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White nigger is a racially charged term, with somewhat different meanings in different parts of the English-speaking world.
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United States
White nigger was a derogatory and offensive term, dating from the nineteenth century, for a black person who deferred to white people or a white person who did menial work. It was later used as a slur against white activists involved in the civil rights movement such as James Groppi of Milwaukee.
The term "white niggers" was uttered twice by Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia in an interview on national television in 2001.
Canada
In another use of the term, Pierre Vallières's work White Niggers of America refers to French Canadians.
India
The White Nigger was a nickname given to the nineteenth-century English explorer Richard Burton by colleagues in the East India Company Army.
Northern Ireland
"White nigger" was a religious and ethnic slur used to refer to Irish Catholics, in the context of The Troubles in Northern Ireland. An example of this can be found in the Elvis Costello song "Oliver's Army", which contains the lyric: "Only takes one itchy trigger. One more widow, one less white nigger."
In May 2016, Gerry Adams, the Leader of Sinn Féin, was criticised after tweeting "Watching Django Unchained - A Ballymurphy Nigger!" Ballymurphy is an area of Belfast best known for an eponymous massacre. Adams deleted the tweet, and subsequently tweeted "[Anyone] who saw Django would know my tweets & N-word were ironic. Nationalists in [the North] were treated like African Americans."
United States
The term was applied to Irish immigrants to the United States and their descendants. The Irish were also nicknamed "Negroes turned inside-out", while African Americans would be described as "smoked Irish".
The status of the Irish became a topic of dark humour within the slave community of the United States. An anonymous quip attributed to an African-American said "My master is a great tyrant, he treats me like a common Irishman." The White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) community within the United States believed that miscegenation would begin with the Irish and African-Americans, and in the 1850 United States Census, the term "mulatto" appeared for the first time to refer to mixed-race marriages between African-Americans and Irish. Despite WASP fears of an "alliance of the oppressed", most Irish-Americans supported slavery and refused to support the abolitionist movement.