pickaninnies

Pickaninny (also picaninny, piccaninny or pickinninie) is a pidgin word for a small child, possibly derived from the Portuguese ('boy, child, very small, tiny').

In North America, ''pickaninny'' is a racial slur for African American children. It can also refer to a derogatory caricature of a dark-skinned child of African descent.

Origins and usage

The origins of the word ''pickaninny'' are disputed; it may derive from the Portuguese term for a small child, . ''Pickaninny'' (along with its alternative spellings ''picaninny'' and ''piccaninny'') was used in the seventeenth century to mean any child of African descent. It aquired a pejorative connotation by the nineteenth century and was used for black children in the United States and Britain, as well as aboriginal children of the Americas, Australia, and New Zealand.

Pidgin languages

The term ''piccanin'', derived from the Portuguese , has along with several variants become widely used in pidgin languages, meaning 'small'. This term is common in the creole languages of the Caribbean, especially those which are English-based. In Jamaican Patois, the word has been shortened to the form or , which is used to describe a child regardless of racial origin, while in the English-based national creole language of Suriname, Sranang Tongo, has been borrowed as for 'small' and 'child'.

In the Pidgin English dialects of Sierra Leone, Ghana, Nigeria and Cameroon in western Africa, or ', or ' – also derived from Portuguese – is used to describe a child. It can be heard in songs by African popular musicians such as Fela Kuti's Afrobeat song "Teacher Don't Teach Me Nonsense" and Prince Nico Mbarga song "Sweet Mother". Both are from Nigeria.

The word is used in Tok Pisin, Solomon Pijin and Bislama (the English-based creole languages of Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands and Vanuatu, respectively) the word for 'child' or 'children'.

United States

Although the Oxford English Dictionary quotes an example from 1653 of the word ''pickaninny'' used to describe a child, it may also have been used in early African-American vernacular to indicate anything small, not necessarily a child. In a column in ''The Times'' of 1788, allegedly reporting a legal case in Philadelphia, a slave is charged with dishonestly handling goods he knows to be stolen and which he describes as insignificant, "only a piccaninny cork-screw and piccaninny knife – one cost six-pence and tudda a shilling". The anecdote goes on to make an anti-slavery moral however, when the black person challenges the whites for dishonestly handling stolen goods too – namely slaves – so it is perhaps more likely to be an invention than factual. The deliberate use of the word in this context however suggests it already had black-vernacular associations.

In the Southern United States, ''pickaninny'' was long used to refer to the children of African slaves or (later) of any dark-skinned African American. The term was used in 1831 in an anti-slavery tract "The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave, related by herself" published in Edinburgh, Scotland. The character of Topsy in Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1852 anti-slavery novel ''Uncle Tom's Cabin'' became the basis for the popular caricature of the pickaninny, described by scholar Debbie Olson as "a coon character ..untamed, genderless, with wide eyes, hair sticking up all around the child's head, and often 'stuffing their wide mouths with watermelon or chicken. According to historian Robin Bernstein:

''Pickaninny'' is now generally considered offensive in the U.S. In 1987, Governor Evan Mecham of Arizona defended his use of the word in an interview, claiming: "As I was a boy growing up, blacks themselves referred to their children as pickaninnies. That was never intended to be an ethnic slur to anybody."

Commonwealth countries

The term ''piccaninny'' was used in colonial Australia for an Aboriginal child and is still in use in some Indigenous Kriol languages. In 1826 an Englishman named Thomas Young was tried at the Old Bailey in London on a charge of enslaving and selling four Gabonese women known as "Nura, Piccaninni, Jumbo Jack and Prince Quarben". The word ''piccaninny'' (sometimes spelled ''picanninnie'') was also used in Australia during the 19th and 20th centuries. Its use is reflected in historic newspaper articles and numerous place names. Examples of the latter include Piccaninnie Ponds and Piccaninny Lake in South Australia, Piccaninny crater and Picaninny Creek in Western Australia and Picaninny Point in Tasmania.

The term was controversially used ("wide-grinning picaninnies") by the British Conservative politician Enoch Powell when he quoted a letter in his "Rivers of Blood" speech on 20 April 1968. Before becoming the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson wrote that "the Queen has come to love the Commonwealth, partly because it supplies her with regular cheering crowds of flag-waving piccaninnies." He later apologised for the article.

In popular culture

Literature

* 1911In the novel ''Peter and Wendy'' by J. M. Barrie, the Indians of Neverland are members of the Piccaninny tribe. Sarah Laskow describes them as "a blanket stand-in for 'others' of all stripes, from Aboriginal populations in Australia to descendants of slaves in the United States" who generally communicate in pidgin with lines such as "Ugh, ugh, wah!".
* 1936In Margaret Mitchell's best-selling epic ''Gone with the Wind'', the character Melanie Wilkes objects to her husband's intended move to New York City because it would mean that their son Beau would be educated alongside "Yankees" and "pickaninnies".

Television

* 2015Season 1 Episode 14 of '' Shark Tank Australia'' featured Piccaninny Tiny Tots which has since changed its name to Kakadu Tiny Tots.
* 2020Episode 8 (''Jig-A-Bobo'') of the HBO television series ''Lovecraft Country'' features a character chased by ''Topsy'' and ''Bopsy'', two ghoulish monsters depicted as "pickaninny" caricatures.

News

* 2002Boris Johnson referred to black people in Africa as "piccanninies" with "watermelon smiles" in a 2002 op-ed in ''The Daily Telegraph''. He went on to say, "No doubt the AK47s will fall silent, and the pangas will stop their hacking of human flesh, and the tribal warriors will all break out in watermelon smiles to see the big white chief touch down in his big white British taxpayer-funded bird."

Related terms

Cognates of the term appear in other languages and cultures, presumably also derived from the Portuguese word, and it is not controversial or derogatory in these contexts.

The term is found in Melanesian pidgin and creole languages such as Tok Pisin of Papua New Guinea or Bislama of Vanuatu, as the usual word for 'child' (of a person or animal); it may refer to children of any race. For example, Charles III used the term in a speech he gave in Tok Pisin during a formal event: he described himself as (i.e. the first child of the Queen).

In certain dialects of Caribbean English, the words ' and ' are used to refer to children. Also, in Nigerian as well as Cameroonian Pidgin English, the word is used to mean a child. And in Sierra Leone Krio the term refers to 'child' or 'children', while in Liberian English the term does likewise. In Chilapalapa, a pidgin language used in Southern Africa, the term used is . In Sranan Tongo and Ndyuka of Suriname the term may refer to 'children' as well as to 'small' or 'little'. Some of these words may be more directly related to the Portuguese than to .

See also

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References

Further reading

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External links

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Online exhibit of stereotypical portrayals of African Americans
Haverford College

{{African American caricatures and stereotypes

Anti-African and anti-black slurs
Fictional African-American people
Portuguese words and phrases
Black people in art
Stereotypes of African Americans