No Stupid Questions

Back from this rabbit hole and brought gifts:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigger

It's been in use since the 16th century by English speakers. Basically it was just an anglicization of the Spanish or Portuguese negro. At the time it was seen as neutral by white folk, but it's also always been tied to slavery, so definitely not neutral from the pov of the slaves.

So did its use imply a power imbalance? Yes. Did the white folk who used it early on know? Maybe..?

I guess it's similar to using "Indian" to describe New World Native peoples. It's always been tied to expansionism and genocide, but from the pov of the oppressor that connotation isn't readily recognized.

did they use the N word back then?

Of course they did. My understanding is that it was both a common-parlance word with no particular mal-intent, but also a pejorative, loaded word, going back to the very founding of slavery in terms of the Colonies.

As others have pointed out, the word goes back to ancient Latin. Forms of it were likely in use whenever Latin and Latin-based languages were commonly-used in the presence of darker-skinned peoples, similar to how others and other cultures might refer to lighter-skinned peoples, reddish-skinned peoples and tawny-skinned peoples. So, same idea, I believe-- a relatively innocent language descriptor at base, which could also be scaled up to a dog whistle, or even worse. There are a quite a few similar words when it comes to cultural and ethnic descriptors coming from the POV of outsiders.

The word you referring to is an anglicization of the Nigro Spanish word that just mean black, like the color, nothing to do with skin.

In my language we say "nero" for black... Indeed both are derived from latin

It's only later that the word got the bad connotation, due to slavery and such.

It's like if you asked when the word black was attacked to black people, in other words. So, probably, since day one?

Better ask when that word started being a bad word, which is probably in the last very few decades

By the way, that's true only in English, in most of other languages the "black" or "nigro" or "nero" doesn't carry the same connotation of that N word (is nigger really that difficult to say?)

When was it attached to black people?

The definition of the word (a lazy black person) explicitly is about the denegation of black people; so I would assume always.

Or what did they use before the N word? I can kinda get Mexicans using Negro for black coloring but it takes a different connotation across the border.

Technically I have none idea what Iam talking about....

I did find this

We have often been told by correspondents that at some time "removed" meant an ignorant or shiftless person of any race. We have no evidence in our files of citations (a citation being simply an example of an English word in context) that "removed" is used with such a meaning. If you have actual evidence of this, especially in print, we would be very glad to have you pass it along. Please remember that a dictionary cannot assign meanings to words; it can only record the meanings that people actually use. We do not believe that we would be doing anything positive about racism by removing the entries for "removed" and other offensive words from the dictionary.

https://americandialect.org/americandialectarchives/octxx97316.html

So I mean I guess theses some history but what exactly that is I don't know.

Leaving my ignorance up, .... Oops

Technically the word's definition is a "shiftless individual" which a bunch of racists seems to this was appropriate to call people they were enslaving. Scumbags.