Though most people seldom if ever process the socio-economic class implications of how they see race, once we stop and really ponder it, it is hard to deny the relationship. The pejorative phrase, “poor white trash” immediately conjoins the two so the need to unpack the phrase probably would feel like overkill. However, when we look at the word “nigger” the undertones of its meaning are vast if not duplicitous. Nigger originally meant property, which morphed into a problem for those who either had to compete against the so-called Negroes attempting to define themselves, or those who no longer had legally sanctioned control over niggers-as-property that of course were once viewed as second class if not the bona fide underclass; criminal (though as newly liberated without resources what were their options), and less than human (legally 3/5 of a person). While all of these aren’t always consciously in a person’s mind when they say or think “nigger,” subconsciously perhaps they are. At least, that is what I’ve discovered from teaching “The Philosophy of W.E.B. DuBois,” African American Culture from 1865 to the Present” and “Examining Diversity through Film” at a predominately white university, working around the country with Dr. Eddie Moore Jr. presenting The Nigger Word” workshops, and reading a plethora of scholarship on the topic. Has that definition changed? I would make the argument that is hasn’t. Subtlety being what it is, or isn’t, I would make the argument that a wealthy, well educated Black person who is bold enough to have been successful in America, could still be seen as a nigger subconsciously by Blacks suffering from self-hatred/internalized oppression. As well, many non-Blacks who think they are of a liberal mindset when it comes to race struggle with seeing once so-called Negroes as anything other than niggers the moment a Black person threatens to adversely affect their reality. This isn’t a reaction racially restricted to non-Blacks ways of seeing. Any seeming oppressive gesture by a White person, for many Blacks, is conveniently considered Cracker-like (as in the overseer cracking his whip over the back of a slave).
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