« BACK TO FORUM
Moderators:
anuriandima84, Liamjod, mekhala, mnopq
 Author |
 Post
|
 |
|
namesteshanti
Joined: May 6, 2006
Posts: 4
Poster Rank:
Tongue-tied
User is
Offline
Gender & Age: Female & 17
Country: United States
Province/State: Massachusetts
|
abolish the "n-word"
May 29, 2006 - 11:34 AM
|
|
the n-word is hate, i don't care if you are black and call your black friends that, it is till the enblem of hate. why would you call your friends what slavemasters called their slaves? What that angry white man called the black man before lynching him! Th n-word was born from racism, and the longer we keep it around, the longer racism will prevail.
www.abolishthenword.com
|
|
back to top |
link to this post
|
|
mnopq
Joined: Dec 20, 2005
Posts: 134
Poster Rank:
Chatterbox
User is
Offline
 Virtual Volunteer
Gender: Male
Country: Egypt
Province/State: Al Qahirah
City: Al Qahirah
|
Re: abolish the "n-word"
May 29, 2006 - 11:43 AM
|
|
hello!
ok lets see what there is on the ethymology of the n-word:
"The word Negro stems from the Spanish word Negro, meaning black. In English, negro or neger became negar and finally nigger. Neger (sometimes spelled "neggar" prevailed in northern New York under the Dutch and also in Philadelphia, in its Moravian and Pennsylvania Dutch communities. For example, the New York City African Burial Ground was originally known as "Begraaf Plaats van de Neger."
In the United States, the word nigger was not originally considered derogatory, but merely denotative of black, as it was in much of the world. In nineteenth-century American literature, there are many uses of the word nigger with no intended negative connotation (see below). The perception of the term nigger as derogatory is no doubt related to the fact that the Negro race itself was widely regarded as inferior, lazy, simian-like in appearance, stupid and criminally inclined by whites of the time. There is an observable pattern of words denoting black people coming to be regarded as derogatory as there is with all ethnic groups. Some well known ones are: Nigger, darky, coon, and coloured, all at various times acceptable, but all considered politically offensive now in North America. Black was generally the preferred term from the late 1960s until the 1990s but has now been displaced by black groups in formal politically correct usage by African American, which resembles the term Afro-American that was in vogue in the early 1970s. The term African American is imprecise, insofar as neither the population of Africa is entirely black nor do all blacks live in the Americas, most so called blacks of North America are mixed race, and it seems pretentious to many, as did the term "person of colour," which (ironically, insofar as it means the same as "coloured person" gained some currency in the early 1990s. Consequently, Black continues in widespread popular use as a racial designation."
from Wikipedia!
So per se it wasnt originally conceived as a racist word but it came to be used as one whne the whole black race was considered to be inferior...
H.
This post was edited on: 2006-05-29 at 11:45 AM by: mnopq
|
|
back to top |
link to this post
|
|
Brigitta
Joined: Oct 3, 2005
Posts: 1
Poster Rank:
Tongue-tied
User is
Offline
Country: Malawi
Province/State: Blantyre
City: Blantyre
|
Re: abolish the
May 30, 2006 - 07:58 AM
|
|
mnopq wrote:
hello!
So per se it wasnt originally conceived as a racist word but it came to be used as one whne the whole black race was considered to be inferior...
This post was edited on: 2006-05-30 at 08:27 AM by: TheBMK
|
|
back to top |
link to this post
|
|
Brigitta
Joined: Oct 3, 2005
Posts: 1
Poster Rank:
Tongue-tied
User is
Offline
Country: Malawi
Province/State: Blantyre
City: Blantyre
|
Re: abolish the
May 30, 2006 - 08:05 AM
|
|
[quote]
So per se it wasnt originally conceived as a racist word but it came to be used as one whne the whole black race was considered to be inferior...
 what does the quote above mean, somebody please explain to me? do you know what you are saying?what is racism about if not considering others inferior due to colour difference?are you actually saying that considering the black race inferior is or was different from racism?!if this wasnt so sensitive it would be funny!
and i really really hate it when non-blacks try to justify anything that black people found and still find eternally offensive.I do....................
I dont give a hoot what the Wikipedia says, nor do i give a d**n if anyone is trying to justify or lessen the sting of racist hate terms. i dont buy just any bull from any of your esteemed sources of the world if its not reflective of what is REAL.i dont give a d**n from what language the word is borrowed but i do give a damn that it was ever used.
anyway what the hell does it mean when the learned Wikipedia writers say "The term African American is imprecise, insofar as neither the population of Africa is entirely black nor do all blacks live in the Americas"????? To my knowledge all blacks are initially Africans since the WHOLE BLACK RACE ORIGINATED from AFRICA, no matter where you find them today.
Why did everything become so complicated?surely there was a time when every black person under the sun was an African, b4 the whole slavery immigration business.that the population of Africa is not entirely black DOES NOT change that, neither does the fact that some people originating from Africa are Arabs.So what if some Caucasians moved over and settled themselves in Africa?does that change Africa's heritage of being home to the sunbaked black sons and daughters of the world?personally i think not, neither does the importation of Africans as slaves to Caucasian or other lands change the heritage of those lands.A black person will always be an African because Africa and only Africa can and ever did produce black people!
if anyone doesnt understand how badly racism makes black people feel,or what racism's essence is,do keep your 2 cents to yourself.
|
|
back to top |
link to this post
|
|
mnopq
Joined: Dec 20, 2005
Posts: 134
Poster Rank:
Chatterbox
User is
Offline
Virtual Volunteer
Gender: Male
Country: Egypt
Province/State: Al Qahirah
City: Al Qahirah
|
Re: abolish the "n-word"
May 30, 2006 - 10:09 AM
|
|
TheBMK,
I understand your hatred, although you dont seem to think that any non-black person can understand that.. but anyway.
As it is, with anyother word which has a negative or positive conotation it is important to know the origins and the history of the word.
So the objective of my previous post was not to offend, insult or anyhow else to intimidate but rather give a ethymological point of view on the usage of the word. And in most cases the present meaning of the word or phrase hides in it the historic developments associated with it.
The extract from Wikipedia was to show that originally the word didnt entrail negativity.. But with time and historic developments it came to be so...
Plus, i dont agree with you when you say racism means inferiority... it doesnt.. For example, i know many people from the West that are racist towards Asiatic people, most particularly Chinese and Japanese. But they dont consider them inferior. They consider Chinese and Japanese incompatible with them, in the broadest meaning of that term.
So racism is rather an extreme expession of radical difference from one's own culture, color skin etc. It implies incompatibility on all possible level for the person in question...
In case of blck people the fact that the came to be widely abused as slaves, this differnce grew into the notion of inferiority, while slaves were considered inferior mostly on the intelectual level...
Again I dont agree with any of these and I deplore racism from my side but I cant help but know that certain people were, are and will stay like that even knowing how the word came to have the negative meaning it has today...
Anyhow, i apologize if my previous post offended you in any way..
H.
|
|
back to top |
link to this post
|
|
Anu maheshwari
Joined: Jun 14, 2005
Posts: 122
Poster Rank:
Chatterbox
User is
Offline
Virtual Volunteer
Gender & Age: Female, 25
Country: India
Province/State: Maharashtra
City: Pune
|
Re: abolish the "n-word"
May 30, 2006 - 11:45 AM
|
|
The Oxford English Dictionary describes the meaning of black before the sixteenth century as, "Deeply stained with dirt; soiled, dirty foul... Having dark or deadly purposes, malignant; pertaining to or involving death, deadly; baneful, disastrous, sinister.. Foul. iniquitous, atrocious, horrible, wicked. ...Indicating disgrace, censure, liability to punishment, etc. Black was an emotionally partisan color... the handmaid and symbol of baseness and evil, a sign of danger and repulsion.". All of these factors are involved in the summation image that formed the image-construct of the African man in the Renaissance period. In Alden T. Vaughan's book 'Roots of American Racism' he writes '... the English name for central and southern Africans came from their skin color. Throughout Europe, in fact, Africans were "blacks, ""blackamores," or "Negroes"; to the Spanish, Portuguese, and Italians, they were "negros' and "negras"; to the Dutch, they were "negers." And in each language the word for "black" carried a host of disparaging connotations. In Spanish, for examples, "negro "also meant gloomy, dismal , unfit , and wretched; in French, 'noir' also connoted foul, dirty, base, and wicked; in Dutch , certain compounds of 'zwart conveyed notions of anger, irascibility, and necromancy; and "black" had comparable pejorative implications in Elizabethan and Stuart England. { pp. 6}. The combine weight of these 'aesthetic associations' can be viewed as a kind of 'stacked deck'. The word Black could also mean dark skin- as in satanic; "black comedy"; dark, as in 'darkest Africa'.
http://www.wesleyan.edu/music/braxton/papers/shakespeare-F.html[link="http://"]
the word never had a neutral connotation.
i came across the above article while doing research on Othello last year. And i found it very shocking too. I thought that the ugly connotation came after the colonisation drive. But i found that various travel doucuments and literature before deliberately portrayed the 'other' in derogatory terms so that the mindset of the people in colonising nation is made more favourable to colonisation.
In this case , i do think the Wikipedia is misleading.
More recently american rappers have tried to give a positive connotation to the word by making it a symbol of resistance but many disagree with the concept as they feel that the word brings back too much hatred.
|
|
back to top |
link to this post
|
|
Anu maheshwari
Joined: Jun 14, 2005
Posts: 122
Poster Rank:
Chatterbox
User is
Offline
Virtual Volunteer
Gender & Age: Female, 25
Country: India
Province/State: Maharashtra
City: Pune
|
Re: abolish the "n-word"
May 30, 2006 - 12:01 PM
|
|
racism doesnt have degrees!
any form of prejudice against a fellow human being , in thinking , attitude , action, whether conscious or unconscious is a form of racism. It is not just an extreme form of prejudice , it is prejudice itself !
racism is not plain superiority complex but superiority complex can be a form of racism.
its a serious problem facing our society , especially in India we have such forms of racism in the caste system. its an evil which is slowly on the wane in urban areas of India where there is a greater interaction between people from differnt communities.
This post was edited on: 2006-05-30 at 04:09 PM by: anuriandima84
|
|
back to top |
link to this post
|
|
Matt
Joined: Jul 15, 2005
Posts: 5
Poster Rank:
User is
Offline
Gender & Age: Male, 24
Country: New Zealand
Province/State: Auckland
City: Manukau
|
Re: abolish the "n-word"
May 31, 2006 - 09:05 PM
|
|
meanings of words can change. so what if one african-american wants to call his mates using that word? its no different than Randy Jackson saying "dawg" to everybody..
in NZ the words pakeha/palagi have sort of changed from being derogatory to being definitions of a persons ancestory.
BUT if someone uses the colour of your skin as an 'insult', ie: "get out of the way white-boy", that would be very racist.
words change their meaning and mean different things to different people -- which is what someone else was previously trying to say (?) i think...
|
|
back to top |
link to this post
|
|
Brigitta
Joined: Oct 3, 2005
Posts: 1
Poster Rank:
Tongue-tied
User is
Offline
Country: Malawi
Province/State: Blantyre
City: Blantyre
|
Re: abolish the "n-word"
June 1, 2006 - 05:12 AM
|
|
matt85 wrote:
meanings of words can change. so what if one african-american wants to call his mates using that word? its no different than Randy Jackson saying "dawg" to everybody..
in NZ the words pakeha/palagi have sort of changed from being derogatory to being definitions of a persons ancestory.
BUT if someone uses the colour of your skin as an 'insult', ie: "get out of the way white-boy", that would be very racist.
words change their meaning and mean different things to different people -- which is what someone else was previously trying to say (?) i think...
Is that so.
|
|
back to top |
link to this post
|
|
Anu maheshwari
Joined: Jun 14, 2005
Posts: 122
Poster Rank:
Chatterbox
User is
Offline
Virtual Volunteer
Gender & Age: Female, 25
Country: India
Province/State: Maharashtra
City: Pune
|
Re: abolish the "n-word"
June 1, 2006 - 12:22 PM
|
|
of course meanings change over the course of time !
for example words like nationalism, fundamentalism,companion, etc have undergone semantic shifts.
as i said earlier in my previous post , recently attempts have been made to give the particular word in question a positive connotation . but many people disagree with that!
In this particular case many people agree on eliminating the word from the dictionalry itself !
there is racism everywhere but the case of apartheid was the most widespread with an entire continent bearing the brunt of it.
Just the thought of things like the "middle passage' sends a chill down my spine...it must have nightmarish for those people who went through it ! ( actually i dotn even have words to describe it) .
Wikipedia gave only the half truth this time!
it didnt talk about the history of the word trying to play it down .hence i called it misleading !
In the United States, the word nigger was not originally considered derogatory, but merely denotative of black, as it was in much of the world. In nineteenth-century American literature, there are many uses of the word nigger with no intended negative connotation (see below).
Wikipedia
this is wrong ! what i wanted to prove was that it had a negative connotation !
since the word 'black' itself had a negative undertone!
|
|
back to top |
link to this post
|
|
Matt
Joined: Jul 15, 2005
Posts: 5
Poster Rank:
User is
Offline
Gender & Age: Male, 24
Country: New Zealand
Province/State: Auckland
City: Manukau
|
Re: abolish the "n-word"
June 1, 2006 - 09:04 PM
|
|
TheBMK wrote:
Is that so.
i think so. Depends what you are talking about??? 
|
|
back to top |
link to this post
|
|
|
Display posts from:
|
« BACK TO FORUM
|
Forum Jump:
|
All times are GMT-05:00
|
» Check that you are logged in!
You cannot create new threads in this forum
You cannot post replies in this forum
You cannot vote in polls in this forum
You cannot edit/delete your posts in this forum
|
|
Administrators:
Liamjod
Moderators:
anuriandima84, Liamjod, mekhala, mnopq
|
|
Home
Community
