"Nigger" is an insult because the meaning is basically "Black person, which is inherently a bad thing."
Well, technically... "nigger" used to have a meaning, before it got wiped out of collective consciousness. It was the black equivalent of "white trash". So, basically "black trash". (Same number of syllables, too.) A rural, backward, ignorant, barbarous, uncivilized ... hick, essentially. Someone who was of no value to any civilized society, and who could be of no value because they'd resist any attempt to make them have value, and be proud of doing so. A totally illegible person, to misuse a term from "Seeing Like A State".
And the part that made it so bad was that when it was used on someone like, say, Booker T. Washington, it implied that no matter how educated and successful he was, none of that mattered. IIRC, there was actually a (racist, obviously) saying, "scratch a black man and you'll find a nigger", which implied that all accomplishments were skin deep, and that at the slightest provocation, a modern educated black person would revert to "jungle savagery" (or however it would have been phrased back then). Which in turn was partly why the black intelligentsia of the time were so careful about their dignity and behavior.
The linguistic fate of the word has a sort of inverted parallel in the fate of "arse", the 4-letter word that was so filthy that we in America only remember the animal sound-alike "ass", and even now primarily associate the sound-alike with the forbidden term. (Whereas "cunt" used to have an animal sound-alike "coney", but for some reason we completely lost the sound-alike there.)
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Well, technically... "nigger" used to have a meaning, before it got wiped out of collective consciousness. It was the black equivalent of "white trash". So, basically "black trash". (Same number of syllables, too.) A rural, backward, ignorant, barbarous, uncivilized ... hick, essentially. Someone who was of no value to any civilized society, and who could be of no value because they'd resist any attempt to make them have value, and be proud of doing so. A totally illegible person, to misuse a term from "Seeing Like A State".
And the part that made it so bad was that when it was used on someone like, say, Booker T. Washington, it implied that no matter how educated and successful he was, none of that mattered. IIRC, there was actually a (racist, obviously) saying, "scratch a black man and you'll find a nigger", which implied that all accomplishments were skin deep, and that at the slightest provocation, a modern educated black person would revert to "jungle savagery" (or however it would have been phrased back then). Which in turn was partly why the black intelligentsia of the time were so careful about their dignity and behavior.
The linguistic fate of the word has a sort of inverted parallel in the fate of "arse", the 4-letter word that was so filthy that we in America only remember the animal sound-alike "ass", and even now primarily associate the sound-alike with the forbidden term. (Whereas "cunt" used to have an animal sound-alike "coney", but for some reason we completely lost the sound-alike there.)
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