Nigger: Friend or Foe
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- Date Submitted: 11/15/2011 02:19 PM
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Fred Jackson
Jayne Harding
Eng. 111-College Composition 1
26 October 2011
NIGGER: FRIEND OR FOE
The N-Bomb is one of the most problematic terms in modern America and the rest of the English speaking world. We are all familiar with the never ending debates about who can say it and who cannot. Is it a racist term or does it actually stands for friendship as some people like to claim? Is it equivalent to the term dude or is it a derogatory term for an African American? When I first decided to do this paper I knew what I was getting myself into but I have been hearing and using the word most of my life. So I decided to find the truth behind the word and why this particular word sparks so much fire.
When I was growing up I was told that the word meant an ignorant person, and then later I was told it was a reference to blacks in slavery days and now in present day it is being use as a different way of saying friend. These were the definitions I grew up on, so I decided to find the true definition of the word and most read, ‘extremely offensive toward blacks’ which was something I already knew. Then I came across this, the word was originated as a term used in a neutral context to refer to black people, as a variation of the Spanish/Portuguese noun Negro, a descendant of the Latin adjective Niger, meaning the color “black”. This gave me better understanding of the word but I still needed to know how this word was turned into chaos if it was never meant to be negative. Now I had to give myself a little history lesson.
In the Colonial America of 1619, John Rolfe used negars in describing the African slaves shipped to the Virginia colony. Later American English spellings, neger and nagger, prevailed in a northern colony, New York under the Dutch, and in metropolitan Philadelphia’s Moravian and Pennsylvania Dutch communities; the African Burial Ground in New York City originally was known by the Dutch name...
Jayne Harding
Eng. 111-College Composition 1
26 October 2011
NIGGER: FRIEND OR FOE
The N-Bomb is one of the most problematic terms in modern America and the rest of the English speaking world. We are all familiar with the never ending debates about who can say it and who cannot. Is it a racist term or does it actually stands for friendship as some people like to claim? Is it equivalent to the term dude or is it a derogatory term for an African American? When I first decided to do this paper I knew what I was getting myself into but I have been hearing and using the word most of my life. So I decided to find the truth behind the word and why this particular word sparks so much fire.
When I was growing up I was told that the word meant an ignorant person, and then later I was told it was a reference to blacks in slavery days and now in present day it is being use as a different way of saying friend. These were the definitions I grew up on, so I decided to find the true definition of the word and most read, ‘extremely offensive toward blacks’ which was something I already knew. Then I came across this, the word was originated as a term used in a neutral context to refer to black people, as a variation of the Spanish/Portuguese noun Negro, a descendant of the Latin adjective Niger, meaning the color “black”. This gave me better understanding of the word but I still needed to know how this word was turned into chaos if it was never meant to be negative. Now I had to give myself a little history lesson.
In the Colonial America of 1619, John Rolfe used negars in describing the African slaves shipped to the Virginia colony. Later American English spellings, neger and nagger, prevailed in a northern colony, New York under the Dutch, and in metropolitan Philadelphia’s Moravian and Pennsylvania Dutch communities; the African Burial Ground in New York City originally was known by the Dutch name...