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Nigger (racial slur)

racial slur towards/against black people

In the English language, nigger is a racial slur directed at black people. In the United States, the term was historically applied to enslaved African Americans and has recently been partially reappropriated by some of their descendants as nigga.

The filthiest, dirtiest, nastiest word in the English language.
~ Christopher Darden

United States

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18th and 19th centuries

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"The nigger" in the woodpile.
  • I jumped aboard de telegraph,
      And trabbled down de riber,
    De lectric fluid magnified,
      And killed five hundred nigger.
  • Wid eyes erect, and head hanging down,
    Like de sprightly hare before de hound,
    Dis nigger streak it through the pasture,
    Nigger run fast, white man run faster.
  • Eena, meena, mina, mo,
    Catch a nigger by his toe;
    If he squeals let him go,
    Eena, meena, mina, mo.
  • Ten little nigger boys went out to dine;
    One choked his little self, and then there were nine...
    One little nigger boy living all alone;
    He got married, and then there were none.
  • It was fifteen minutes before I could work myself up to go and humble myself to a nigger—but I done it, and I warn't ever sorry for it afterwards, neither.

20th century

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When I was in Africa, this voice came to me and said, "Richard, what do you see?" I said, "I see all types of people." The voice said, "But do you see any niggers?" I said, "No." It said, "Do you know why? 'Cause there aren't any." ~ Richard Pryor
 
Niggers are the ones that marched.
  • The White House is now so saturated with the odor of the nigger that the rats had taken refuge in the stable.
    • James Vardaman's remark regarding Booker T. Washington's meeting with Theodore Roosevelt on October 16, 1901, as quoted in Lusane, Clarence (23 January 2013). The Black History of the White House. City Lights Publishers. p. 254.
  • There is no use to equivocate or lie about the matter.... Mississippi's constitutional convention of 1890 was held for no other purpose than to eliminate the nigger from politics. Not the 'ignorant and vicious', as some of the apologists would have you believe, but the nigger.... Let the world know it just as it is.... In Mississippi we have in our constitution legislated against the racial peculiarities of the Negro.... When that device fails, we will resort to something else.
    • Mississippi Governor James Vardaman's remarks regarding the 1890 Mississippi state constitution, as quoted in McMillen, Neil R. (1989). "The Politics of the Disfranchised". Dark Journey: Black Mississippians in the Age of Jim Crow. University of Illinois Press. pp. 41–44.
  • I am opposed to the nigger's voting, it matters not what his advertised moral and mental qualifications may be. I am just as much opposed to Booker Washington, with all his Anglo-Saxon reenforcement, voting, as I am to voting by the coconut-headed, chocolate-colored typical little coon, Andy Dotson, who blacks my shoes every morning. Neither one is fit to perform the supreme functions of citizenship.
    • Mississippi Governor James Vardaman's remark regarding Washington's role in politics, as quoted in Morrell, Edward DeVeaux. "Negro suffrage : should the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments be repealed?" (4 April 1904). Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
  • Republicanism means Negro equality, while the Democratic Party means that the white man is supreme. That is why we [white] Southerners are all Democrats... History has no record of Negro rule. The situation is grave, and calls for wisdom and all manner of statesmanship. If we had our say, the Negro could never vote. I believe that God made the white man out of better clay than that which the Negro was made from... We don't need another race to help us at this time. In some of the states, the Negro holds the vote of control... In Chicago, the Republicans needed the Negro vote to elect their whole ticket, so a nigger was nominated for judge and elected.
  • Two days later, Tillman gave another speech and apparently was offended by the presence of a black man in the audience. ‍'‍Look down that aisle, there's a nigger as black as the ace of spades‍'‍, the South Carolina Democrat exclaimed. According to a news report, the man was well dressed and only smiled at Tillman's outburst, showing more class in that moment than Tillman had shown in his entire life.
  • I noticed that among this class of colored men the word "nigger" was freely used in about the same sense as the word "fellow," and sometimes as a term of almost endearment; but I soon learned that its use was positively and absolutely prohibited to white men.
  • Negro went to heaven by land. Went there an' knocked on the door. St. Peter come to the do', say,"Who is that?" Nigger say, "This is me." St. Peter say, "You ridin' or walkin'?" Nigger says, "I'm walkin'." St. Peter says, "Well, you can't get in here les'n you're ridin'." Nigger left; come on back down the road about five miles, meets up wid a white man. Say, "Mr. White Man, where you goin'" White man say "I'm goin' to heaven." Nigger say, "You can't git in dere walkin'. I just left dere." Nigger say, "I'll tell you a way we'll get in dere." Nigger say, "Let me be your horse an' you get straddle me an' I'll go ridin' an' carry you up to heaven; an' you knock on de gate an' Salt Peter ask you who you is an' you tell him it's you, an' he gonna say, 'Bof you all come on in.'" White Man says, "All right, get down." White Man straddles the nigger, nigger goes runnin' back up to heaven wid him. Rode him right up to de door. White man knocks on de do'. St. Peter say, "Who is dere?" White Man say, "Dis is me." St. Peter say, "You ridin' or walkin'?" White Man says, "Yes." St. Peter says, "Hitch your damn horse outside an' come on in."
  • I call on every red-blooded white man to use any means to keep the niggers away from the polls[;] if you don’t understand what that means you are just plain dumb. I’m calling on every red-blooded American who believes in the superiority and integrity of the white race to get out and see that no nigger votes...and the best time to do that is the night before!”
    • Mississippi Senator Theodore Bilbo in a speech to his white supporters during his successful re-election campaign in June of 1946, as quoted in Robert L. Fleegler, Theodore G. Bilbo and the Decline of Public Racism, 1938-1947 (Spring 2006)
  • Many southern politicians continued to use extreme language similar to Bilbo’s. Major southern figures such as James Eastland, Richard Russell, Strom Thurmond, and George Wallace played the race card and supported Jim Crow with all their energies well into the 1960s. But they usually avoided the kind of overt racism, anti-Semitism, and anti-Italian remarks that Bilbo consistently expressed. Instead they employed code words; these legislators talked of the need to protect the South from “outside agitators” and the necessity of defending “state’s rights,” but rarely used the terms niggers or kikes.
    • Robert L. Fleegler, Theodore G. Bilbo and the Decline of Public Racism, 1938-1947 (Spring 2006)
  • I wanna tell you, ladies and gentlemen, that there's not enough troops in the army to force the Southern people to break down segregation and admit the nigger race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches.
    • Strom Thurmond, Dixiecrat presidential nominee, in a speech met with loud cheers by his assembled supporters during his 1948 presidential campaign
  • In every stage of the [Montgomery] bus boycott we have been oppressed and degraded because of black, slimy, juicy, unbearably stinking niggers. … African flesh-eaters. When in the course of human events it becomes necessary to abolish the Negro race, proper methods should be used. Among these are guns, bows and arrows, slingshots and knives. … All whites are created equal with certain rights, among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of dead niggers.
  • Muhammad understands the vicious fraud of the Jewish exploitation of the Negro people and, fighting his way from the gutters as we did, he had [sic] demonstrated truly incredible leadership abilities. He has gathered millions of the dirty, immoral, drunken, filthy-mouthed, lazy and repulsive people sneeringly called 'niggers' and inspired them to the point where they are clean, sober, honest, hard working, dignified, dedicated and admirable human beings in spite of their color.
  • In the Deep South, you are dealing with a sheriff or a landlord or a landlady or a girl of the Western Union desk, and she doesn't know quite who she's dealing with—by which I mean, that if you're not a part of the town, and if you are a "northern nigger", it shows in millions of ways. So she simply knows that it's an unknown quantity, and she wants to have nothing to do with it. Because she won't talk to you, you have to wait for a while to get your telegram. Okay, we all know this. We've been through it, and by the time you get to be a man, it's very easy to deal with.
  • The nigger race is inherently inferior to the white race intellectually.
    • George Lincoln Rockwell in an interview with Alex Haley that was published in Playboy (April 1966)
  • Jim Eastland could be standing right in the middle of the worst Mississippi flood ever known, and he'd say the niggers caused it, helped out by the Communists -— but, he'd say, we gotta have help from Washington.
  • Then I come down to Houston, I went to a bowling alley. I couldn't go bowling, there were no bowling balls. The people here throw 'em all in the sea, thought they were nigger eggs... thought they were nigger eggs.
    • Kinky Friedman, from a 1980 tape, as reported on the Burnt Orange Report, an Austin-based Democratic blog, in September 2006; quoted in Texas Weekly, vol. 23, no. 13 (18 September 2006), Online
  • You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger." By 1968 you can't say "nigger"—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger."
  • When I was in Africa, this voice came to me and said, "Richard, what do you see?" I said, "I see all types of people." The voice said, "But do you see any niggers?" I said, "No." It said, "Do you know why? 'Cause there aren't any." And it hit me like a shot, man. I started crying and shit. … And it made me say, "Oh my God, I've been wrong. I've been wrong. I've got to regroup my shit." I said, "I ain't gonna never call another black man a nigger." … I don't like it when black people say it to me. I really don't no more.
  • Blacks stayed at home during the civil rights march. Niggers are the ones that marched.... A nigger is one like Hosea Williams. He wants to come up here and cause trouble.
  • You fuckin' guys are acting like a bunch of fuckin' niggers! You work with niggers, huh? Just like you two, always sayin' they're gonna kill each other.
  • When you came pullin' in here, did you notice a sign on the front of of my house that said "Dead Nigger Storage"?
  • The prosecutor, his voice trembling, added that the "N-word" was so vile he would not utter it. "It's the filthiest, dirtiest, nastiest word in the English language."
  • There's black people, and there's niggers. And niggers have got to go. Every time black people wanna have a good time, ign'ant-ass niggers fuck it up.

21st century

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  • Oraetta Mayflower: There's a word for people like you.
    Ethelrida Pearl Smutny: No. That's your word. You invented it to make yourself feel bigger. But that's not what I am.
  • If the slur is mentioned in key court decisions, it should not be taboo in law schools.
    • Randall Kennedy and Eugene Volokh, "The case for quoting the n-word in university classrooms", The Washington Post (13 May 2021), Online

Outside the United States

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Early use

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  • It is a common saieng; A lion feareth no bugs. But in our childhood our mothers maids have so terrified us with an ouglie divell having hornes on his head, fier in his mouth, and a taile in his breech, eies like a bason, fanges like a dog, clawes like a beare, a skin like a Niger, and a voice roring like a lion, [...] that we are afraid of our owne shadowes.
  • She is a foole, that dare not wash her face, because she would not have her husband thinke she paints it so she is a nigger, that dare not laugh, least her husbande shoulde thinke shee is lascivious.

19th century

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The nigger was calm, cool, towering, superb. ~ Joseph Conrad
  • He never lost his appetite —
    He bigger grew and bigger;
    And proved, with every inch of height,
    A nigger is a nigger.
    • Henry Kendall, “My Piccaninny”, in The Australian Town and Country Journal (19 June 1880), p. 28, col. 4
  • The lady who dyes a chemical yellow,
    Or stains her grey hair puce,
    Or pinches her figger,
    Is blacked like a nigger
    With permanent walnut juice.
  • The nigger was calm, cool, towering, superb.
    • Joseph Conrad, The Nigger of the "Narcissus" (1897), Ch. 1
    • The titular character, James Wait, is a West Indian black sailor aboard the merchant ship Narcissus sailing from Bombay to London.

20th century

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  • Oh, plain black's best for a nigger.
  • You wouldn't believe it now, but I've had forty niggers under me, doing what I told them to.
  • You've inserted the thin end of the wedge by allowing stinking niggers into such a fine hotel.

21st century

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See also

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  •   Encyclopedic article on Nigger on Wikipedia
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