Evil Words & Their Evil Use

This essay was written as a response to an incident with my US history professor. I noticed his use of the word "n*gr*" in one of his articles to refer to Black people. I mentioned it to him during our following class but instead of the receptive ear I was hoping to find, I was confronted by both my professor and classmates cutting me off and making me feel like I was the crazy one. With this essay which I sent to my professor by email, I was hoping to make things right and defend my point of view without being worried about being interrupted.
- Inès N'cib

I wanted to follow up on my issue with you using the word “n*gr*” in your article, as I feel I wasn’t able to express myself well enough last we talked about it.

Before diving deeper into the origin of the word and its negative connotations, I wanted to show you the definition of the word “n*gr*” on Cambridge’s online dictionary:

“Negro

noun [ C ] offensive old-fashioned

UK /ˈniː.ɡrəʊ/ US /ˈniː.ɡroʊ/

plural Negroes

a word for a Black person, which was used frequently in the past and is now extremely offensive”

As I already said before, the word is generally considered not only as old-fashioned but also offensive in this day and age. As scholars, I think it is our duty to care about the words we use and to be careful when we choose them. We cannot pretend that Black people’s history of being demeaned and degraded doesn’t exist, thus we should strive not to add insult to injury with the terms we employ to refer to them. Saying “Black people” is not the same thing as saying “the Bl*cks” or the “N*gr*es”.

As a reminder, these are the instances in which you used the word that I deem inappropriate:

- page 15: “A Senate filibuster (an arcane procedure that allowed Senators to talk for as long as they liked, thereby avoiding a vote) overturned the bill and with that the extrajudicial killing of negroes continued unabated.”

- page 17: “In January 1933, a twenty year-old negro, Fell Jenkins, was beaten to death in Louisiana by three white farmers because he had allegedly trespassed on the property of one of them.”

- page 21: “Public opinion had also become more assertive on the racial question, largely because Americans were increasingly aware of the parallels between the treatment of Jews in Europe and that of negroes in America.”

As a way to dip our toes in the subject, I also wanted to share this excerpt from the US national archive:

“English speakers adopted Negro from Spanish and Portuguese (in which negro is the masculine word for the color black) in the mid-16th century. White people, especially enslavers and their supporters, used it to refer to Black people through the 19th century; the term was also used in now-debunked theories of race. During the early to mid-20th century, many Black Americans reclaimed the term as a preferred self-identifier, and many Black-led and Black-focused organizations incorporated it into their formal names. However, after the Black Power movement in the 1960s, the term fell out of favor and is now considered derogatory and offensive because of its associations with slavery, racism, and oppression against Black people.”

Then, with this email I’ll explain as clearly as I can why the word “n*gr*” is not an appropriate term to use.

Black people used it to refer to themselves

You have already told me that in the past, Black people used it to refer to themselves. And it is true, Martin Luther King did use it in his speeches, yet this doesn’t make it ok for us to use the word “n*gr*” nowadays. First of all because Black people choosing to reappropriate a word that has been used to demean them for centuries doesn’t mean it’s fine for non-Black people to casually say it. Secondly, because this excuse ignores how Black people’s attitude towards “n*gr*” changed over time. During the 1960s and the 1970s, Civil Rights activists started to express their desire to stop using the word “N*gr*” to refer to themselves (already, back in 1930, it was decided that “n*gr*” should always be used with a capital “N” to avoid disrespect). The Black Power movement, notably Stokely Carmichael in his speech at a rally in Mississippi in 1966 when he declared “What we got to start saying now is Black Power! We want Black Power,” marked a turning point in Black people’s attitude toward calling themselves “N*gr*es”. They recognised the racist devaluation and the degrading connotation of “n*gr*” and therefore decided it was time to stop using it. Thus began their fight to name themselves “without white people’s blessing” (Stockely Carmichael, cited in Bell, 2013). To them, renaming themselves was a way to affirm their freedom. As Richard B. Moore wrote, “when all is said and done, dogs and slaves are named by their masters; free men name themselves!” As “n*gr*” became the embodiment of the inequality and discrimination Black people faced on the daily and linked them to the idea of inferiority and prejudice, it was high time to stop using it.

You also mentioned Malcom X using the word “n*gr*”, but I am afraid Malcolm X didn’t have a good opinion on the term either. Here’s what he said in his speech in January 24, 1965:

“We’re not Negroes, and have never been, until we were brought here and made into that. We were scientifically produced by the white man. Whenever you see somebody who calls himself a Negro, he’s a product of Western civilization – not only Western civilization, but Western crime. The Negro, as he is called or calls himself in the West, is the best evidence that can be used against Western civilization today. One of the main reasons we are called Negro is so we won’t know who we really are. And when you call yourself that, you don’t know who you really are. You don’t know what you are, you don’t know where you came from, you don’t know what is yours. As long as you call yourself a Negro, nothing is yours. No languages – you can’t lay claim to any language, not even English; you mess it up. You can’t lay claim to any name, any type of name, that will identify you as something that you should be. You can’t lay claim to any culture as long as you use the word Negro to identify yourself. It attaches you to nothing. It doesn’t even identify your color.”

Researcher Zenobia Bell studied how even in the 1960s, when the word was still widely used, it did not have a positive definition. In “African-American Nomenclature: The Label Identity Shift from "Negro" to "Black" in the 1960s”, Bell highlights three main reasons why “n*gr*” was always negative :

- Its origin from slavery and its perpetuation of the slave-master relationship

- Its relation to negative stereotypes, such as savagery, oppression, laziness, idiocy…

- Its detachment to Black people’s ancestry and disconnection to any particular land (This same critic has been made about the label “Black.”)

Nowadays, the word is generally considered as being highly pejorative. According to the Jim Crow Museum, The Associate Press, the New York Times and the Supreme Court stopped using “n*gr*” in the 1970s. In 2013, the U.S Census Bureau stopped using it in its survey. Calvin D. Fogle, in a study of the social acceptability of “N*gg*”, “N*gg*r” and “N*gr*” (or what he calls the “N” terms), showed how there is a predominantly negative attitude towards those words. 71% of the people surveyed recognised the terms as “Negative words referring to African Americans.”

My own contempt for this word has two main reasons: its origins and how it has been used through the years. I shall elaborate more on both of those. I’ll be using mainly, but not solely, the book The name “Negro” its origin and evil use (1960) by the Black intellectual Richard B. Moore as a reference. I recommend you give it a look as well, it is quite a quick read and the eBook version only cost me 3€ on Amazon.

Origins of the word:

As mentioned above, the word “n*gr*” originates from Portuguese or Spanish, literally translating to “black”. Explorers started using it after 1441 when the Portuguese reached the Senegal River and saw Black people with darker skin than what they were used to and who were easier to conquer, making them easy targets for the slave trade. Before that, words such as “Moors or “Azenegues” were used to talk about Africans. Europeans referred to them as “Ethiopian” until they reached the area from which Portuguese took slaves. Therefore, “n*gr*”, since the very beginning, comprehended the meaning of “slave” and not just “black”. In english, “n*gr*es” was exclusively used to refer to the slaves, and “blacks” was used in reference to the colour. The same applies for french. From then on, “n*gr*” was connected to the notion of inferiority, bestiality and such. Even in spanish the word gained such negative connotations that free Black men were called “moreno” and “n*gr*” was only used for enslaved people.

Linguist Keith Baird stated in 1967 that “linguistic scholarship is virtually unanimous in its findings that names and words determine, to a great extent, what we see and what we feel.” Indeed, the word “n*gr*” can never be dissociated from its evil origin, and after Black people’s struggle to make it disappear from our vocabulary back in the 1960s, I cannot think of one good reason to insist on using it.

“N*gr*” is not a neutral word

The word “n*gr*” stayed popular for centuries, but its meaning was far from kind. The narrative created was of the “n*gr*” as a savage creature who must serve his superiors, and the term associates Black people with oppression and exploitation. From the very beginning it strived to tie Black people to slavery and inferiority.

In the Universal illustrated European Encyclopedia of 1960 by Espasa Calpe “n*gr*” is defined as “vicious, or perverse, in speaking of the soul, of the heart and of the feelings.” To “work like a n*gr*” means to “work like a slave.” The Oxford English Dictionary (Vol.III, 1933) associates the word “n*gr*” to “n*gr*-whipping” the act of whipping slaves, “n*gr* dog” a dog that hunts runaway slaves, and “n*gr* lethargy” which is used when slaves don’t work hard enough. The 1899 edition of the Dictionnary of the Castillan Language by the Royal Spanish Academy defines “n*gr*” as “figuratively wretched, accursed, and calamitous.”

Those various examples show that the word “n*gr*” was never meant to be neutral. During the XIXth century intellectuals such as W.E.B DuBois used it in order to reclaim it and exchange its degrading meaning for something better. However we have already explained how things evolved during the 1960s and how the word was finally rejected.

Discussions

It is important to involve the people concerned in these kinds of discussions. Especially since when I first brought this up to the rest of the class James told me that it wasn’t an offensive word (and when I asked him why, he kindly replied “I just got home I can’t explain it to you”), I decided to ask some of my Black friends what their opinion was. I would have given up if they told me it was ok, but on the contrary they told me they were triggered by its use as it was very degrading, and they were shocked to see it in a recent academic text.

I don’t pretend my friends are experts on race or political correctness, nor do they need to be. A Black person telling us a word is not ok to use should be enough for us to take a step back and reconsider our way of saying things. (I also happen to have a friend from the United States whose input I thought would be useful in this context. She assured me no one would casually used the word “n*gr*” in the US nowadays, and that just seeing it made her uncomfortable).

Conclusion

Thus I have explained how and why the word “n*gr*” is seen as offensive nowadays, which is why I disagree with its use. I hope you’ll read this email with the open-mindedness befitting a scholar. I myself have tried to be open by listening to what you had to say and researching more to verify my own claims.

However I would like to not spend anymore time discussing this matter. I feel I have done what I could and I’ll stand by what I have already said.

Bibliography

ABC News. (2013, February 25). U.S. Census Bureau drops “Negro” from surveys. ABC News.

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/OTUS/us-census-bureau-drops-negro-surveys/story?id=18591761

Bell, Z. (2013). African-American Nomenclature: The Label Identity Shift from “Negro” to “Black” in the 1960s. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1j12q56x

Black Person | National Archives. (n.d.). https://www.archives.gov/research/catalog/lcdrg/appendix/black-person

Fogle, C. D. (2013). The etymology, Evolution and social acceptability of “Nigger”, “Negro”, and “Nigga.” Social Science Research Network. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2326274

Malcolm X on Afro-American History (January 24, 1965). (n.d.). ICIT Digital Library. https://www.icit-digital.org/articles/malcolm-x-on-afro-american-history-january-24-1965

Moore, R. B. (1960). The name “Negro”: Its Origin and Evil Use. Black Classic Press.

Negro. (2024). In English Meaning - Cambridge Dictionary. https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/negro

Palmer, B. (2010, January 11). How old was Harry Reid when the word Negro became taboo? Slate Magazine. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2010/01/how-old-was-harry-reid-when-the-word-negro-became-taboo.html

When did the word negro become socially unacceptable? - 2010 - Question of the Month - Jim Crow Museum. (n.d.). https://jimcrowmuseum.ferris.edu/question/2010/october.htm

by Inès N'cib