The N-word

There is a word that some people are scared to say, others are scared to hear, some use it as a term if endearment, others still use it freely and wonder what the fuss is all about. I am a person who enjoys a bit of controversy, stirring up a good debate or conversation, ushering people to think of old ideas in a new way. I am trying to find an answer to get peace though talk rather than war.

“Nigger” originated simply as a word referring to dark skin, coming from the Spanish and Portuguese word for “black” being Negro, and the Latin word Niger, before that. Then what happened? Well, in Africa some tribes captured people of other tribes and kept them more or less as slaves. Eventually the Europeans came to Africa and found a good bit of money could be made by buying slaves and reselling them. Thus the new slave owners were typically white people, who used to term Nigger to refer to their slaves. After a while slavery was more or less abolished, but some people still used the term negatively, and it doesn’t take much before hear somebody of African American decent to complain about how wrong done they have been simply because their ancestors were slaves. While whites may have bought their ancestors, it was often other blacks who captured and sold them to the slave traders.

For years, between the time slavery was abolished, to the Civil rights movement in the United States of American, the word was used freely and without as much negativity as surrounds its usage today. Today people fear the word, the very mention of it, to see it in print, to speak it allowed. Why?

BUT Wait.

If we know our history, there are some strong facts. One is that the first slaves were in fact white people themselves. The word slave even originated from the word “Slavic”. Yet no white people today ask for pity because their forefathers were slaves. The word “Redneck” originated as a negative term against uneducated white workers, basically in meaning it meant the same thing as Nigger. However white people did not react in such a way as to give the word any power,over time they embraced the word to the extent they write country and western songs with lyrics like “give me, oh give me, give me a redneck girl”. Words used against other groups were taken by those groups and embraced, another example being the word “queer”, originated as a word against homosexuals who now proudly chant “we’re here, we’re queer”. By embracing the words they lost any negative context.