House Negro

House Negro (also house nigger) is a historical term for a house slave of African descent. It is also used as a pejorative term to compare a contemporary black person to such a slave.

The term "house negro" appears in print by 1807, in a report of the African Institution of London:

A wretched old woman came to me a few days ago, to tell me she was compelled to work in the field. She was a favourite house-negro in her former master's family, and had nursed one of his children. Being ordered to throw a mixture of gunpowder and salt-water on the mangled bodies of the negroes whipped in the market-place, she refused, and incurred the displeasure of her master; and her intellects have since been evidently disordered.

The variation "house nigger" is recalled in John G. Williams's The Ole Plantation, an 1895 manuscript which features "glimpses" of "old plantation life" with dialect and phonetic accent:

Wy you tink dat Mossa gwine hab dutty nigger in e great house to wait pun um? He ent ka ef feel nigger dutty, but house nigger hasser clean. Wy you fraid to put you foot pun de step to Mossa great house ef you ent hab on clean shut and you face wash.

Margaret Mitchell made use of the term in her famed 1936 Southern plantation fiction, Gone With the Wind:

Pork, the only trained house negro on the place, had general supervision over the other servants, but even he had grown slack and careless after several years of exposure to Gerald's happy-go-lucky mode of living.

African-American activist Malcolm X commented on the cultural connotations and consequences of the term in his 1963 speech "Message to the Grass Roots", wherein he explained that during slavery there were two types of slaves: "house Negroes" who worked in the master's house, and "field Negroes" who performed outdoor manual labor. He characterized the house Negro as having a better life than the field Negro, and thus being unwilling to leave the plantation and potentially more likely to support existing power structures that favored whites over blacks. Malcolm X identified with the field Negro.

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