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Dr Stanford says white people cannot use the word because its origin in slavery hasn't been lost.
- The Concept of Race
- The Slave Trade
- The Shakespearean Treatment
- Race Might Not Be Real, Racism Is
Both examples might seem surprising to contemporary readers, but they serve to prove the historian Nell Irvin Painter’s reminder in The History of White People (2010) that “race is an idea, not a fact”. Middleton alone did not invent the idea of whiteness, but the fact that anyone could definitely be the author of such a phrase, one that seems so o...
There is little verisimilitude in describing anyone with either term, which explains their malleability over the centuries. How arbitrary is it to categorise Sicilians and Swedes as being white, or the Igbo and Maasai as both black? This kind of racial thinking developed as the direct result of the slave trade. Hall explains: “Whiteness is not only...
Consider the Dark Lady of Shakespeare’s sonnets. In sonnet 130, he says of his mysterious paramour that “her breasts are dun”; in sonnet 12, he references her “sable curls”; and in sonnet 127 he writes that “black wires grow on her head”. As is commonly understood, and taught, Shakespeare subverted the tradition exemplified by poets such as Petrarc...
Yet our particular criteria concerning how we think about race did develop, and it did so in service to colonialism and capitalism (and their handmaiden: slavery). Bolstered by a positivist language, the idea of race became so normalised that eventually the claim that anyone would have coined such an obvious phrase as “white people” would begin to ...
The earliest known use of the noun hilarity is in the mid 1500s. OED's earliest evidence for hilarity is from 1568, in the writing of Gilbert Skeyne, physician. hilarity is a borrowing from French.
Jun 30, 2018 · Old English brad "wide, not narrow," also "flat, open, extended," from Proto-Germanic *braidi- (source also of Old Frisian bred, Old Norse breiðr, Dutch breed, German breit, Gothic brouþs), which is of unknown origin.
Oct 25, 2016 · Its effect can be explosive and painful: Harvard University professor Randall Kennedy has traced the history of the N-word to understand the evolution of the infamous racial slur.
- PBS News Hour
- 9 min
Jun 4, 2020 · For much of human history, people viewed themselves as members of tribes or nations but had no notion of “race.” Today, science deems race biologically meaningless. Who invented race as we know it, and why?
Jun 21, 2014 · Ellah Allfrey looks at the evolution of the N-word from the mispronunciation of the Spanish "negro" through to its subsequent re-appropriation in rap and hip-hop culture.
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