The decision to employ such a controversial term like ‘nigger’ as a key tool for engaging ‘race talk’ amongst a group of pre-service white teachers may seem bizarre and fraught with difficulties. Hence, the following interrogation of its history in order to examine the way it encompasses and summarises white supremacy and the discourses it deploys that position black and white people differentially (Mills, 1997). The need to prepare in such a manner is perhaps testament to this very controversy, at the same time, by attempting to explore its origin and history directly uncovers its roots, which are firmly situated within and propelled by white supremacist discourse. By adopting an approach that encompasses the black gaze, a ‘view from across the tracks’ (hooks, 1992, p.165) the term can be explored from a black point-of-view.
Because the term is so controversial, I expected to be challenged on its usage. This is why, in the same way as ‘race’ is used; the term ‘nigger’ is qualified by quotation marks. In many respects, like the terms white and black, it underpins the whole project in that it sums up the very relationships of identity formation that are being investigated.
In the lexicon of racial bigotry and hatred the term ‘nigger’ has no equal. Wop, Yid, Paddy and Paki, to cite just a few pejorative terms, are equally ugly and insulting at conjuring up verbal pictures of racist stereotypes. ‘Nigger’ however, arguably carries with it not one signified (Saussure, 1916) but many; uncle-tom, coon, wog, sambo, mammy, (Bogal, 1973) all in one way or another reflecting the vastness of anti-black prejudice.
The term ‘nigger’ can be applied in support of any number of stereotypical images of black people. Equally the term can be fixed in front of or behind other terms to reinforce and compound their negativity; sandniggers when referring to Arab people, or niggerlovers, refereeing to white people who engage with black people (Kennedy, 2003). Finally, even the singer/songwriter John Lennon, when reflecting upon the position of women in society wrote, ‘Woman is the nigger of the world’. ‘Nigger’ is the ultimate insult, the bottom of barrel; ‘nigger’ means you are nothing.
How is a sense of a white self, involved in this? Why has this term come to sum up all that is negative, insulting and condemning in terms of the linkage between white and black people? In essence what have white people got to do with it? If we start to ask such questions, challenging our own very intimate relations to its construction, its entomology, how the term is used to label and position black people (Kennedy, 2003), its origins become clear. ‘Nigger’ is a white word. This is why it has been used in the title of the thesis. Not for sensationalism, nor to court controversy, but as a signpost that sums up a legacy of identities both white and black that has been constructed around the logics and modalities of white supremacy.
Why is ‘nigger’ never discussed?
‘White racism is not primarily individual acts or beliefs; those are only social effects. White racism is the Onto-Logical; it is built into the very nature of the social reality. It is Epistemo-Logical; it is built into the very nature of accepted and legitimated assumptions about how we come to know reality. It is institutional, societal, and civilizational’ (Scheurich, 2002, p. 3).
In April 2004 the football pundit Ron Atkinson used the term ‘nigger’ when commenting upon the performance a black football player. Consequently he was sacked from the game he loved and served for almost 50 years, and for most people rightly so. How could a man, who over his long career was one of, if not the, first football manager to actively include and encourage black players, say such a thing? Yet in spite, perhaps because of, his ‘race credentials’, Atkinson’s ‘stupid few words’ (Observer, 25 April, 2004) led to him becoming the pariah of the English game. It was perhaps not ‘what Ron Atkinson said’ (BCC 1. 13 12 04), but the very fact that this man who throughout his career had supported black players, did not understand that of all things racist, the term ‘nigger’ occupies a position of being the most offensive, the most profane of insults.
This is what Ron Atkinson seemed oblivious to. His stupid few words carried within them the complete story of oppression and subjugation by white people of black people. Perhaps, if Ron Atkinson had looked into, even considered the history and origin of his ‘stupid few words’, he would have seen why it cost him ‘a million pounds’ (Observer Sunday April 25, 2004).
The object of this section on the term ‘nigger’ is not to condemn white people such as Ron Atkinson for that would be hypocritical, in that all white people share, at least some culpability in terms of the history of the word ‘nigger’ and its use. It could be argued that Ron Atkinson’s’ mistake was that he articulated, while working on live TV what most white people, (at one time or another throughout our lives) think or have thought. Like most white persons living in England, Ron Atkinson, shares a common culture, a cultural inheritance, that positions and fixes our relations with black people. But unlike most white persons, Ron Atkinson was in the public eye when he made his unguarded remark.
An opportunity seems to have been missed. Instead of making Ron Atkinson an outcast, it would have been more productive to discuss why the term ‘nigger’ is so offensive. Perhaps because once inquired into, Ron Atkinson would not be the only white person to be held to account. It is to this very point around accountability, indeed ownership of the term ‘nigger’ that is most interest for this project.
Since Atkinson’s demise there have been a number of high profile cases, mainly in football, surrounding the use of term ‘nigger’. In April of this year the Professional Footballers Association was embarrassed over the hiring of Comedian Reginald D Hunter, and Paul Elliot’s (chair of kick racism out February, 2013) tweet calling a business colleague ‘nigger’ are two examples. Still the term ‘nigger’ and why it causes such offence is never discussed. This is why it was decided to use the term ‘nigger’ as a catalyst for discussion in the primary research design. Why is it that people do not use it and why does it elicit such powerful reactions? I argue that this type of questioning about the term ‘nigger’ and its use should and must be asked. Furthermore, that such discussion can be had and form the basis for pre-service white teachers to explore their sense of a white self and its linkage with constructs of being black.
What’s in a word?
Why does this term ‘nigger’ carry with it such loaded and powerful qualifiers? It is because it is about identity. An identification between victim and aggressor, between the constructed and the constructors, between notions of what it means to be positioned as either black or white. In many respects it is also the example par excellence of the unequal nature of the relationship between black and white people. Slavery, Jim Crow, lynching, the KKK, 400 hundred years of oppression, these and many other signifieds are invoked when the signifier ‘nigger’ is used. In many ways the term ‘nigger’ is a ‘catch all’ term evoking in one single word the whole catalogue of black subjugation. An inquiry into how and why the term ‘nigger’ holds such significance and the role of white people in producing it may go someway to explaining its ability to invoke outcry.
The history of the term ‘nigger’.
Nigger: 1. nigger ‘another name for a negro. 2. a member of any
dark-skinned race.
Negro: 1. a member of any of the dark-skinned indigenous peoples of Africa and their decedents elsewhere. 2. relating to or characteristic of Negroes.
Negress: a female negro.
The Collins English Dictionary and Thesaurus (1990)
Nigga: ‘Never Ignorant, Gets Goals Accomplished’. (Tupac Shakur (1991): ‘Words of Wisdom’. 2pacalyse Now, Interscope,)
The word ‘nigger’ is a many-sided, versatile, volatile term with a career spanning the intolerable cruelties of white and black relations. In terms of the relations between black and white peoples it arguably holds centre stage. No other word can incite general condemnation and generate such powerful reactions. Indeed, the result of such contestations has in part led to this research. It will be argued that the word should not be taboo, but made clear and apparent. The term ‘nigger’ should be made clear and apparent in terms of its white origins, its white constructions, and its white inheritance.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary the etymology of the term ‘nigger’ can be traced back to the Latin word for the colour black. This colour symbolism it should be pointed out, was already firmly embedded in medieval and Greco – Roman culture (Banton and Harwood, 1975). Black was associated with sin, evil, dirt and fear, with early medieval manuscripts often showing the persecutors of Christ as black (Banton and Harwood, 1975, pp.14 –15).
The origins of the term were not totally derogatory and singularly applied to black people (Patterson, 1967). The meaning changed from simple colour differentiation to absolute negativity arguably over time. The term developed its negativity when Europeans first encountered Africans during the years of commercial expansion and voyages of exploitation from the mid 1400’s onwards. An ironic point to note about this early expansion was that one of motivations was to find the legendary black Christian ruler ‘Pester John’ (Newby, 1975). Commercial expansion was the real motivation for these voyages. This led to the exploitation and ultimate oppression of indigenous peoples and the trade in human flesh, known as the transatlantic slave trade (Harris, 1997). Thus far it has been argued that these Christian, God fearing white European peoples needed some kind of excuse and justification for their unchristian actions. It is here, where the foundations were laid for the term ‘nigger’.
The people that Europeans encountered on their voyages of discovery were usually of a darker hue than themselves. It does not take a great leap of the imagination to see a connection between how the Latin word niger (the colour black, already established as opposite to the purity of whiteness) became a term to describe the dark skinned people that white Europeans encountered. Equally, once the enslavement of these dark skinned people commenced, justifications had to be found that would satisfy Christian sensibilities and make the project of slavery a palatable one for ‘civilised’, religious people (Newby, 1975). Not that white Europeans needed an excuse, for they believed it was their divine right to convert and spread the word of their benevolent God (Hall, 1992, pp 283–84). One could add while also making a tidy profit! It is to the background that made it possible for the Europeans to go forth and exploit the vast riches of humanity that will now be discussed.
‘If you have peace, easy taxes and a tolerable administration of justice, then the rest is brought about ‘by the natural course of things’. (Jones.1981, pp. 90-6,232-7)
Mann (1988) argues this was the prerequisite for European expansion. Stability, allowed the development of capitalist trade and the accumulation of individual wealth, while also providing the platform from which Europeans launched themselves into the vastness of the Atlantic Ocean, searching for a seaward route to the riches of Cathy. It is interesting to note that the voyages of discovery/exploitation occurred roughly at the same time as Europe emerges from the Dark Ages, the Moors were driven out of the Iberian Peninsula and the authority of the Catholic Church began being challenged by the Kings and Princes of northern Europe (McNeill, 1963). Europe was undergoing both a renaissance of thought and a reformation of religious belief creating a kind of restlessness (McNeill, 1963) both of which would have a powerful impact upon the psyche of white Europeans.
Religion or more precisely Christianity was the key building block upon which white European society developed. As Mann sums up,
‘The Christian achievement was the creation of a minimal normative society across state, ethnic, class and gender boundaries’ (Mann, 1988, p26).
Europe at this point can be seen as a Catholic belief system, centralised in the all-embracing hands of the papacy. Europe was arguably a theocracy, with a worldview that positioned Europe at the centre of all things. J.M. Roberts (1985) points to how by the middle of the 1500’s,
‘Mercator’s new ‘projection’, first used in a map in 1568…drove home the idea that the land surface of the globe was naturally grouped about a European centre…Mercator helped his own civilisation to take what is now called a ‘Eurocentric’ view of the world’ (P.195).
For Europeans Christ was the son of the one true God and had provided both the moral and intellectual materials with which to go forth and preach his word. White Europeans viewed themselves arguably as a chosen people, judging all they met in much the same disparaging way, judging others against a European yardstick.
So what was different in the way Europeans viewed, represented, and treated the people from the continent of Africa? Europeans dished out in equal measure oppression, subjugation, and exploitation of all people they encountered. The genocides, some more successful than others in wiping out whole cultures, peoples and civilisations, in the Americas, Australasia and Asia, were arguably as heinous as any atrocities carried out against Africa and Africans. Human suffering cannot be measured by how much suffering one group undergoes against another.
However, Europe had quite a different relationship with black Africans. That difference is the development of the African slave trade. This is not to say that the suffering of black people was any more than that of other peoples white Europe exploited, but that the systematic relations of production that evolved and refined during the course of the transatlantic trade in human suffering, was all encompassing in its severity and negativity.
Though exploitation occurred throughout European expansion as exemplified in the Raj of the Indian sub-continent, there was at least some tacit recognition of the existence of cultural and historical worth. Africa, for Europeans was devoid of anything approaching what they considered civilised. However, according to Diop (1974) when the Europeans first encountered West Coast Africans,
‘the political organisation of the African States was equal, and often superior, to that of their own respective states. Monarchies were already constitutional, with a People’s Council on which the various social strata were represented’ (Diop,1974, p 94).
Accepting Diop’s observations, the question that begs to be asked is why did white Europeans develop discourses that positioned black Africans as the antithesis of all that they considered ‘civilised’ and ‘advanced’, as the polar opposite of white.
The people of west coast Africa were evicted from their homes, totally dehumanised in the middle passage, reconditioned, and then sold into bondage. White Europeans systematically took the cream of African youth for over 400 hundred years in processes establishing new communities while destroying old ones (Williams, 1973, Rodney, 1978). In a letter of 1526 to King John of Portugal, King Affonso of Kongo begged him to stop his merchants trading in slaves,
‘And we cannot reckon how great the damage is, since the mentioned merchants are taking every day our natives, sons of the land and the sons of our noblemen and vassals and our relatives… they grab them and get them to be sold; and so great, Sir, is the corruption and licentiousness that our country is being completely depopulated…’ (Addison, 1974).
Like no other people Africans were redeployed, evicted and transported to far away lands, denied their culture, language and belief systems, while being selected and bred like animals. Black Africans were arguably considered less than human and in certain circles of lesser valve than livestock. As Olaudauh Equiano (Gustavus Vassa) so eloquently affirms;
‘It is not enough that we are torn from our country and friends, to toil for your luxury and lust of gain? Must every tender feeling be likewise sacrificed to your avarice?…Why are the parents to lose their children, brothers their sisters, or husbands their wives? Surely this is a new refinement in cruelty, which while it has no advantage to atone for it, thus aggravates distress and adds fresh horrors even to the wretchedness of slavery’ (Equiano, p.48).
Africans were commodities to be consumed and discarded for the benefit of White Europe. As such there was no need to consider black Africans as having any cultural, artistic, historical or organisational worth. As consumers there was no need for white Europeans to empathise with this human commodity that provided them with so much. Indeed, it was essential to the furtherance of the slave trade to actively dehumanise and devalue Africa and its people, creating a racial hierarchy that placed white people at the top and black people at the bottom. The fact that the Latin term niger meant the colour black may have just been a convenience, the opposite colour to white, used as part of larger racist discourses that were being constructed within a white supremacist hegemony (Mills, 1997).
Once transported to the Americas, Africans were then introduced into a programme of production that was the plantation system. The plantations of the Americas and Caribbean provided at one and the same time both intimacy and rejection. Black Africans, forcibly taken from their homeland, chatteled to the land, deigned family, home and religion lived often side-by-side with their white masters. Ministers of religion preached that God had condemned blacks to be slaves. Scientists measured heads, faces and genitals to prove that blacks were inferior to whites, while teachers taught to all white classes that blacks where less evolved (Harris, 1997). The relationship between black Africans as the slaves of white masters was further enforced in laws and national and commercial interests (James, 1980). By the mid 1700’s the triangular trade in sugar, slaves and goods was well and truly established, with the plantation system providing European capitalist with wealth beyond their imagining.
It is arguably at the work place of Slavery, the plantation, that usage of and the meaning behind the term ‘nigger’ come into full and hateful effect (Kennedy, 2003). Once Slaves were captured, their re-conditioning began. This was done in order to keep people apart, not just families but whole communities. Indeed as slaves arrived from Africa, individual characteristics of suitability to slave society were ascribed according to where the slaves originated (James, 1980). Slave masters began to assign characteristics of being lazy, instigators and leaders of rebellion or hardy and robust, to the slaves they purchased. Thus began the re-categorising of black African slaves (James, 1980) and the establishment of types that later became established in stereotyped representations such as the Mammy (docile female servant), Tom (will do anything for his master), Buck (dangerous thug) and coon (the happy-go-lucky idiot) (Bogel, 1973). The term ‘nigger’ could equally apply to all of these types, interchangeable in the service of a slave-based economy that was underpinned by a set of anti-black images and representations, established for the every purposes of justifying its continuance.
It is with the establishment of the slave trade and the racial discourses and representations of black people it constructed that the seeds of the Latin word for the colour black grow in to the term ‘nigger’. Along with the assignment of general tropes of disparagement such as coon or buck, the term ‘nigger’ seemed to be all encompassing in its application (Kennedy, 2003). The term ‘nigger’ whether as a noun, adjective or verb at one and the same time both defined and limited what it meant to be part of the African Diaspora, to be a displaced black person in a system of oppression and subjugation that was slavery.
Having briefly considered the early encounters between Africa and Europe, the next section will discuss the discursive and ideological representations that were put in place to justify white exploitation of black Africa.
Justification by science alone: The Enlightenment and Scientific Racism.
As has already been stated, the exploitation of people from the African Continent by white Europeans, primarily the Portuguese, French, Spanish and English needed some kind of excuse or justification for its continuance. In many respects Christianity provided the underlying moral driving force providing the twin, contradictory logics of slavery.
Firstly, in a Weberian sense ([1905] 1930), the Christian work ethic provided the rationale of capitalism. Secondly, at the same time, the basic tenets of the religion preached love and understanding for one’s fellow man [sic]. How, could an enlightened and civilized people, a Christian people, brutally enslave another group? The answer was simple. Dehumanize those that were enslaved. Make them uncivilized, primitive, and unchristian, turn them into ‘niggers’. Take for example the following quote by one of the eightieth Century’s most prominent thinkers, David Hume,
‘I am Apt to suspect the Negroes, and in general all other species of men (for there are four or five different kinds) to be naturally inferior to the whites. There never was a civilised nation of any other complexion than white, nor even any individual eminent either in action or speculation’ (Quoted in Fryer, 1984, p 152).
Clearly Hume saw the world through European eyes, through the prism of Enlightenment Universalism and the notion of the centrality of European civilization as the most advanced of all humanity. This Eurocentric evaluation, steeped in the universal truths of the natural sciences, provided the logics for the notion that became what Franz Fanon referred to as the fact of blackness (Fanon, 1960). White Europeans, through a process of cultural inversion constructed a discourse in which black Africans became their polar opposite; savage, heathen, animal, base and sexually deprived. This opposite needed to be civilized, Christianised and enslaved. Edward Long in his three-volume History of Jamaica (1774) proposed the theory that whites and blacks were different species and that slavery was for the greater good of the African (Fryer, 1984, p 159 – 60). The essence of this discourse was one of white superiority and black inferiority.
There were other, counter discourses at play such as the work of Aphra Behen in the novel Oroonoko (1688) or in some of the writings of the likes of Blake, Burns, Coleridge and Wordsworth (Fryer, 1984). However, the pre-eminent discourse was similar to that of Hume. Even the writings of Voltaire, Buffon and Kant were suffused with notions of black African inferiority (Fryer, 1984).
It was here with the notion of natural superiority, at best ambivalent, based on the Enlightenment belief in European civilizations as the pinnacle of human evolution that the foundation for perhaps the most insidious discourse of all, scientific racism, is to be found. The basic premise of scientific racism is the division of humanity into a number of ‘races’ based upon observation and empirical ‘truth’. This social discourse set out to categorise the whole of humanity into a hierarchy of phenotypical colour differentiation in which white was at the top and black most firmly placed at the bottom (Fryer, 1984). Physical markers such as skin colour, hair texture and skull size were posited as reasons for racial difference and inferiority/superiority.
Robert Knox in ‘The Races of Man’ (1850) and Gobineau’s Essay on the ‘Inequality of Human Races’ (1854) put forward the notion of racial typologies based on physical characteristics. This scientific discourse that validated European racism is clearly seen in the following quote from James Hunt in ‘on the Negro’s place in nature’ (1863),
‘1. that there is a good reason for classifying the Negro as a distinct species from the zebra: and if, in classification, we take intelligence into consideration, there is a far greater difference between the Negro and European than between the gorilla and chimpanzee. 2. That the analogies are far more numerous between the Negro and the ape, than between the European and the ape. 3. That the Negro is inferior intellectually to the
European. 4. That the Negro becomes more humanized when in his natural subordination to the European than under any other circumstances. 5. That the Negro race can only be humanized and civilized by Europeans. 6. That European civilization is not suited to the Negro’s requirements or character.’ (Lorimer, 1978, pp.138 –9).
I quote Hunt’s summary of the ‘Negro race’ at length to demonstrate the way scientific racist discourse produced black people as the antitheses of white people (Fryer, 1984). The sliding scale of humanity, with its measurement of head size, attention to physiology and colour supported a racial hierarchy that preferenced white people. White Europe established the rules of engagement and constructed the discourses that perpetuated it. It was under such circumstances that the meaning of the word ‘nigger’ evolved and took shape.
What has been discussed thus far? The origins of the term ‘nigger’ are based upon the Latin for the word black. This colour symbolization was then further enhanced and associated with everything that was evil, corrupt, and debase. That the construction of the term ‘nigger’ can be closely linked to the development of the transatlantic slave trade and the consequent plantation societies of the Americas. The term is multi layered in its complexity and application; as an enthnophaulisms it has no equal. Finally, that its meaning and construction are the direct responsibility of those Europeans and their descendants that encountered and exploited black Africans both on the continent of Africa and through their displacement in the Americas.
But more than that, the term has come to be infused with negative connotations within societies around the globe. In many respects it is the ultimate insult, the signified of caricatures and stereotypes both comic and threatening. To be a ‘nigger’ is to be something sub-human, beyond compassion, beyond empathy. The term ‘nigger’ sums up centuries of systematic reorganization that engaged the full force of white European systems of representation, in other words it sums up white supremacy.
The term ‘nigger’ is also to do with questions of identity and identification. It is an example of how identities are constructed. When the term ‘nigger’ is used it implies all the horrors and injustices brought upon people from the African continent by white Europeans in the pursuit of trade and wealth. It implies that the person who is called ‘nigger’ is not a person at all but a thing, an object to be abused, degraded and humiliated. ‘Nigger’ ultimately represents all that is debase, corrupt and inhuman in white European civilization and thus provides the ultimate Other (Lacan, 1949) for white identification. It carries with it the inheritance, the ‘trace’ (Derrida, 1978) of European interference in the cultural, social, historical, and political development of the African continent and it’s Diaspora. This is why it is able to insight such outcry when it is used.
Finally, we come back to Ron Atkinson’s ‘stupid few words’. It is interesting that Ron Atkinson chose to use the term to express his total disgust at the performance of a particular black player in a particularly important game, then claim that he could not remember saying it, that it was an abhorration, a one off. He chose the exact word to fit how he felt. Ron Atkinson, like most white people, sub-consciously summed up from his racialised memory bank the most insulting word he could assign to a person of black African origin, ‘nigger’.
It is considered enough, almost a must, not to use the word. But perhaps the origin of such a powerfully emotive and damaging term should be considered, discussed. Further, an examination of where the meanings of the term ‘nigger’ and how they were fostered and perpetuated in the psyche of white Europe should be undertaken. Until such as time when white people accept, recognise and acknowledge the role played by white people in the constructions and representations of the term ‘nigger’, then like Ron Atkinson white people will still be saying the word ‘nigger’, without thought or consideration.
See Booklist in ‘Culture’ section for the bibliography of books used in this article
A Dedication