Nigger Babies, Tar Babies, and Boys

Nigger Babies, Tar Babies, and Boys

I’m almost ashamed to admit it but when we were kids we’d go to the local movie emporium and plop down a quarter–16 cents in sleazier South Bronx theatrical emporia–head for the candy counter, and buy some goodies which today would be considered racist.

I’m almost ashamed not because of my impoverished background which I overcame, thank you very much, but because some of us urchins purchased, along with dry popcorn and a flat soda if we were really flush with nickels, and without the slightest reflection, “nigger babies,” bought and sold under that name at the counter.

They were small, chocolatey, licorice candies the Urban Dictionary describes as “made from a humanoid-shaped mold that gave the treats their baby-like appearance” and goes on to misrepresent the treats.

The Urban Dictionary explains, “Typically sold in bulk for a penny-a-piece, they were renamed ‘Chocolate Babies’ in the 1960s and were eventually sold in a box,” a misleading description because they were being sold in boxes as early as the early fifties.

“Nigger babies” weren’t a big favorite except among licorice aficionados and most fifties kids would never have laid out a precious penny for “nigger babies” in bulk or otherwise even in the sleaziest of movie houses and under the best of circumstances.

In retrospect, they were very inappropriately-named confections even if we only bought them occasionally, the equivalent of vanilla “honky babies” which were never produced as far as I know.

In any event, the N-word has been banished from the English language–except in rap lyrics. The white epithets “honky” and “cracker” are still in wide, contemporary usage, testimony to selective, racial sensitivities which even extend to the innocuous word “niggardly,” an adverb judged abhorrent since it sounds bad.

All this candy reminiscence relates to new, hyperactive sensitivities involving two equally-benign terms in the news lately: “tar babies” and “boy.” Their usage doesn’t quite carry the social stigma of “nigger babies” but they do cause some people to overreact and infer slurs and racial stereotypes where none exist.

“Tar babies” and “boy” may both some day enter the politically incorrect, verboten pantheon along with such literary classics as Huckleberry Finn and Uncle Remus after the PC police succeed in banning them, although banishing the word “boy” and every writing in which it appears would be a monumental challenge.

It comes down to how influential black agitators become. . .
(Read more at http://www.genelalor.com/blog1/?p=5176)

The Story of the N-Word

The Story of the N-Word

Shakespeare’s Juliet rhetorically asked, “What’s in a name?” We may all ask, and not rhetorically, What’s in a word, especially a certain word?

Words have meanings and have different meanings for different people. That’s not a very profound statement, I know, but it’s more relevant today than it ever used to be although it depends on the nature of the word.

President Bill Clinton notoriously played with words back in 1998 during his grand jury testimony. He veered into existentialism by painstakingly parsing the third person singular, president indicative of the verb “be:” “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is. If the–if he–if ‘is’ means is and never has been, that is not–that is one thing. If it means there is none, that was a completely true statement. . . Now, if someone had asked me on that day, are you having any kind of sexual relations with Ms. Lewinsky, that is, asked me a question in the present tense, I would have said no. And it would have been completely true.”

Amazingly, he wasn’t thrown out of office on the basis of that gobbledegook alone!

Since then, others have fared much worse, not for their misuse of the word “is” but because of their use of another word deemed not merely offensive but damned as so vile it no longer qualified for inclusion in either the spoken or written English language.

Wikipedia provides the history of “nigger:” “The variants neger and negar, derive from the Spanish and Portuguese word negro (black), and from the pejorative French nègre (nigger). Etymologically, negro, noir, nègre, and nigger ultimately derive from nigrum, the stem of the Latin niger (black) (pronounced [niɡer]“

In the last decade, that emotionally-charged word has taken on a life, and death, of its own.

To my knowledge, “nigger” is the only word ever to be consigned to language oblivion–except for black rappers and for any other blacks of a mind to use it–and is widely regarded as so offensive that even usage of words that sound like “nigger” have earned the users eternal ignominy.

Also, to my admittedly limited knowledge, “nigger” is the only word ever buried–by the Philadelphia NAACP Youth Council in 2007– and is one of the few words that can in and of itself constitute a hate crime.

Back in 1999, white staffer David Howard of black Washington, D.C. mayor Anthony Williams learned the message of word associations the hard way when, in his ignorance, Williams demanded Howard’s resignation because Howard had used the word “niggardly” in a staff meeting. It didn’t matter that “niggardly” meant “stingily” and had nothing to do with race or color.

Meanings and common sense aside, niggardly sounded like a racial slur . . .
(Read more at http://www.genelalor.com/blog1/?p=3324)