'Mommy What Does Nigger Mean?' By Gloria Naylor

1243 Words3 Pages

When children of a certain ethnic group grow up, they often hear phrases or words that are used often by that specific group and they develop a definition of that word or phrase. The word is usually never used to hurt someone’s feelings or to put them down but instead used to greet one another or used to describe someone. That all changes when a person outside of the ethnic group uses the word or phrase. The meaning of it becomes totally different and can become hurtful. There’s a new meaning that’s different from the one that the child already had known and then it becomes a word that is hurtful and bad to them. This exact thing happened in the short story “Mommy, what does ‘Nigger’ mean?”, by Gloria Naylor. A young African American girl grew That changed when a white boy called her a ‘nigger’ and she knew that it wasn’t meant to sound like the way that she had heard it before but instead to hurt her. Naylor wrote “But I didn’t “hear” it until it was said by a small pair of lips that had already learned it could be a way to humiliate me” (346). Just like in the story I grew up with an African-American family and society and become to know words or phrases that when used within the group was completely acceptable but when used outside the group became offensive. The words or phrases that offend me are; the word ‘Nigger’, the phrase “All crimes are committed by an African American”, and the phrase “It’s because you’re I’m not a person’s property but a free person. The word also offends me because it makes me feel like my name that was given to me at birth is not being acknowledged by the person talking to me or that they don’t care enough to learn it so they just call me ‘nigger’ because it can be related to every black person and they feel like they can’t go wrong because it’s related to all black people regardless of their actual name. The word ‘nigger’ alone doesn’t offend me but instead when the way it is said is used to try and afflict pain upon me by making it direct and saying it in a harsh tone. For example, when someone says “You’re nothing but a stupid nigger” it makes me angry because it is used to hurt me and it makes the person saying it that they are above me in some way and that they are better than me because of the color of their skin. When the word is used around my community it is used to greet someone that it very close to that person and have a lot of memories and history together or used to describe someone but never in a way that can be hurtful or taken in the wrong

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