'Niggerhead' Revisited

There is no escaping history. As Andrew Sullivan put it, "we asked for it," given our ugly racial past. The brouhaha over the name of Rick Perry's hunting camp (formerly called "Niggerhead") in West Texas is prompting some interesting discussions across the web. Here are some observations from two of Sullivan's readers:

One reader:

"When I was growing up in southern Mississippi in the 1950s, most grocery stores carried Niggerhead brand shrimp, which was canned in southern Louisiana. The label featured a drawing of a old black man with a lined face and nappy hair."

Another:

"In my twenties, while living in the Pacific NW in the early '90s, I worked as a deckhand on a tugboat, a salmon tender (off the coast of BC) and an intercoastal freighter in the north Pacific and Bering Sea. The term "niggerhead" was used frequently by some of the older salmon fishermen to refer to the main hydraulic windlasses on the decks of fishing vessels, which were often coated in a thick black marine-grade paint. I cringed when I heard the term. It seemed such a discordant and stupid thing to hear on lonely pitching waters or in the fog or rain or in the unusual light found only at sea - far from the mainland of the US, which I took to be the unhappy home of that term. But nautical terminology changes very slowly, and I realize now how intrinsic maritime trade was to the history of racial othering."

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