What Is a "White Nigger" Anyway?
There has been a more or less considerable furor over Sen. Robert Byrd's (D-WV)
usage of the term "white nigger."
Everyone seems to think that they know what this means. But do they? Before
one can decide if the words are offensive, one must first know what they mean.
Mary Mostert, at Banner of Liberty, thinks Byrd meant "poor white trash"
in general, and Bill Clinton in particular. However, this has a somewhat dubious
fit to the context. I should like to explore an alternative possibility.
Classificatory terminology has to do with identifying social groups. In the
early South, biological race tended to be interlinked with servile status, occupation,
education and social class. The word "nigger" per se probably meant
a member of a group of rural field slaves, of comparatively pure African descent
and recent arrival, living on a large plantation. Interestingly, William Byrd
of Westover, in the early eighteenth century, does not refer very much to "negroes"
or anything else that one might recognize as a racial term. He refers, over
and over again, to "my people," a reflection of his patriarchal orientation.(1)
The invention of the word "nigger" probably had to wait for the growth
of the lower South, with its big cities (starting with Charleston, South Carolina,
and running out to New Orleans), and its comparatively rentier-like slaveholders.
By the time Fanny Kemble, the wife of an archetypal absentee landlord, visited
Georgia, in 1838-39, the word was apparently in common use. (2)
The term "white nigger" is a marking, or qualification, of "nigger,"
a means of describing a group which resembles "niggers" in some respects
but not in others. There seem to be two major bodies of early usage: 1) a white
person who is conspicuously exploited. and 2) a member of the concubine class,
intermediate between black and white.(3) This latter usage is characteristic
of the slaveholding plantation regions, and is probably not directly relevant
to West Virginia.
To account for what a West Virginian means by "white nigger," one
should look at usage in economically similar regions. For example, in Edward
Eggleston's late nineteenth century The Hoosier Schoolmaster (chapter
four: "Spelling Down the Master") we find: "But to their surprise
'ole Miss Meanses' white nigger,' as some of them called her in allusion to
her slavish life, spelled these great words with as perfect ease as the master."
The setting is a public spelling competition, in which Hannah, the put-upon
"bond-girl" finds herself more or less involuntarily obliged to demonstrate
her worth, to the mixed admiration and scandal of the neighborhood. George Elliott
Clarke has pointed out a body of rather less amiable usages, in the works of
early-nineteenth century Nova Scotian writer Thomas Chander Haliburton. Haliburton
was writing in a Fitzhughian vein, and his story "The White Nigger"
is about the auctioning off by the parish overseers of aged paupers and orphans
to the lowest bidder. These are collectively usages deriving from predominantly
white regions, as distinct from the slave-oriented south. Most recently, I have
found the usage "white nigger" used as a self description by "B.
Lokey" an anti-abortion activist born circa 1940. (4)
West Virginia is something like 95 percent white, and and only 3.2 percent black
(2000). If the Ohio valley and the cosmopolitan college towns were left out,
the percentage of whites would probably be considerably higher. I should add,
however, noting the work of Duke Talbott, that a lot of people have escaped
slave ancestors a long way back, the same as they have Native American ancestors
a long way back. Among other things, the frontier was about escaping from the
ownership of the tidewater aristocracy. The odd escaped slave got absorbed.
West Virginia not like Mississippi, where Trent Lott's constituents are the
declining white 61 percent, trying to stay on top of the growing nonwhite 39
percent.
Trent Lott has the best of reasons to do a bit of discreet race-baiting, but
Robert Byrd does not have anything resembling a motive. I very much doubt whether
senators have anything resembling racial prejudice in the ordinary sense of
the word. They have one overriding prejudice -- an odd insistence on being reelected.
Given the right circumstances, Strom Thurmond is capable of saying both "I
have a dream..." and "we shall overcome." The balance of probabilities
is that Senator Byrd was attempting to convey to blacks that they are not by
any means the only poor people, and to invite them to make common cause, rather
than becoming lost in racial separatism.
(1)William Byrd II of Westover, Secret Diary, entries for Dec. 31, 1710; Jan
[2, 6-7, 22-23], 1711; Feb [6-7], 1711; Dec 31, 1711;Jan [1, 15-18], 1712; may
22, 1712, reproduced in Baym et. al., Norton Anthology of American Literature,
2nd ed., Vol 1, W. W. Norton, New York, 1985 This does not seem to be available
on the web, save in odd fragments. It was originally written in cipher, and
not decrypted and published until 1941. For available online information, see:
http://www.tncc.cc.va.us/faculty/longt/byrd/William_Byrd_II_of_Westover_Homepage.htm.
(2) Frances Anne Kemble, Journal of a Residence on a a Georgian Plantation, 1838-1839 (1863), ed. John A. Scott, 1961 (Knopf), 1975 (New American Library).
(3) See: Lawrence R. Tenzer, "Stand up and Sound off!!" White
Slaves, Chapter Three of "The Forgotten Cause of the Civil War:
A New Look at the Slavery Issue," October/November 2001. William Wells
Brown [1815-1884], Clotelle (1864) In this novel , the term "white
nigger" is used to describe the daughter of generations of slave concubines,
i.e.. someone like Sally Hemmings. One of the things we lose sight of about
famous authors such as Harriet Beecher Stowe is that they do not exist in a
vacuum. There are always a lot of other people at the same time, working along
the same lines. The heroine, Clotelle, is the offspring of a "quadroon
woman," upwards of three-quarters white, and a slaveholder. She is described
as being so light-skinned as to be instantly recognizable as her father's daughter.
Interestingly, in chapter 13, the wicked stepmother character (more precisely
the stepmother's mother) "manufactures" five-year-old Clotelle as
a "nigger" by shaving her head (the traditional punishment of prostitutes),
and then forcing her to become drastically sunburned, i.e.. to become a "redneck."
(http://xroads.virginia.edu/ http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/wwbrown/cover.html;
http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/wwbrown/ch05.html; http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/wwbrown/ch13.html)