From Slavery To Self-Defamation: An Interpretive History Of The "N Word"
By Orlis Trone
From the beginning, blacks were branded with the "N word." The beginning began in 1619, when 20 black Africans descended the gang-plank of a Dutch trading vessel into the hell of Jamestown, Virginia.
The "N word" put a bounty on the black race, a price tag that sent "slaver" ships crossing the ocean at top-knot speed to dock at Africa’s "Door of No Return." Exiting through this door, two by two, chained Africans boarded the "slavers" and were packed—sardine-tight—in the ships’ filthy cargo holes. These vessels then up’d anchor and set sail for the West Indies, where torturous degradation was inflicted to render the Africans servile and slave-ready for a life-span of back-breaking toil in the American colonies.
The "N word," its social meaning, that is, gave occasion to the "peculiar institution" of colonial slavery, the societal order that defined the black race out of its human identity. It represents this country’s most heinously brutal aggression against an unprovocative people. The hatred within just that one word is so egregiously evil that it, alone, accomplished the total dehumanization of the black race. The "N word" is America’s "degenerative genes" ("Bell Curve") word, the "genetic deficiency" lie, made-up to equate blacks more with the "lower animal" than with mankind. This, effectively, reduced black people to beasts of toil—like oxen or elephants or sled dogs or mules—to be worked, sold and bought, bequeathed and inherited, like any other livestock.
The "N word" was incubated in racism to spawn a nomenclature of derogatory designations with which to vilify blacks. These epithets spread out from Virginia over all America, like a metastasizing disease: moron, gorilla, jiggerbo, monkey, baboon, black ape, buffoon, spic, sambo, tar-baby, darkie, n_____-waiter, all specifically applied to deny—utterly--any trace of human dignity to black people.
The "N word" broke more bones than "sticks and stones." It broke apart thousands upon thousands of black families. It broke parents apart from children, siblings apart from siblings and husbands apart from wives.
The "N word" created the "wanted poster" for runaway slaves, called the "Fugitive Slave Act." It was this "law" that authorized the return of Dred Scott to his "rightful owner," John Sandford. For rebellious slaves, the likes of merkina Kinte, who still refused to "stay put," their masters could pluck out an eye, cut off an ear or chop off a foot.
The "N word" disallowed blacks to be taught to read and write the English language, and criminalized the act of doing so.
The "N word" guaranteed the opportunistic success of D.W. Griffith’s movie, "The Birth of a Nation," which did its part to glamorize the nighttime terrorists of "white supremacy," the dreaded Ku Klux Klan.
The "N word" was the white minstrel in blackface, acting out a caricaturized impersonation to portray black people as a race of self-degrading "happy darkies," eager to make buffoons of themselves.
The "N word" reduced black individuality to a mass of undifferentiated black pigment, and gave rise to the racist’s declaration: "They all look alike to me."
The "N word" justified the duplication of public facilities—duplicate drinking fountains, duplicate restrooms, duplicate entry-ways, railway cars, lunch counters, etcetera, marked "Whites Only" or "colored," in the segregated and unequal society of "Jim Crow."
The "N word" was invoked to force blacks to sit in the back seats of the bus, and threw Rosa Parks in jail when she refused to surrender her seat to a white passenger.
The "N word" was captured in "The Problem We All Live With," Norman Rockwell’s poignant painting of a little black girl, dwarfed by four giant U.S. Marshals, being escorted past a wall, scrawled with epithets, to integrate an all-white school.
The "N word" motivated George Wallace, Governor of Alabama, to "block the schoolhouse door."
The "N word" was yelled out by racist bombers just before the explosion that blew up the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, killing four little black girls.
The "N word" sanctioned the "sic-um" command issued by Sheriff Eugene "Bull" Connor to his vicious K-9 attack dogs, which tore into the flesh of peaceful black protesters—men, women and children.
The "N word" is full with the toil, sweat, tears and blood of the black race. It marks the graveyard that bulges with the remains of its black victims. All those who suffocated in the cargo holes of the "slaver" ships or flung themselves into the shark infested waters of the "Middle Passage," are buried there. Nat Turner and Steven Biko lie there, as do the remains of fourteen year old Emmet Till. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Medger Evers and James Chaney are buried there, as are Arthur McDuffy, Malice Green and, added just today, James Byrd Jr.; "N_____-lovers" are buried there, too. The remains of William Lloyd Garrison, Thomas Paine and Harriet Beecher Stowe lie there, as do the remains of Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy. Viola Luizzo is buried there, as are the remains of James B. Read, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, and all the others whom the "N word" has caused to be maligned, maimed or murdered from 1619 to just now.
Essentially, the "N word" is a one-word language, a full vocabulary that speaks volumes about the four-hundred years of "hate-crimes" committed against the black race. Where man’s inhumanity to man is concerned, the "N word" says it all.
For all of the above reasons—from 1619 to four-hundred years later—black people never took the "N word" as anything but a racist’s short-hand for "black slave"—until now, that is. Suddenly—and sadly—some blacks seem to have been seized up by a full-blown case of "n_____"-of-the-mouth disease. Anymore, black rappers, comedians, superstars, athletes, "leaders" and a monolith of black followers, have taken the "N word" and re-invented it as "A term of endearment."
The enigmatic reasoning that the self-defamation of one black person calling another black person the "N word" is hide-toughening, soul-inuring and self-esteem building, is as weird an absurdity as the "peculiar institution" of slavery, itself. Blacks who do so fail to comprehend that they spit into a racist wind, which blows the expectorant back to desecrate the genealogical headstone that records the history of so much black toil, black suffering and black death.
To redefine the "N word" as black-friendly and to redeem it as "A term of endearment" is an act of historical revisionism -- by the victims of that horrid word, no less. Given the history of the oppressive cruelty that the "N word" coerced upon black life, it strikes the heart, the memory and the conscience as inconceivable that any of slavery’s offspring would so indulge themselves.
As I write this opinion, Tojo’s daughter’s WWII revisionism is being made into a major motion picture in Tokyo, in which Tojo, that is Japan, is the "aggrieved" and the Allies are the "aggressors." In Germany and around the world, "Skinheads" and other worshippers of "Nazism," are denying that the "Holocaust" ever occurred. Now, the notorious "N word" is upgraded from a "hate-crime" word to "A term of endearment." Whether done from an error of judgment or from the ulterior motive of a professional revisionist, there is only one result of truth being evicted out of history, and it is spelled out in the truism of the forewarning that "Those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it."
