Today’s History lesson (The word Nigger)

Whoever started the saying “Anybody can be a Nigger” needs to shot by a medieval firing squad.

For those of you who never heard that saying before, it is stating that anyone who is ignorant, no matter their race, can be called a Nigger. I’ve had regular clients use that quote to make a point, and automatically I think to myself that he’s either uneducated or uses the word often. And If I were to guess correctly, I’d say that he uses the word often. I’m a real good judge of character.

So let me school y’all on the history of the word “Nigger”.

“Nigger” is simply a mispronunciation by American Southerners of the Spanish word Negro and the French word Nègre which both means “Black” in their respective languages.

Around 1442 the Portuguese first arrived in sub-Saharan Africa while trying to find a route to India. The term Negro, literally meaning "black", was used by the Spanish and Portuguese to refer to people.

Then when the French began to colonize the Americas, they brought with them slaves from the West Indies and Africa to be sold on auction blocks to help fund their travels, and it’s the French word “Nègre” that American Southerner’s couldn’t pronounce and morphed into the word Nigger.

If they taught this fact in schools throughout the centuries, the word Nigger would be powerless today, and considered nothing more than the butchering of a foreign language, which it was.

But instead they taught us that the Word Nigger meant “Ignorant Black person” and “Bad Black person”, which does something devastating to your psyche when you saw how the word was used so regularly and frequent throughout history. That alone basically told us that we were a race of people who were ignorant and bad.

That’s why gaining “Right knowledge” is imperative if we are to co-exist without animosity.