Social scientists refer to words like nigger, kike, spic, and wetback as ethnophaulisms. Almost two centuries later, it remains a chief symbol of white racism. Whatever its origins, by the early 1800s it was firmly established as a denigrativeĮpithet. That nigger is a phonetic spelling of the white Southern mispronunciation of Negro. One can compare to negre the derogatory nigger – and earlier English variants such as negar, neegar, neger, and niggor – which developed into a parallel lexico-semantic reality in English. In Early Modern French niger became negre and, later, negress (black woman) was clearly a part of lexical history. The Latin niger became the noun negro (black person) in English, and simply the color black in Spanish and Portuguese. The etymology of nigger is often traced to the Latin niger, meaning black. The word nigger was a shorthand way of saying that blacks possessed the moral, intellectual, social,Īnd physical characteristics of the Coon, Brute, Tom, Mammy, and other racial caricatures. With blacks, generally, and are implied in the word nigger. They are also presented as intellectually childlike, physically unattractive, and The Tom and Mammy caricatures are often portrayed as kind, loving "friends" of whites. This depiction is also implied in the word nigger. The Brute caricature depicts black men as angry, physically strong, animalistic,Īnd prone to wanton violence. Self-indulgent these are also traits historically represented by the word nigger. The Coon caricature, for example, portrays black men as lazy, ignorant, and obsessively 2 it is usually directed against blacks who supposedly have certain negative characteristics. Although nigger has been used to refer to any person of known African ancestry. There is a direct and strong link between the word nigger and anti-black caricatures.
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