Date:  Wed, 29 Oct 1997 11:20:20 EST
From:  Larry Horn <LHORN[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]YALEVM.CIS.YALE.EDU>
Subject: Re: ADS-L Digest - 27 Oct 1997 to 28 Oct 1997

Ron Rabin writes,

>Someone also noted that African American use of nigger reclaimed it, as
>did homosexual use of queer. But my sense is that nigger has been used
>right along as a general reference term for black man (not black women?
>not by black women?) by African Americans for as long as I've heard it
>spoken. And you?

The someone was me, but I agree with the point: "nigger" has evidently been
used by African Americans (although I think there has been a conscious recent
reclamation effort too) in a way not quite parallelled by "queer" or other
recent reclamation efforts ("hag", "dyke", etc.).

>What do we know, historically and a matter of sociolinguistic practice and
>lore, about a group themselves using a term neutrally that is used to
>label them from outside negatively? We do have the example of "Black
>is beautiful" where a group asserts as positive that which is used
>as a negative. What I find interesting is that nigger could remain
>neutral for black speakers while it exists (and existed) in such a nasty
>sense for whites.
One candidate for this status that I think doesn't really fit is the Yiddish
"yid", referring to a (Jewish) person. This word was around in Yiddish before
becoming a pejorative in German and English, I believe. Someone who knows the
history can correct me.

Larry