10 November 2020
[Note: This word is perhaps the most offensive one in present-day English. I use the n-word in this entry only because the word has various forms and spellings that have changed over time and that connote different meanings. It’s impossible to clearly explain such differences when the word is expurgated. In this entry, I expurgate the double-g spelling of the n-word everywhere except the first reference, even in quotations where I mark the expurgation in square brackets, while leaving the older, variant forms intact. My hope is that this will allow a clear explanation of the word’s history while minimizing the offense it may cause.
If anyone is offended by my use of the word in this entry, please accept my apologies, and let me know how I have offended or erred. I will listen and make changes as appropriate.
In this entry, I explain the word’s history. For commentary on why it is not appropriate for White people to use the word, see my post on “Should a White Person Ever Use the N-word?”]
The history of the word nigger is etymologically straightforward and semantically complex. When used by White people, the word has, from its first appearance in English, been a derogatory one. But as used by Black people, the word has a range of nuanced senses and connotations, although these uses by Black people remain controversial, with some saying the word is so polluted that it should never be used by anyone.
The n-word is borrowed from the French nègre, which borrowed it from the Spanish negro, a word which was also borrowed into English directly from Spanish at about the same time. The root literally means black. In French, it appears by 1516 as a noun in the sense of a Black person and as an adjective by 1611. But while n——r and negro both started out as simple descriptive terms, without any negative connotation, n——r quickly acquired such negative connotations in English usage.
The word appears in English with the form neiger in Thomas Hacket’s 1568 translation from the French of André Thevet’s The New Found Worlde. The passage quoted here uses the word as a description of skin color but with a connotation of White racial superiority. It also portrays an Early Modern version of scientific racism, where environmental conditions were thought to affect the bodily humors and cause the darkening of the skin and purportedly making Black persons inferior to White persons:
Then to the skin of this people so burned, there resteth but the earthly parte of the humor, the others being dispersed which causeth the coulour. I said they were fearful, bicause of the inward coldnesse: for hardinesse and manhoode commeth not, but with a vehement heate of the heart. The which causeth the Englishmen, & those that are vnder the North Pole, which co[n]trary are cold without, but maruelous hot within, to be hardy, couragious, & ful of great boldnesse. Therfore these Neigers haue their heade curled, their téethe white, great lips, croked legges, the women vnconstant, with many other vices which wold be to long to reherse
The word, with the spelling niger, appears a few years later in Edward Hellowe’s 1577 translation of the letters of Antonio de Guevara. Here the word is merely descriptive, with no implications of racial difference, although the passage does reflect anti-Semitic attitudes:
There is not any nation in this world, be it never so barbarous, that hath not some place to retire unto, or some captein to defend them, the Garamants of Asia, the Massagetes bordering upo[n] the Indians, & the Nigers of Aethiop, bearing witness, except you most miserable Iewes, the which in all places and countries be fugitives and captiues.
The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) distinguishes these earlier variants from the double-g spelling, placing them in separate entries. But this distinction makes little sense to me. Both forms follow the same etymological path, and their senses are not all that different. The one entry simply contains older forms of the same word.
The double-g spelling appears by 1608 in a letter by Anthony Marlowe, a representative of the East India Company, to his superiors back in London describing an encounter that happened in August 1607. Marlowe uses the word to denote indigenous Brazilians, not Africans, and his use is a patronizing one, connoting a sense of White racial superiority:
August 6 came to anchor in Serro Leona river, this place proved a happy place to us, for here at little charge we got up our men with limes, water and fish. In this river the Portugal hath trade, commodities gold and elephant's teeth, it is a goodly river, the navigation of it bold and good for any ship to come on the south side.
The King and people n[——]rs, simple and harmless.
By the late eighteenth century, the n-word is clearly being used as a term of contempt. Here is an example from a British song mocking George Washington and the troops of the Continental Army upon the occasion of Washington assuming command of the Army on 3 July 1775 at Cambridge Massachusetts:
Full many a child went into camp,
All dressed in homespun kersey,
To see the greatest rebel scamp
That ever cross'd o'er Jersey.
The rebel clowns, oh! what a sight!
Too awkward was their figure.
'Twas yonder stood a pious wight,
And here and there a n[——]r.
Upon a stump, he placed (himself,)
Great Washington did he,
And through the nose of lawyer Close
Proclaimed great Liberty.
So, as used by White people, the n-word became progressively more derogatory over the centuries, but its use among Black people is more nuanced.
There is a history of Black people in America using the term neutrally, but often this is in conversation with White people—the enslaved person using the term of the oppressor to curry favor or at least avoid punishment—and often such instances that are recorded are ventriloquized or mediated by White writers. The Oxford English Dictionary, in its sense A.I.1.c. “used by black people (esp. African Americans) as a neutral or favourable term” gives four nineteenth-century examples, but all four are by White writers attempting to portray Black speech, including an example from Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. Many of the uses in this sense are a form of verbal blackface, where White writers attempt to use Black dialect to mock and denigrate as a form of entertainment for White readers.
Instead, when we look at how actual Black writers in the nineteenth century use the n-word, they adopt it when they are quoting White people, speaking to White people from a position of subservience, or speaking among themselves but using the word to connote their servile or abject condition.
There are a fair number of published works by Black American writers in the nineteenth century, many of them narratives by formerly enslaved persons. But in these narratives the word is rarely used, except when quoting White people. For example, Frederick Douglass’s 1846 Narrative of the Life, which is perhaps the most famous of these narratives, uses the word eight times, always quoting a White person.
But there are some examples in these narratives of Black people using the term among themselves. For example, there is this passage from Lewis Clarke’s 1845 autobiography describing his emotions upon arriving in Canada and to freedom. Note, though, that Clarke’s use is in the context of master-slave power differential and connotes a servile position. It is not a word a free person would use to describe themselves:
When I stepped ashore here, I said, sure enough I AM FREE. Good heaven! what a sensation, when it first visits the bosom of a full grown man—one, born to bondage—one, who had been taught from early infancy, that this was his inevitable lot for life. Not till then, did I dare to cherish for a moment the feeling that one of the limbs of my body, was my own. The slaves often say, when cut in the hand or foot, "plague on the old foot, or the old hand, it is master's—let him take care of it—N[——]r don 't care if he never get well." My hands, my feet, were now my own. But what to do with them was the next question.
Solomon Northup in his 1853 Twelve Years a Slave shows how the word could be used among enslaved Blacks to mark a social hierarchy:
Patsey is twenty-three—also from Buford's plantation. She is in no wise connected with the others, but glories in the fact that she is the offspring of a "Guinea n[——]r," brought over to Cuba in a slave ship, and in the course of trade transferred to Buford, who was her mother's owner.
John Andrew Jackson, in his 1862 narrative, uses the word adjectively to mark something that is associated with or belonging to enslaved persons, in this case the slave quarters:
Mack English, having turned a wishful eye on Rose, wrapped himself up in his big cloak, and went to the n[——]r-house in the night, and called a slave named Esau, and told him to tell Rose to come to him as he wanted her.
And in her 1862 narrative Harriet Jacobs shows a Black woman using the word in a sense that would be common among Black speakers by the turn of the twenty-first century, that of a strong and assertive Black person:
If dey did know whar you are, dey won't know now. Dey'll be disapinted dis time. Dat's all I got to say. If dey comes rummagin 'mong my tings, dey'll get one bressed sarssin from dis 'ere n[——]r.
In the early twentieth century we see the appearance of the non-rhotic variant n[——]ah in Leon Harris’s 1925 telling of the story of the Black folk-hero John Henry. In this passage, the character Shine is speaking to fellow Black railroad workers. They are free men, but performing menial labor:
“Howdy n[——]ahs,” he commenced, “how’s you all dis mawnin’. ‘Lo ole man! Wot you doin’ sittin’ up heah lookin’ lak Rain-In-De-Face?”
He dropped the hammer and hand drill, threw his head back, opened wide his mouth and began singing:
“Keeps on a-rainin’, podnor,
N[——]ah can’t make no time.”
Harris, a Black writer, originally published his version of the John Henry story in the Black journal The Messenger. When called upon to reprint it in 1957 for Phylon Quarterly, a journal that focuses on culture and race in the United States but with a more racially mixed readership, n[——]ah was changed to folkses and nobody. Why the change was made is not known. Perhaps it was imposed by the editors. Or perhaps the intervening years had made the word more unacceptable. Or perhaps Harris thought it inappropriate to use it when writing for a more racially diverse readership.
Harris’s use of the non-rhotic n[——]ah presages the use of n[——]a by later rap artists and other Black speakers. And since the late twentieth century and the advent of Hip-Hop culture, some Black speakers and writers have actively tried to reclaim the n-word and use it positively, although that attempt has been criticized by those who consider the word irredeemable and object to any use of it. Much of the controversy over whether or not the term should ever by used focuses on this non-rhotic variant. And some even consider n[——]a to be a distinct word.
In her dictionary of Black speech, Black Talk, Geneva Smitherman gives seven distinct senses for n[——]a when used by Black people:
1. a close friend
2. a person rooted in Black culture and experience
3. a neutral term for a Black person
4. a Black woman’s term for her Black boyfriend
5. a rebellious, assertive, unconventional Black man
6. the negative, stereotypical sense of the n-word as used by Whites
7. a cool person, rooted in Hip-Hop culture.
I’m not going to give examples of each of these senses, but an example of Smitherman’s sense number six can be found in the 1992 rap song “Mnniiggaahh” by the duo Goldmoney:
I'm a n[——]a
But that is just the way that I choose to act
It ain't got nothin' to do with bein' black
“All n[——]s are black”
Shut up, fool, how ya figure?
'Cause where I'm from there's a lot of white n[——]s
Like the one who likes to stick his tongue out
At a girl when he meets 'er
Attempts to avoid using the word led to creation of the euphemism n-word, which is recorded from the early 1980s, but is probably older, as evidenced by this use in the 1971 poem “What It Means to Be an ‘N’” by Frenchy Jolene Hodges:
If what is said reaches you
Though you don’t know where or when,
It’s a cinch you’ve had the experience
You know what it means to an “N”.
And use of n-word is clearly in place by 1981 as evidenced by this article in the 17 July 1981 issue of Ohio’s Chillicothe Gazette:
She said she won’t stand for the use of what she calls the “N-word” in her presence.
So, when used by White people, the term’s history renders it as a term of abuse and contempt, regardless of the intentions of the speaker. But when used by Black people, the term is complex and nuanced, with many meanings, negative, neutral, and even positive, but even in such positive uses there are many who object to its use.
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