Use of nigger in the arts
[2][3] In 1897, Joseph Conrad penned a novella titled The Nigger of the 'Narcissus', whose titular character, James Wait, is a West Indian black sailor on board the merchant ship Narcissus sailing from Bombay to London.
[8] Van Vechten, a white supporter of the Harlem Renaissance (1920s–30s), then used the word himself in his 1926 novel Nigger Heaven, which provoked controversy in the black community.
[citation needed] Flannery O'Connor uses a black lawn jockey as a symbol in her 1955 short story "The Artificial Nigger".
[11] Gil Scott-Heron, the American jazz poet who wrote "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised", released a novel in 1972 entitled '''The Nigger Factory", described as "life on black college campuses".
[13] The novel is written from the point of view, and largely in the language, of Huckleberry Finn, an uneducated white boy, who is drifting down the Mississippi River on a raft with an adult escaped slave, Jim.
The change was spearheaded by Twain scholar Alan Gribben in the hope of "countering the 'pre-emptive censorship'" that results from the book's being removed from school curricula over language concerns.
The counting rhyme known as "Eenie Meenie Mainee, Mo" has been attested from 1820, with many variants; when Kipling included it as "A Counting-Out Song" in Land and Sea Tales for Scouts and Guides (1923), he gave as its second line, "Catch a nigger by the toe!"
P. G. Wodehouse has the repeated phrase "nigger minstrels" only on the lips of Wooster and his peers; the manservant Jeeves uses the more genteel "Negroes".
In short story "The Basement Room" (1935), by Graham Greene, the (sympathetic) servant character, Baines, tells the admiring boy, son of his employer, of his African British colony service, "You wouldn't believe it now, but I've had forty niggers under me, doing what I told them to".
[citation needed] In Paul Temple (1940) [Track 15][20] by Francis Durbridge the phrase "he worked like a nigger" is used without any apparent further context.
[22] The Reverend W. V. Awdry's The Railway Series (1945–72) story Henry's Sneeze, originally described soot-covered boys with the phrase "as black as niggers".
The song was banned by the South African Broadcasting Corporation, but this was because its mixing of English and Afrikaans language was considered to violate the principles of apartheid.
The British performance poet Malik Al Nasir claims that his mentor Gil Scott-Heron was inspired to write classic song "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" by the last of these three.
[12] In 1972 John Lennon and Yoko Ono used the word in both the title and in the chorus of their song "Woman Is the Nigger of the World", which was released as both a single and a track on their album "Sometime in New York City.
In 1979 Elvis Costello used the phrase "White nigger" to refer to Northern Irish people forced to become mercenaries in the song "Oliver's Army".
The punk band the Dead Kennedys used the word in their 1980 song "Holiday in Cambodia" in the line, "Bragging that you know how the niggers feel cold and the slum's got so much soul".
The 1993 song from A Tribe Called Quest "Sucka Nigga" off their album Midnight Marauders addresses the rising usage of the word in Hip Hop at the time.
[35] The 1995 song "They Breed" by American death metal band Malevolent Creation from their album Eternal concludes with the word.
The 1995 song "I Believe" by Blessid Union of Souls featured a line containing the word but was edited for radio airplay.
[37] As a result, it is a word that is heard daily by millions of all races worldwide who listen to uncensored hip hop and other music genres, while being socially unacceptable for anyone but African Americans to utter.
Ta-Nehisi Coates has suggested that it continues to be unacceptable for people who are not of African ancestry to utter the word nigger while singing or rapping along to hip-hop, and that by being so restrained it gives White Americans (specifically) a taste of what it is like to not be entitled to "do anything they please, anywhere".
Bernardine Evaristo used the word as the title her first play as a student, which the then head of Rose Bruford College said "was the best piece of theatre he'd ever seen".
According to a volunteer actor playing one of the victims, this living memorial "consist[s] largely of older white men calling him "nigger," tying a noose around his neck, and pretending to shoot him repeatedly"[41] One of Horace Ové's first films was Baldwin's Nigger (1968), in which two African Americans, novelist James Baldwin and comedian Dick Gregory, discuss Black experience and identity in Britain and the United States.
Stanley Kubrick's critically acclaimed 1987 war film Full Metal Jacket depicts black and white U.S. Marines enduring boot camp and later fighting together in Vietnam.
Gayniggers from Outer Space, a 1992 English-language Danish short blaxploitation parody, features black homosexual male aliens who commit gendercide to free the men of Earth from female oppression.
[48] During World War II, a dog named Nigger, a black Labrador belonged to Royal Air Force Wing Commander Guy Gibson.
In Michael Anderson's 1955 film The Dam Busters, based on the raid, the dog was portrayed in several scenes; his name and the codeword were mentioned several times.
Replying to complaints, ITV blamed regional broadcaster London Weekend Television, which, in turn, singled out a junior employee as the unauthorised censor.
[55] Later in the 2000s, South Park's eleventh season premiered with "With Apologies to Jesse Jackson", in which Randy Marsh incorrectly answers niggers instead of naggers for the hint "people who annoy you" on Wheel of Fortune, which triggers public humiliation and ostracism.
Despite criticism from the Parents Television Council, many, including African Americans, have praised the episode for its humorous message of how it feels to be called a nigger.
