AN ESSAY ON
WHAT THEY CALL US
by
Marcus McGee
* * * * *
PUBLISHED BY:
An Essay On What They Call Us
Copyright © 2011 by Marcus McGee
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ISBN - 978-1-4524-5322-4
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What They Call Us
I was six years old, in the first grade. My family was living in Madrid. It must have been November, because I remember the skies being dark, threatening rain, as the school day ended. Carl was my best friend, an American. His parents had sent a note through him to my parents, inviting me to come over after school that day. It was a Friday afternoon. Since he didn’t live far away, we walked to his house, excited for this opportunity to have a one-on-one visit after school.
We talked all along the way, planning what we would do, about his toys and what games we would play. And then we came to his front door. As Carl turned the knob, the door was yanked open by what I thought was the tallest, meanest man I had ever seen, and he was scowling directly toward me.
“He’s a nigger!” he screamed toward his frightened, startled son. “You brought a gaddammed nigger to my house! He’s not coming in here!”
And so herding his son past me into the door, he looked down at me.
“Go away, little Nigger!” he sneered and slammed the door.
I was unprepared for it, but it was a defining moment in my life, a wound still tender to the touch of memory. I didn’t even know what a nigger was, but I knew it had to be something bad, something undesirable, something less than human. I stood there in shock, numbed and ashamed at the realization that I was something dirty and unworthy. Through the door I saw Carl’s dog in the house. The dog was allowed in, but I wasn’t, the reason being because I was that name he called me, whatever it meant. It was the first time I had ever heard the word in my life.
I walked away from the door, hurt and crying, traumatized by such meanness from an adult, who was the father of my best friend. I was six, and I had walked there with Carl, who knew the way to his house. But I had no idea how to get back to where I lived. By that time, it had started to rain, so I stood under a nearby carport for shelter.
I must have stood there for two hours, though it seemed like longer. The man’s angry voice and that word burned into my soul, redefining who and what I was. Notwithstanding, I survived the ordeal and life went by so that as I sit here, many years later, I am able to contemplate that memory and finally undo the damage done that day.
According to several dictionary definitions, the word Nigger is the most offensive word in the English language. Over time and the evolution of American idiom, the word has lost some of its sting, but to me and to those who have had similar or worse experiences, Nigger is much more than a word. It encompasses an ugly, hateful, centuries-old history. It seeks to redefine, dehumanize, limit and degrade individuals and an entire legacy.
Words are powerful. Words can create an institution, or a movement. In the denotative sense, they define us, while in the connotative sense, they stigmatize us. For that reason, we should be aptly guarded about what we allow anyone to call us, and we should be even more discriminate about what we call ourselves and each other. The real questions: who and what are we? Who do we allow to define us? What do we call ourselves? And why is this important? The answers are in history.
The Beginning
Throughout time, regardless of genealogy or culture, humans have found strength in clans, tribes, groups, societies, empires and nations. By combining their numbers, resources, talents, ideas and martial inclinations, the stronger, more resourceful, better disciplined and aggressive factions have been able to dominate their less organized and less aggressive neighbors. This tendency is innately human, played out from Nimrod to present on every peopled continent of the Earth.
The aggressors named themselves, their cities, nations and dynasties, because those who dominated owned the narrative and history. Those who controlled the narrative controlled the people. They also named and defined what they had conquered. In many cases, the conquered were called slaves.
Slavery was endemic to the Old World, where the conquered were subject to their victors. But the nature of slavery changed in Africa during the late 1400s, due to a partnership between two players. The Portuguese, who had established trading posts all along the Atlantic coast of Africa, then began supplying tens of thousands of slaves to Muslim merchants for sale in the Islamic Empire, and thus was the beginning of the commercial slave trade.
The biggest African slave suppliers, those who sold humans commercially, were the kingdoms of the Kongo and Angola. Benin and other African empires were also complicit in this immoral exploitation, but for many nations and peoples, it was a holocaust of staggering proportions. By some estimates, the total human loss to Africa over the four centuries of the transatlantic slave trade ranges from 30 million to 200 million persons.
Some went to the Islamic empire, where the men were required to be castrated and women were lawfully subject to the carnal desires of their owners. Others went to Europe for lifelong servitude or to the West Indies for seasoning. The most unfortunate went to the Caribbean islands, where they were literally worked to death in three to five years, due to the harsh conditions at sugarcane plantations.
A good many however, were shipped to the British colonies in the New World, a place that would become the United States of America. Ironically, the first African slaves arrived in 1526 (in what is now South Carolina), but they did not remain slaves for long. They revolted and fled the colony, seeking refuge and freedom among Native Americans.
One hundred fifty years later, South Carolina, a colony principally involved in exporting Native Americans as slaves to the West Indies, became involved in the import of Africans to the colonies to work in tobacco fields. Virginia and other southern states quickly followed suit so that by the early 1700s, over 700,000 African slaves had been imported, and by 1860, the U.S. Census counted the slave population at over four million.
And when in 1865 the Emancipation Proclamation liberated these “Africans,” who after living in America for more than two hundred years were not exactly Africans anymore, the questions became: what are these people? Are they still Africans? What do we do with them? How do we protect the things we love and have become accustomed to from them? And finally, what do we call them?
After all, many had become married to or had otherwise mixed blood with Native Americans, and some were the direct descendants of white men through consensual and non-consensual interracial unions. Abolitionist, writer and orator Fredrick Douglass suspected that “my master was my father,” while most historians presently accept that Thomas Jefferson, the third President of the United States, fathered six children by Sally Hemings, the Colored half-sister of Jefferson’s wife, Martha. At that time, the race of the mother determined what the child was called. Thus Fredrick Douglass was black, or a Negro, James Madison Hemings, the President’s son, was a Negro, and Walter Francis Whit
e was a Negro.
According to a Virginia law in 1792, any person with one-fourth or more African ancestry was considered a mulatto. An 1866 law decreed that every person having one-fourth or more African blood was to be deemed a “colored” person, and every person not a “colored” person having one-fourth or more Indian blood was to be deemed an Indian. A 1910 law reduced to one-sixteenth the minimum of African ancestry for “colored” persons.
But Sally Hemings was at least a mulatto, half-Negro, who bore children by a white man, making her children only one-quarter Negro, if that much. Sally’s mother, Betty, is described in 1847 by former Monticello