Many of these slurs became fully traditional pseudo-scientific, literary, cinematic, and everyday distortions of African Americans.
Over time, racial slurs have victimized all racial and ethnic groups but no American group has endured as many racial nicknames as Blacks: coon, tom, savage, pickaninny, mammy, buck, samba, jigaboo, and buckwheat are some. Social scientists agree that words like nigger, kike, spic, and wetback come from three categories: disparaging nicknames (chink, dago, nigger) explicit group devaluations ("Jew him down" or "niggering the land") and irrelevant ethnic names used as a mild disparagement ("jew bird" for cuckoos having prominent beaks or "Irish confetti" for bricks thrown in a fight.) In the 21st century, it remains a principal term of White racism, regardless of who is using it.
No matter what its origins were, by the early 1800s, it was firmly established as a derogative name. It is probable that nigger is a phonetic spelling of the White Southern mispronunciation of Negro. One can compare to negre the derogatory nigger and earlier English substitutes such as negar, neegar, neger, and niggor that developed into its lexico-semantic true version in English. In early modern French, niger became negre and, later, negress (Black woman) was unmistakably a part of language history. This word became the noun, Negro (Black person) in English, and simply the color Black in Spanish and Portuguese. The history of the word nigger is often traced to the Latin word niger, meaning Black. *Note: some of the content in this writing may be offensive to children. But, beyond the tee-hees, these pieces can reveal deeper truths about sex and relationships.On this date, we look at the history of the word “nigger” in America, a word that still sits at the center of anti-Black verbal distortions. Poems in this category can range from titillating to obscene. But, poetry which pokes fun at bodies and desire is centuries old. After all, it is not polite to talk about sex. Sometimes called dirty, naughty, rude or cheeky, this type of humour works because it violates social norms. Humour, after all, has the power to disarm us and promote reflective thinking.Īlthough there are innumerable ways in which poets can be funny in their work, I have chosen pieces here which employ three different types of humour to demonstrate how poetry can make us both laugh and think. Perhaps the crime here isn’t that funny poems have been sidelined in favour of serious ones, but that funny poems are not also considered to be serious. The limerick, for instance, is thought to have originated during the Middle Ages and has been used to great humorous effect by thousands, from Shakespeare to Roald Dahl. This seems strange given that many of our earliest poems are comic ones. Even now, poems designed to make us laugh are often dismissed as frivolous. It was art – and art took itself seriously. Even now, these lines still come knocking:Īs a teenager, I was taught that poetry should be more serious.
#Skin stealer poem skin
I loved it so much that I started reciting the poem Skin Stealer every day, to the great annoyance of my little brother. As a child, I remember laughing out loud while reading Shel Silverstein’s poetry book A Light in the Attic (1981).
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