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 19th and 20th 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.
