NAPPY: Origin of a Racist Slur from Bill Casselman's Canadian Word of the Day & Words of the World at www.billcasselman.com

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Words are potent.

We watched a chilling demonstration of verbal potency over the last few weeks of April, 2007. Don Imus, a not-very-pleasant American radio host and racist yahoo called the members of an American girls’ college basketball team “nappy-headed ho’s,” translation: whores with frizzy hair. Black power vultures smelled blood, flooded the internet with video clips of Don’s transgression and within days they destroyed Imus’ career. Did Don deserve it? Probably. Imus won’t starve, after all. And getting fired beats getting lynched from a tree limb after one has been caught gawking at Miss Scarlett’s boobs while serving her a mint julep on the bougainvillaea-vined verandah at Tara.

The word nappy began its life innocently enough as the adjectival offspring of the word nap. Nap is a fuzzy surface layer on yarn or cloth. Nap is teased up or raised higher by brushing the cloth against a rough surface. Our common weed teasel is named because it was used long ago to tease up the nap on cloth. Nap on wool was often shaved off and used to fill pillows. A number of words were brought to England during the 14th and 15th centuries by Dutch weavers who came to Britain to ply their trade. One of these words from Middle Dutch was noppich , ‘nappy’ an adjective referring to cloth that had a fiber-thick surface layer that could be trimmed down or teased up and cut even.

Late in the 18th century or early in the 19th century, Americans in the southern U.S. began to refer to negro slaves as nappy heads, comparing some tightly curled negroid hair to the nap on some cloth or fur. It was not a compliment. Beaver hats were said in early Victorian times to have a ‘fine, black nap.’

Then, as happened in history with many terms of abuse, those abused, the black slaves, took to using the word among themselves with affection, partly as a method of ‘taking back the hurt’ in the insult and partly out of the sheer exuberant play of language that all people share. There are 19th century letters from black mothers to distant daughters where the mother addresses her girl as “my sweet little nappy head.” What white racists don’t seem to get is the black imprimatur of such language. That usage is permissible among blacks, but when whites say it, it’s racist. That does not seem like rocket science, and yet hundreds of thousands of Americans seem too dense to clue into such circumscribed linguistic parameters. Words freighted with deep emotional import and electrified by taboo are dangerous cargo. Use them and you sink with them.

This private recruitment of some words is not new. Words, especially self-referential words, are one of the vocal ways a powerless minority can keep a dominant majority always ill at ease in their speech and writing. The minority simply changes its ordained names, changes the racial words by which it is polite and civilized to refer to themselves. In American history, it was once quite acceptable to refer to negroes, persons of color, blacks, and Afro-Americans. One ploy in the perpetual one-upmanship of racial turmoil is to keep altering one’s proper racial designation. Yes, there was even a time in American history when nigger was NOT automatically a disparagement. This year, check out some black magazines where the term Afro-American is now considered racist. Well-meaning whites wonder what referent may be next: our tinted brethren? The point, of course, is that NOTHING is acceptable. Just keep changing the label as soon as whites get used to the new one. Whites are thus eternally guilty and never to be countenanced or forgiven. Political correctness is apt for corpses. Among the living it is impossible to maintain.

But incessant revenge is possible. Just shoot the varmit's leg off and the flesh-eaters will circle overhead attentively. This April, the chief attendant vulture, loud and vulgar and happy as he rended Don Imus’ flesh, was the opportunist rabble-rouser Al Sharpton, as sleazy as any ambulance-chasing lawyer, a black yahoo to match Imus, a white yahoo. Al does not chase ambulances; Al chases black pain. Then he uses it for his personal advancement and for his own political publicity.

But I’m white and I’m on the side of forgiving Imus and promiting free speech. Obviously Afro-Americans are not.

Lip service is paid to the noble concept of free speech usually as long as the person paying the lip service agrees with the free speech. But: say something the proponent of expressive freedom disagrees with and whammo! down comes the hammer of disapproval square on your sinning skull.

Of course, there is constraint on public utterance of free speech in every democratic constitution. One may not scream FIRE! in a full theater. But shall we fill the scrolls of rectitude with long lists of what is and what is not permissible, thus ensuring the happiness of litigious persons and the wealth of their lawyers? Or shall we tiptoe gingerly through the razor-like coral shoals of questionable speech and get by day-by-day, trying to be civil to our fellow beings and, when we have not been, correcting ourselves? The preferred answer across most of our crazy planet these days appears to be: no, let's not be logical or civil or permit corrective remorse. Let's choose lethal hysteria and run breathless riot in the streets, spraying saliva and bullets every-which-way.

Apparently Afro-Americans also want whites to apologize for 200 hundred years of slavery. Did you observe that march in Britain this spring where the Archbishop of Canterbury apologized to all black persons who ever lived for slavery? The pro-apologists’ view states that history is kindergarten; all one must do to make up for past horrors is give the bruised world a big, wet, sloppy kiss and a warm mommy hug and, presto! everything baaaaaaaad will be all good.

No, it won’t.

That is so stupid and childish a concept that it will probably be popular with the professionally downtrodden for the next millennium. But nevertheless it is false. It is baloney. I am NOT responsible for slavery and what one must say to history’s losers is: you lost, we won. But let’s march on together by co-operating instead of continuing to blubber at the side of the road and shout out hoarse enticement to eternal hatred.

This is the new age of whining victimhood in which we live and last week, when Don Imus was sacrificed to the voodoo fires of black yahooism, we saw a perfect example of our age, during which, above the soft winds of admittedly creeping progress, above the zephyrs and freshets of new tolerant air, there will always rise, to drown co-operative voices, the deafening chorus of the aggrieved, weeping and moaning that they have been hard done by and so the world should come to a loud, screaming stop. Alas, our spinning spheroid seldom does. And it would be kinky to think it might.

EMAILS & LETTERS

Email from a British reader

June 28, 2007

Dear Mr. Casselman,

Thank you for your wonderful web pages. I’ve found them very interesting and educational having been pointed to them by my wife who is a Canadian from the Toronto area. She is always pointing out to me the myriad ways as an Englishman I manage to insult people (whether taught to me or just through ignorance). So your website has been a great help in my continuing re-education and also a cracking good read. Hopefully it will help me avoid insulting any of your fellow citizens on a trip to the Maritime Provinces I will be making soon.

I just noticed a small mistake though. In your article on ‘Nappy Head’ you say, “Apparently Afro-Americans also want whites to apologize for 200 hundred years of slavery.”

Surely this is twenty thousand years. (Sorry, I majored in Math(s) and all the pedantry that involves). Now that would be even more shameful than it is already. I think you were referring to the 200 year anniversary of the British parliament’s abolition of the transatlantic slave trade in 1807. This was not however the end of slavery (especially not in the States, just ask Harriet Tubman), but as Churchill might have said, was the end of the beginning.

Kind Regards,

Mike Perrin