Controversial Topics

Who Should Say Slurs?

So slurs, defined as "derogatory words said towards specific groups of people". Who should say slurs?

First, let's delve into the history of certain slurs, starting with the n-word.

During the late 18th and early 19th century, the n-word also described an actual labor category, which African American laborers adopted for themselves as a social identity, and thus white people used the descriptor word as a distancing or derogatory epithet, as if "quoting black people" and their non-standard language. During the early 1800s to the late 1840s fur trade in the Western United States, the word was spelled with a u instead of an e, and is often recorded in the literature of the time. George Fredrick Ruxton used it in his "mountain man" lexicon, without pejorative connotation. The n-word was evidently similar to the modern use of "dude" or "guy". This passage from Ruxton's Life in the Far West illustrates the word in spoken form—the speaker here referring to himself: "Travler, marm, this (n-word)'s no travler; I ar' a trapper, marm, a mountain-man, wagh!" It was not used as a term exclusively for blacks among mountain men during this period, as Indians, Mexicans, and Frenchmen and Anglos alike could be an n-word. "The noun slipped back and forth from derogatory to endearing."

By 1859, the term was clearly used to offend, in an attack on abolitionist John Brown.

The term "colored" or "negro" became a respectful alternative. In 1851, the Boston Vigilance Committee, an abolitionist organization, posted warnings to the Colored People of Boston and vicinity. Writing in 1904, journalist Clifton Johnson documented the "opprobrious" character of the n-word, emphasizing that it was chosen in the South precisely because it was more offensive than "colored" or "negro". By the turn of the century, "colored" had become sufficiently mainstream that it was chosen as the racial self-identifier for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). In 2008 Carla Sims, its communications director, said "the term 'colored' is not derogatory, [the NAACP] chose the word 'colored' because it was the most positive description commonly used [in 1909, when the association was founded]. It's outdated and antiquated but not offensive."

A style guide to British English usage, H.W. Fowler's A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, states in the first edition (1926) that applying the n-word to "others than full or partial negroes" is "felt as an insult by the person described, & betrays in the speaker, if not deliberate insolence, at least a very arrogant inhumanity"; but the second edition (1965) states "N. has been described as 'the term that carries with it all the obloquy and contempt and rejection which whites have inflicted on blacks'". The quoted formula goes back to the writings of the American journalist Harold R. Isaacs, who used it in several writings between 1963 and 1975. Black characters in Nella Larsen's 1929 novel Passing view its use as offensive; one says "I'm really not such an idiot that I don't realize that if a man calls me a (n-word), it's his fault the first time, but mine if he has the opportunity to do it again."

By the late 1960s, the social change brought about by the civil rights movement had legitimized the racial identity word black as mainstream American English usage to denote black-skinned Americans of African ancestry. President Thomas Jefferson had used this word of his slaves in his Notes on the State of Virginia (1785), but "black" had not been widely used until the later 20th century.

In the 1980s, the term "African American" was advanced analogously to such terms as "German American" and "Irish American", and was adopted by major media outlets. Moreover, as a compound word, African American resembles the vogue word Afro-American, an early-1970s popular usage. Some Black Americans continue to use the n-word, often spelled with an a at the end, without irony, either to neutralize the word's impact or as a sign of solidarity.

Now, moving on to the r-word. The R-word, also known as the R-slur, is a hurtful term that remains prevalent throughout social media, according to a Kantar Social Listening study. The research shows that when social media users are posting about people with intellectual disabilities, 7 in every 10 of those posts are negative, and 6 in 10 contain a slur.