Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. used the word “Negro” more than once in his I Had a Dream Speech. Had he lived, MLK would be about 89 years old today. I wonder if he would have embraced the word “black,” and/or insisted on African American and denounced the word “Negro,” considering that in his time, ‘Negro’ was apparently not objectionable. Also not objectionable was Senator Harry Reid saying Barack Obama has “no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.” Reid, the pasty white man of an age when “Negro” was considered a polite way of describing a person with black skin, obviously thought it not desirable to have a “Negro” dialect, and obviously thought it also unusual for a “Negro” not to have a “Negro” dialect. Harry Reid didn’t lose his speakership, wasn’t sanctioned by the U.S. Senate and was re-elected even though he reminded us that Obama might have something “Negro” about him. How did we get to this place today, when a proper noun, “Negro” is considered a vile pejorative?
The word is believed to have evolved from “nigro,” spelled without vowels, N-G-R, pronounced “en-ger,” and found on ancient Egyptian temple walls in “sacred writings and hieroglyphs,” and has “divine origin and meaning,” referring to “God.” How did we get to this place today, when a proper noun, “Negro” is considered a vile pejorative?
Niger and Nigeria, undoubtedly, played a part in this history of the word. Niger is perhaps named after the Niger River, one of Africa’s longest. The river existed long before the country we know today, and became part of the Saharan trade routes. Why was the river named “Niger?” Seems no one knows. As a Nigerian (not Nigerien) essayist explains, neither country has a reason for it’s name. The river is not a “black” river.
The origin of the name Niger is unknown. It is often assumed that it derives from the Latin word for “black”, niger, but there is no evidence for this,…in any case the Niger is not a blackwater river. The name is thus thought to be indigenous, but no convincing origin has been found among the 30 languages of the Niger delta…
This lack of origin [Nigeria] is one that has led to a weakness of attitude, which translates to weakness of character…When we do not know the meaning of our name, we do not know why it was chosen, our case can then be only likened to getting a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it. Read more.
So, negro/nigro in particular would have been spelled like so: Ngr. So, it would not matter what vowel sounds
Fast forward to today and you see the descendants of those that created the actual word, despise it, banning it and going through a process of having a funeral for it. The term “ignorance” can not fully describe the actions taken by a people who have been stripped of their very dignity and divine wisdom. - Ernie A. Smith, M.D., Ph.D., Professor of Linguistics and Doctor of Internal Medicine. Read more here.were placed in between the letters, the word was the same…
In which classrooms are black children taught that whites are plenty smart enough to see the irony of blacks calling blacks Ngrs yet hating whites for using phrases like “The Negro?” That’s not a rhetorical question.
Which brings me to Cliven Bundy’s remarks this week, that will not be allowed to be merely “in-elegant” or “misspeaking,” as is always the excuse for shameless high-profile Liberals. Congresswoman Maxine Waters comes to mind, telling an oil executive that “this Liberal” would “be about socializing — basically — taking over and government running all of your companies.” That unconstitutional threat didn’t draw a peep from the main street media — a serious threat that to the liberty and welfare of people of all colors. She said it on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives.
Anyone out there upset about Cliven Bundy should think again.
Barack Obama calls some of us “bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them…” Ask blacks what they think their futures will be with 15 million illegals in the U.S.
The worst of Bundy’s press conference was the intimation that it could ever be better to be a “slave” than a free person, but if we are intellectually honest, we know from other comments he made, that he was talking about learning skills and supporting ones self as a free man or woman, and he came right out and said we “sure don’t want to go back” even to the time of the Watts riots when people felt “unhappy” and “thinking they don’t have freedom.”
“The Negro” and “picking cotton” are the quotes the main stream media jumped on — not much about “government subsidies,” or Bundy’s praise for the lifestyles of illegal Mexicans inside the U.S. Here’s a snippet. His full remarks are below.
I was in the Watts riot. I seen the beginning fire, I seen the last fire. What I seen in civil disturbance, is that people are not happy. People thinking they don’t have the freedom. They don’t have these things and they don’t have them.
We’ve progressed quite big since that day until now, and we sure don’t want to go back. We sure don’t want these colored people to have to go back to that time. We sure don’t want these Mexican people to go back to that point. And we can make a difference now by taking care of some of these bureaucracies and do it in a peaceful way.
Bundy ably made the point that all people will be better without government interference. He obviously has great empathy for blacks and Hispanics, but he’s an old-timey rancher, and yes, he is definitely in-elegant, but put Joe Biden in a tux or go ahead, just give him a microphone, and he’ll make Bundy sound like a Wall Street cattle trader living in a Central Park penthouse. You cannot seriously think Cliven Bundy condones slavery without a political agenda behind that belief.
A black Marine with the handle Charlie Delta defended Cliven:
…if you take the time to do your own research, you’ll find that his statements about some black Americans actually hold weight. He posed a hypothetical question. He said, “I wonder IF” … Hell, I’m black and I often wonder about the same about the decline of the black family. Bottom line is that we are all slaves in this waning republic, no matter our skin color. Mr. Bundy could have used any racial demographic as an example: Native Americans on reservations, whites in trailer parks, etc. He noticed the crippling effects of receiving government “assistance” and the long term result of accepting handouts. Read more at The Black Sphere
Each and every one of us has color to our skin, some more than others. Each of those colors make up an imperfect human being, some more imperfect than others. Give most of us some power and black, white, brown, red, or yellow turns ugly.
Consider those known as “Americo-Liberians.” By 1820-1822, before the Civil War, America was freeing African American slaves wanting to return to the homeland of their ancestors, and funding their voyage. From those 13,000 to 15,000 who went to the brave new world of Liberia to form the first Africa Republic, without any drama in telling the tale, the new Liberians from America set about keeping to their own superior society, and enslaving the black natives whom they considered inferior. Some of the indigenous peoples were also slavers. In fact, many of the first slavers, ever, were blacks. Imperfect persons having nothing to do with the color of their skin — just an historic fact. All skin colors have enslaved people.
The Americo-Liberian elite’s historical faults are sizeable: denying citizenship to indigenous Liberians until 1904, denying full voting rights until well into the 20th century; one-party oligarchic rule for 133 years; lack of property rights, and forced labor which “prompted a League of Nations investigation” and poor leadership focused more on nepotism and kleptocracy than producing wealth to develop the country. Source: The Grio
So Harry Reid is the recipient of the timely Cliven Bundy distraction, moving the conversation away from a lawless Bureau of Land Managment (BLM) scandal, which sent snipers and men with body shields to take on Bundy and his supporters, and herd cattle off the property with helicopters hovering right behind the cow’s rear-ends, and by the time it was over, some laid dead on the sand, and some under the sand. PETA didn’t care. The BLM didn’t care that Bundy’s cattle provides protein-rich dung to shuttle the dusty little shelled creatures across and through the desert brush.
Yes, Bundy broke the law, but some laws are both legal and unjust and we have only to think back to the civil rights battles to understand the truth of it. In fact, every government since Andrew Jackson has broken the promise to return the trust of the land back to the people.
Fine Bundy if it must be done, put liens on his property, and we’ll be waiting to see what Harry Reid and his son develops in the area near Bundy property.
The following the the full transcript of Bundy’s press conference.
CLIVEN BUNDY: I was in the Watts riot. I seen the beginning fire, I seen the last fire. What I seen in civil disturbance, is that people are not happy. People thinking they don’t have the freedom. They don’t have these things and they don’t have them.
We’ve progressed quite big since that day until now, and we sure don’t want to go back. We sure don’t want these colored people to have to go back to that time. We sure don’t want these Mexican people to go back to that point. And we can make a difference now by taking care of some of these bureaucracies and do it in a peaceful way.
Let me talk to you about the Mexicans. These are just things I know about them and the Negro. I want to tell you one more thing I know about the Negro. When I go through Las Vegas, north Las Vegas and I would see these little government houses and in front of that government house, the door was usually open and the older people and the kids, and there’s always at least a half-a-dozen people sitting on the porch. They didn’t have nothing to do. They didn’t have nothing for their kids to do. They didn’t have nothing for their young girls to do, and because they were basically on government subsidy, so now what do they do? They abort their young children, they put their young men in jail because they never learned how to pick cotton. And I’ve often wondered, are they better as slaves, pickin’ cotton and having a family life and doing things or are they better off under government subsidies?
They didn’t get more freedom. They got less freedom. They had less family life and their happiness, you can see in their faces, they have to step on that concrete sidewalk. They [inaudible] were probably going to church. So that’s all government. That’s not freedom.
Now let me talk about the Spanish people. You know I understand that they come over here against our Constitution, across our borders, but they’re here and they’re people and I’ve worked side-by-side with a lot of them. Don’t tell me they don’t work, and don’t tell me they don’t pay taxes, and don’t tell me they don’t have better family structures than most of us white people. When you see those Mexican families, their together, they picnic together, they’re spending their time together, and I’ll tell you, in my way of thinking, they are awful nice people, and we need to have those people join us and be with us. Not coming [through or to???] our party.
He said he would continue holding a daily news conference; on Saturday, it drew one reporter and one photographer, so Mr. Bundy used the time to officiate at what was in effect a town meeting with supporters, discussing, in a long, loping discourse, the prevalence of abortion, the abuses of welfare and his views on race. ~Adam Nagourney, New York Times
“I want to tell you one more thing I know about the Negro,” he said. Mr. Bundy recalled driving past a public-housing project in North Las Vegas, “and in front of that government house the door was usually open and the older people and the kids — and there is always at least a half a dozen people sitting on the porch — they didn’t have nothing to do. They didn’t have nothing for their kids to do. They didn’t have nothing for their young girls to do.
“And because they were basically on government subsidy, so now what do they do?” he asked. “They abort their young children, they put their young men in jail, because they never learned how to pick cotton. And I’ve often wondered, are they better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family life and doing things, or are they better off under government subsidy? They didn’t get no more freedom. They got less freedom.” ~
Cliven Bundy, according to the NYT
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