understand all the modern day fuss about Golliwogs. When I was a nipper, they were just cheery little characters that advertised jam (Robertson’s, was it?) – there were absolutely no racist connotations whatever, and for me at least, there still aren’t. Of course I can understand that you don’t go around calling people niggers or white honkys in a perjorative way with an intention to belittle or offend, but I can’t help thinking some people take the ‘must’nt offend’ to rather extreme limits.
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June 6, 2015 at 12:30 pm -
Let’s not forget those three heroes of Enid Blyton’s books – Golly, Woggie & Nigger! Is it true that “Big-Ears” is nowadays known as “White-Beard” to avoid millions of outraged letters from those of increased auricular capacity (or rather those who feel it’s their solemn duty to display outrage on their behalf)?
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June 6, 2015 at 12:35 pm -
“Big-Ears” is nowadays known as “White-Beard”
Unlikely when ‘Blackbeard’ still has negative connotations…can’t have anything ‘white’ being in anyway ‘good’, can we?
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June 6, 2015 at 12:41 pm -
“Blackbeard” may have been a scurvy pirate but I still don’t see why “blackboard” raises so many eyebrows these days…
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June 6, 2015 at 12:51 pm -
“missing from most Lennon ‘best of’ collections, curiously”
Have to disagree with the “curiously”, I’m afraid.
The whole Sometime in New York City album has been described as the worst ever by a major music figure and, even for a long-time Beatles admirer, it’s hard to disagree. It’s full of toe-curlingly simplistic trite doggerel about every tick-box radical fad of the moment. I doubt Lennon really gave much of a toss about most of them as he appeared to give no more time or thought to the lyrics than it would take to skim-read an SWP pamphlet.
If anything from the album appears on a “best of” it can only be because the compilers mother is being held hostage.
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