Philip Ochieng
2 November 2008
column
THE OBAMA-MCCAIN CON-frontation yields unusual lessons. One is that ignorance -- even when it is deployed against a longstanding evil -- may prove just as dangerous as that evil. Take the enduring anti-black discrimination in that country's employment market.
A white-skinned editor is reported to have been fired for using the word "niggardly" in an editorial commentary against a well-known black American institution. The newspaper owner was livid with rage. Although also white, he is a liberal whose enthusiasm for Barack Obama is militant.
Because niggardly looks akin to nigger -- and given especially the editorial's context -- the editor was accused of racial disrespect and summarily dismissed. This was clearly an example of "misguided enthusiasm."
The American proprietor's heart was in the correct place. It was his intellect that let him down. He had no idea that the lexical resemblance between a nigger and a niggard is completely fortuitous. There is just no etymological connection.
Niggardly means meagre, tight, mean, stingy. A niggard is a skinflint. Though a nigger may be a niggard, it will be an individual trait. His niggardliness will have exactly nothing to do with his "niggertude," so to speak. Ignorance of this fact was what forced the newspaper owner's hand.
That is the lamentable thing. For, although his victim may be a niggard, he may have nothing against niggers as a group.
Nigger -- we have to agree -- is a disrespectful term, a racial pejorative. It occurs, for instance, in the idiom "nigger-in-the-woodpile" -- coined by trans-Atlantic slave drivers and popularised by coeval white American media -- to mean the stray fly that spoils good meat or, in general, any hidden snag.
Nigger-in-the-woodpile originally meant that if even a single black person were found in an organisation of whites, that organisation must be ruined beyond repair. Black people were so squalid that it was simply unthinkable to share any comestible with them.
As we know from Jerome Corsi, that is exactly how many white Americans think of Obama. Even before he enters the sanctum sanctorum of white America's temple of governance, by the mere fact of coming so close, Obama has become the most foetid nigger-in-the-woodpile of all time.
What is nigger? Negro, its etymological ancestor, was originally a completely harmless word. Tracing its history (in his book Made in America), Bill Bryson writes: "Negro is Spanish and Portuguese ... for 'black', and [was] first noted in English in 1555.
"Nigger appeared in 1587 and was not at first a pejorative term but simply a variant pronunciation of Negro ... Blacks were generally called blacks (or, more politely, coloureds) until the 1880s when Negro became the preferred term. It wasn't usually capitalised until the 1930s..."
BRYSON IS ALWAYS A DElight to read. He is well educated and, for an American, extraordinarily well informed about the human world. It is simply impossible to associate him with any form of chauvinism. But here he could have been a little more careful with his words. Yes, Negro was the "preferred" term.
But "preferred" by whom? Clearly, preferred not by the Negroes themselves, but, at that time, only by the slave drivers. It has never been for slaves (of any colour) to choose nominal clothing for themselves. Moreover, the African slaves would have had no good occasion to refer to themselves by a European term.
For Negro was a Spanish word derived from the Latin niger. But niger meant "black" tout court. In the beginning there was no value judgement in its use. That is probably why two African countries -- Niger and Nigeria -- have decided to retain those colonially given names.
The cinch is that the European empire builders imposed those appellations with insolent intentions. But so what? Niger and Nigeria mean nothing but "black." And I know nobody -- apart from my own Nilotic cousins in Southern Sudan -- who is blacker than a Yoruba or an Ibo.
In his book The Kalenjin People's Egypt Origin Legend Revisited, Kipkoech arap Sambu adduces a great deal of attractive evidence to show that jet-black, being the skin complexion of Chebet -- the goddess of creation -- was what all the Nilo-Hamites considered to be the colour of perfection.
Let me add that the Nilo-Hamites include the Hausa, Nigeria's -- indeed, Africa's -- most populous ethnic community. Dubbed "Nilo-Saharans" by Joseph Greenberg (the great American linguistic anthropologist), they also include the Luo, Kalenjin and Maasai, some of Kenya's largest ethnic groups.
It was through Cortes, Pizarro and other Spanish conquistadors that niger reached the Americas as negro. But negro continued to carry no ethical or aesthetical value. Latin Americans of all rainbow colours sing the song Yo vendo unos ojos negros ("I am selling some black-eye peas") with equal gusto.
Perhaps it was after niger entered German as Neger that the word began to refer specifically to the skin complexion of a certain group of human beings. That group happened to be Africans being chained all over the Western world, especially in the plantations of America's Deep South.
The German Neger and the French negre were probably also innocent at the beginning, both derivatives of the Spanish negro, ultimately from the Latin niger. Originally, the English verb to denigrate meant no more than to literally paint something black.
It probably had not even a whiff of racial, leave alone racist, connotation either. Only gradually did it take on the figurative significance of to spoil the reputation of a person or thing or idea. Even the hateful nigger may originally have been innocent.
It evolved from negger, a 16th-century dialectal English rendition of the French negre. It was among Dixieland's owners of cotton and other plantations -- most of them from Germanic Europe (England, Germany, Holland and Scandinavia) -- that Negro, Negger and Neger began to come out of the uneducated mouth as nigger.
And it was among these farmers -- all barely literate and racially jingoistic to the core -- that even nigger began to be used as a term of abuse. Yet, as recently as the early 1960s, when I was an undergraduate student in Chicago, the mass of black Americans remained at best ambivalent about it.
On the one hand, if uttered by a white person, nigger riled most of them a great deal. But, on the other, Negro was the term that even they used for themselves. As Bryson reports, "Coloured" (or "People of Colour") was also common, especially in intellectual discussions. Maya Angelou, the great black poetess, uses it all the time.
But, of course, even it was a misleading term. By implying that gypsum -- the epidermal appearance of "white" people -- was not a colour, it could have armed white racists into asserting that Caucasians were so superior as to be colourless and that such a smear as colour could belong only to the inferior races.
NOWADAYS, OF COURSE, WE know that the opposite is what is true. In the light spectrum, it is black that represents absence of colour. White represents a mixture of all the colours in the prism. But, of course, "white", "black" and "yellow" are terrible misnomers for human skins.
No European has ever really been white. Similarly, every time I put my hand against a truly black background, it amazes me how brown I am. The upshot is that all human beings are various shades of brown. It depends on the amount of melanin in your blood system.
Natural selection allotted melanin -- a black substance that protects human beings from the sun's lethal ultraviolet rays -- in accordance with amount of sun that a region receives. That is why black skin makes excellent biological sense on the equator and white skin makes equally good sense in Lapland and Kamchatka.
The start of black Americans' rejection of the appellation Negro coincided with the publication in the late 1950s of a remarkable book by a white spoilsport called John Griffin. Griffin had darkened his skin and curled his hair by swallowing certain chemicals.
Under this disguise, he travelled as a "Negro" all over the south to gain a first-hand experience of how a Negro felt under the yoke of discrimination and abuse. In this way, Griffin became the first -- and probably the only -- white individual throughout the history of racism who can claim to possess any emotional knowledge of the Negro person's historic suffering.
Along with Martin Luther King's activism, James Baldwin's fiction, Langston Hughes' poetry and Malcolm X's later didactics, Black Like Me -- the book that Griffin wrote from that experience -- played a profound role in the black American's revival of self-pride, self-respect and self-assertion of the 1960s.
This was the climate in which Elijah Muhammad's Nation of Islam -- better know as Black Muslims -- reached its peak. This was the rebellion that spawned Angela Davies, Stokely Carmichael, Huey Newton, James Brown, the Black Panthers and, in the ring, Muhammad Ali.
After victories over certain black Neanderthals, whom he saw as white stooges, Ali wrote and published a two-word poem -- "Me? Whea!" -- and asserted for all to hear that nobody knew how good it felt "to be as great as me." Ali's chest-thumping was not empty. After, all, he was a real victor.
BUT, MORE IMPORTANT THAN that, he had caused an international uproar by his refusal to be drafted for a war -- in Vietnam -- to which black youngsters were being sent to perish by the thousands in the cause of a corporate system which had adamantly refused to admit the black person into any of its material privileges.
Ali's reference was not merely to his boxing prowess. More important, it was a reference to his blackness. Soon the rebellion would assert it for all and sundry to hear: Black Is Beautiful! From now on, all appellations that tended to gloss over the black person's historic humiliations would be thrown overboard like jetsam.
"Negro" was among the first casualties, in preference for "black." For, although they denoted exactly the same thing, what they connoted was what mattered. Negro was contaminated with 400 years of blood and denigration, while black remained relatively unprejudiced.
For a time, too, the people toyed with the terms "black American" or "Afro-American." But, by the end of that mental uprising in the mid-1970s, "black" (both as an adjective and as a noun) had replaced all these terms. Today, however, even "black" has moved over, overthrown by the adjective "African."
Barack Obama and my daughter Juliette Akinyi are no longer "blacks" or "black Americans" or such, but "African Americans."
Of course, I question its objective correctness.
For they are no more "African American" than George Bush is "European American" or Fareed Zakaria is "Asian American." They are all simply Americans.
To say so is not to alienate my late friend's son from Illinois -- much less my daughter -- but only to recognise that they owe to America much more than they owe to Africa.
But having said that, I must admit that blood is thicker than water. That gives me two solid reasons for wishing Barack Bama a resounding victory in this week's ballot.
In the first place, because he is a true American -- and a jolly good fellow -- he deserves the oval office as much as any white person.
But, secondly, as a man who shared with his father both the Luo ethnicity and the black race -- as well as friendship into the bargain -- I will benefit an extraordinary deal from the ethnic and racial pride that this victory will generate.
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