N-word Brown and the Colour of Globalized Ethnic Slurs

An African-ancestored family in Brampton, Ontario was in for a rude surprise when their 7 year old daughter observed that the labels on their new chocolate brown, three piece furniture set read “nigger brown.” Read about it at Racial Slur on Sofa Label Stuns Family.

The family contacted the seller of the furniture,Vanaik Furniture and Mattress store in Mississauga, Ontario. The assistant manager of Vanaik’s, Romesh Kumar, disclaimed any knowledge of the labels and passed the blame to his supplier, Cosmo Furniture in Scarborough, Ontario. The owner of Cosmo, Paul Kumar (no relation to Romesh), while expressing regret over the labels, blamed the labeling on the manufacturer in Guangzhou Province, China. He indicated that he would demand that all such labels be removed from future shipments.

Since when has nigger brown been a part of the Chinese colour palette?

Perhaps since the phrase came into common usage in England in the 19^th and 20^th centuries. “Nigger brown” has been documented as a colour used by English designers and manufacturers for well over one hundred years. Fabrics, thread and other materials in dark brown were routinely referred to by that name throughout the United Kingdom. This usage spread to English colonial possessions, including parts of China. While the phrase was not quite so common in the United States, its usage was not unknown. Indeed, the United States has had, throughout its history, no shortage of commonplace usages of the word nigger and other racial slurs. It is noteworthy, for example, that in the United States and Canada there were once scores of towns, cities and other geographical places with racist names such as Nigger Island, Chinks Peak and Squaw Tit. Most such names have been changed in recent years in response to greater public sensitivity. In both the United States and Canada geographical place names are governed by detailed sets of regulations developed and administered by official government bodies, the United States Board on Geographic Names and the Geographical Names Board of Canada.

The fact that the word nigger is still being employed as part of a colour description is, according to Jack Chambers, a professor in the University of Toronto department of linguistics, an “imperial excrescence” and a “colonial marker.” Such usages are not, however, unique to English language and culture. One such example is tête de nègre, a round, meringue-filled French pastry covered with chocolate. The phrase has also been used in French to describe a dark brown colour (it was an equivalent for the colour known in English as nigger brown). The literal translation of tête de nègre is “nigger head.” Lest we assume that this is a relic of the distant, racist past, such pastries are still sometimes found in modern day France and in other Francophone countries. Though increasingly the dessert is no longer labeled tête de nègre (and in an almost humorous bow to political correctness the chocolate frosting is sometimes replaced with white frosting) it remains a staple French dessert. It was reported, for example, that tête de nègre was served at no less august a global gathering than the 2007 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

It may be argued that, given the way in which the furniture ended up being labeled with the word nigger, there is no significant harm done. Even if members of the family that purchased the furniture were, because of their black ancestry, uniquely sensitive to being offended by the label, perhaps it may all be written off as an unfortunate glitch in the chain of global commerce. After all, how many times is it the case that items made in non-English speaking countries are mislabeled or poorly described, sometimes humorously so, because of the imperfect use of English? Moreover, in the particular instance of the use of the word nigger, there seems to be no clear consensus as to whether nigger can or should be considered as an offensive word when used in mainstream public discourse, given its pervasiveness in American popular music and culture.

While some would say that nigger has lost much of its sting, others argue that the word is as offensive as ever. There have even been attempts to bring the effect if not the force of law to bear on the matter. In February, 2007 the New York City Council declared a moratorium on the used of the word nigger. Supporters of the measure also urged the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, Inc., a private organization of music professionals who administer the Grammy Awards, not to nominate for Grammys those songs which use nigger in their lyrics and asked cable television network Black Entertainment Television (BET) to stop using the word in its shows. Though the declaration was purely symbolic, it followed similar resolutions by the New York state assembly and state senate.

Despite a split of public opinion as to whether the word nigger belongs in mainstream discourse, the fact remains that the word, even when used casually and offhandedly without immediate racist intent, still often has a unique power to wound because of its long history as a word which was meant to articulate the degraded social position of African-ancestored persons. Despite arguments that the apparent absence of malicious intent divests the word of its unique power, no amount of global buck-passing can easily or quickly unhitch the freight born by the n-word--hundreds of years of past race-based oppression and the continuing race-based inequities suffered by persons of African ancestry.

Don Imus, the Not So Merry Christmas and the Law of Insults

Don Imus, a white American male radio sport show host called the mostly African American women of the Rutgers women’s basketball team nappy headed Merry Christmases. Read about it at Networks Condemn Remarks By Imus.

For the uninitiated, a Merry Christmas is what we in my almost all black neighborhood often said in lieu of the word ‘ho (whore). We took the use of profane insults pretty seriously, so there were rules to govern their use. One rule was that substitutes and euphemisms were often used in place of the worst of the words in our arsenal, words like ‘ho. To call someone a ‘ho was a pretty brutal, low down insult, suggesting an unbridled, wholly undiscriminating sexuality. For us, a ‘ho was the kind of girl who “did it” with just about anyone, anytime without even the pragmatic, instrumental approach of a prostitute. Part of the power of ‘ho was that it was a distinctly gendered insult; we had no equivalent term for boys who behaved the same way. (Nowadays there is “man ‘ho” but it doesn’t come close to having the same sting.) No, back in the day, we didn’t throw around the word ‘ho—that was playing with dynamite. Before you openly called anybody a ‘ho, you’d better be pretty sure you could beat up the so-labeled girl and her defenders, because to call someone a ‘ho was a prelude to a fight. If the word we sought was ‘ho, (and we usually resorted to much less serious name calling before we got to that) better to say “Merry Christmas” in sotto voce snickers when the girl walked into the room and leave it at that. Such was the law of insults in our neighborhood.

Don Imus is a law breaker. On open microphone he called members of the Rutgers women’s basketball team “nappy-headed ‘hos”. Moreover, the racial and gender insult wasn’t just random; there was apparently a theme running through the show. Imus’s comment immediately followed the comment of his executive producer Bernard McGuirk, who called the women “hard core ‘ho’s”. Later in the show, which was simulcast via CBS radio and on MSNBC television, McGuirk described the match between the Rutgers women’s basketball team and the Tennessee women’s team as the “Jigaboos versus the Wannabees”. In his defense, Imus has said that it was an “idiot comment meant to be amusing,” and has apologized. No apology has been published by McGuirk. A recent op-ed by Bob Herbert of the New York Times indicates that McGuirk, in the words of Imus himself dating back to 1998, was "there to do nigger jokes."

Many of us don’t need to wonder where Imus got the idea that he could throw around the word ‘ho in reference to African American women without consequence. One need only listen to the lyrics of numerous gangsta rap songs performed by mostly African American singers in which the use of the word ‘ho has reached epic if not epidemic proportions. In such songs, words such as ‘ho and its close kin bitch are chanted with impunity. But, what Imus and a lot of other people have apparently failed to see is...that’s not most people’s real life. Despite what those media portrayals suggest, that’s not necessarily anybody’s real life. All too often, what we have in gangsta rap is not art imitating life but art imagining life. As I’ve written in other work, one of the most pointed critiques of the gangsta rap genre is that it not only glorifies actual profanity and violence but also imagined profanity and violence. Life in ghettos and poor neighborhoods is often shown as excessively profane in order to gain market share and “street cred.” In point of fact, many of those involved in songwriting, production and sometimes even the performance of gangta rap are themselves well-educated products of middle and working class homes, where, I assure you, nobody is openly calling anybody a ‘ho. Even where ‘ho is used in gangsta rap, it is usually meant to be offensive and hence intentionally transgressive as a means of expressing rebellion. It has even been inverted and portrayed as a term of endearment, but in such instances its use still engenders a frisson of the forbidden. One thing it is not meant to be is funny.

Should sorry be enough in this instance? Judging from the response to Imus's utterance, the answer is no. Despite Imus’s apology, on April 10, 2007 Imus’s show was suspended for two weeks by his broadcasters CBS Radio and MSNBC cable television, in response no doubt to the pressure brought to bear by sponsors and by a public mortified by a vicious verbal assault on college women athletes for the sake of amusement. After the suspension there remained a maelstrom of controversy surrounding the matter and nationwide calls for his firing and for a boycott of his sponsors. This was, after all, not the first time that Imus has made offensive sexist or racist remarks. One of the best known is a 1993 incident in which he called then New York Times White House correspondent Gwen Ifill, an African American woman (now with PBS) , a “cleaning lady.” In another instance his show offered a parodic song that referred to former First Lady and now Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s urinary habits and menstrual cycle. Read about it in a blog piece by Andrew Ross of the San Francisco Chronicle . No, Imus was no stranger to serving up the lowest forms of sexist and racist insult.

The chickens finally came home to roost when on April 11 NBC News canceled the televised simulcast of the Imus radio show aired on MSNBC cable news and on April 12 when CBS News canceled the "Imus in the Morning" radio program. So, it looks like, at the moment, Imus's career on traditional terrestrial radio is over. There is always satellite, though. Just ask Howard Stern.

The bigger issue, the one well beyond Imus’s outrageous remarks about the Rutgers women’s basketball team, is why he and others like him have been allowed a broadcast reign of terror which routinely debased women, racial and religious minorities and gays and lesbians. As Andrew Ross suggested in his blog, citing the Manhattan Institute’s John Leo in an April 13 Wall Street Journal op-ed, many powerful persons in politics and the media “enabled” Imus by willingly appearing on his show despite and perhaps even because of its often profane nature, giving it an imprimatur of respectability. (On another note, I was none too amused by Leo’s use of a brothel metaphor to explain what was wrong with Imus’s show. Will some of these men never get it?!) But it's not just the high and mighty who promote the likes of Don Imus. While many of us may be loathe to admit it, what he routinely expressed in his broadcasts well represented the lowest common denominator of thought in many segments of the United States population. In a world where political correctness, tolerance and inclusion increasingly require reining in offensive remarks in public, Imus's show represented a last bastion of the clubby, old boy (and good old boy) atmosphere that prevailed in most of the places that mattered in the United States for much of its history. Until we acknowledge this, the level of discourse promoted on the Imus show will continue to flourish in other fora, nourished by a sadly corrupted notion of what freedom of expression means.