The N-Word's Origin

The N-Word’s Origin Around 1442, the Spanish first arrived in Southern Africa while trying to find a sea route to India. The term negro, literally meaning “black”, was used by the Spanish as a simple description to refer to the people that they encountered. Negro dnotes “black” in Spanish, derived from the Latin word niger, meaning black. “Negro” was also used of the peoples of West Africa in old maps labelled Negroland, an area stretching along the Niger River. From the 18th century to the late 1960s, negro was considered to be the proper term for people of black African descent. The N-Word Usage The word negro was adopted from Spanish and first recorded from the mid 16th century. It remained the standard term throughout the 17th-19th centuries and was used by prominent black American campaigners such as W.E.B DuBois and Booker T. Washington in the early 20th century. Since the Black Power movement of the 1960s, however, when the term black was favoured as the term to express racial pride, Negro has dropped out of favour and now seems out of date or even offensive in both British and US English.

The N-Word in History …show more content…
The first usage on American soil cannot be set in stone, but it is believed to have of first been used in John Rolfe’s 1619 diary, when he was noting the arrival of the first African slaves on American soil. From the early 1600s to late 1960s, negro/nigger was used to refer to black Africans’ negative history (referring to the enslavement, segregation, and discrimination over centuries and decades.). However, during the 1950s and 1960s, some African American leaders objected to the word negro because they associated it with the long history of slavery, segregation, and