Is this racist? Update in OP

[jln]

The term "motherfucker"?  I'm curious what CEP thinks.

Update:  I wanted to hear opinions before I explained.  Here's the explanation...

Someone said that they liked a shirt that had the term "motherfucker" on it. Someone else suggested that it's a racist word because it was used during the slave era. Apparently it refers back to the slave trade practice of forcing black people to breed.  This is via oral history and not something that comes up when you google the origin.  

So, if it was in fact used during the slave era, is it racist?  

[Velar Fricative]

No......

Oh man, I will feel terrible if I'm wrong.

[laurenpetro]

I hope not. I use that all the time.

[wambam]

No...?

What?

[downtoearth]

Racist? No. It's just bad, but not racist.

[daisyn]

No but it is a bad word

[laurenpetro]

This is the one swear word my mom wouldn't let me say in front of her. I made that mistake once. I'm still shocked I survived the death stare.

[smock]

I'm trying to figure out HOW it could be racist, and I'm coming up blank.

[itsme]

I need a backstory. I am not seeing how that is racist.

[josieposy]

Oh crap now someone is gonna come in here and tell us all why we shouldn't say it.

Motherf....

[StrawberryBlondie]

I vote no.

[Skyesthelimit1212]

I hope not or James Lipton will never be able to ask another actor what their favorite curse word is.

Chris Rock
"My grandfather said 'motherfucker,' my father said 'motherfucker,' I say 'motherfucker,' and someday my daughters will say 'motherfucker.

[vanillacourage]

I feel like asking if it's racist is in fact racist. Like, does someone think incest is more prevalent among a certain demographic?

[Michelle]

No motherfucker, it's not.

[emilyj]

No.

Why would that question need to be asked? What's the backstory?

[wawa]

The only race based associations for motherfucker I can come up with are based on dominos and Samuel L. Jackson. But I can't figure out how exactly that would make the term racist. I am curious to hear the explanation.

[erbear]

Dec 22, 2015 13:58:01 GMT -5 laurenpetro said:

This is the one swear word my mom wouldn't let me say in front of her. I made that mistake once. I'm still shocked I survived the death stare.

Same. She got mad when my smartass sister then started saying, "like a mother" and I remember it taking me forever to figure out why that was so bad.

[Velar Fricative]

[Elsa]

Listen motherfucker, you can pry that word out of my cold, dead, possibly racist hands.

[Vespasia]

Dec 22, 2015 13:58:01 GMT -5 laurenpetro said:

This is the one swear word my mom wouldn't let me say in front of her. I made that mistake once. I'm still shocked I survived the death stare.

My mom wouldn't let us call her mother because she said it sounded like half a word. 

[jln]

Update in OP

[litebright]

So, interestingly, there are not many reputable sources when you google "etiology of motherfucker," LOL.

However, apparently there is a book called The F-Word on the history of the word fuck and its variations, which is cited multiple times on this site: english.stackexchange.com/questions/27308/what-is-the-origin-and-history-of-the-word-motherf-er

In this context, I particularly appreciate this comment: "To appreciate the thrust of the insult motherfucker doesn't require knowledge of the technology, or culture, or local history of any particular milieu; the logic behind it is virtually ageless, because it is undergirded by a fundamental evolutionary truth, instinctually apparent to every creature since sex first came about — and that truth is that a mother's fidelity is dear, to both her and her partner, and it is mostly unfavorable circumstances that serve to erode it."

Someone on that site mentions that a Black Panther author, Bobby Seale, said in his book in 1970 that motherfucker was a term used in the context of slavery and that "society doesn't want to face this fact", but TBH it looks like the term or a variation of it dates way, way back before modern slavery and outside of that context, so I don't know how well grounded that claim is.

Another comment, based on The F-Word book: Unfortunately, some of the etymologies that are given here are nonsensical, since as The F-Word clearly notes, the word fuck itself was not attested until the end of the 15th century. It clearly came into its own as a vulgar word in the 16th and 17th centuries, replacing the word swife. However, given the puritanical nature of publication in those days, was not recorded in a English dictionary till 1775, and only till 1891 were more than a couple of words and a few quotations jotted down about it, in John Farmer's and W.e. Henley's Dictionary of Slang and Its Analogues.

You see, that was the nature of vulgarities back then; they might prosper in spoken English but would be scarcely written down until the late 19th centuries. [The book tells an amusing anecdote of a defendant rebutting a slander judgment against him by claiming as late as 1846 that fuck, the word he slandered a woman with, was not an English word.] Thus, we cannot be sure that motherfucker, borne of fuck was not actually attested in speech by the dates we have first written attestation, and sadly enough they are the only products amenable to historical investigation.

In any case, here are the first few citations given for the earliest known definition, a despicable or contemptible person:

1918 Letter in Journal of American History LXXXI 1585: Your low-down Mother Fuckers can put a gun in our hands but who is able to take it out? [1918 in H. De Witt Bawdy Barrack-Room Ballads: The little red run he grew and grew/fucked his mother and sister too.] 1928 C. McKay Banjo 229: I've been made a fool of by many a skirt, but its the first time a mother-plugger done got me like this.
The word motherfucker then really took off in the Army in World Wars, giving the second sense, a fellow; a person; an admire person; a formidable person:

1958 Stack a Lee (typescript, Kinsey Institute) 1: He...said who put the hole in this motherfucker's head/Who could the murderer of this poor man 1964 R.D Abrahams Deep down in Jungle (Appendix II) 261: One of the best things which can be said of a man is that he is a "mean motherfucker" or a "tough motherfucker", but to call him just a "mother-fucker" is to invite reprisal.
And after the Wars, and the return of the troops, I'm supposing it exploded onto the popular consciousness as result of vanishing indecency standards in the '60s, and that was that.

Someone else cites this source: According to Jim Dawson's "The Compleat Motherfucker: A History of the Mother of All Dirty Words", page 14

Possibly the earliest literary use of the term motherfucker was in the Ionic poetry of Hipponax, who accused a sculptor who had insulted him of being a metrokoites.(which was also around 5 BC)

Dawson mentions Marquis de Sade (1740 – 1814) arrested for using the phrase and the first written occurrence in a Texas Court of Appeals in 1890.

[wambam]

Lots of words were used in the slave era...?

[jln]

Dec 22, 2015 15:14:33 GMT -5 wambam said:

Lots of words were used in the slave era...?

This was my thinking prior to hearing this.  

I would like to be sensitive to those that would see this as derogatory towards people of color.  I've just never heard that this term could be considered racist.  

[Velar Fricative]

There is no evidence this term has origins or was heavily used during the slave era in a derogatory way towards slaves. Anything is possible, but I would not consider this a racist term until more evidence is shown that ties it more closely to serious use against slaves during that era.

[pixy0stix]

I always thought it referred to hillbillies of the Uncle Grandpa variety.

[cookiemdough]

Yes it is racist. I can't believe you all didn't know this!!!










Kidding lol