Sand slander

Insults, imprecations, and slurs arise from a variety of dank basements. Racial, cultural, or national, they focus on stabbing at the underbelly of those chosen as disliked.

There is (or was) the obvious, Yid, from the word Yiddish for Jews to the more obscure, wop for Italians. Both are now thankfully out of use, even in jargon.

But what, I wondered for a long time, was a wop? What made this thudding sound suitable to Italian immigrants in the first half of America’s twentieth century?

The answer is simple. Or is it?

Revisionists have a more didactic theory. The explanation for wop as meaning “without papers,” they point out, appeared only in the 1960s. A more plausible theory, they continue, is that the Italo-Iberian slang for a dapper man, guapo, with its pronounced “w” (for “u”) and “p” sounds, was bastardized into wop when it collided with American English. Perhaps.

Spic, the longtime pejorative for illegal Mexican immigrants, is more straightforward. Splice and dice the word Hispanic, and what do you get?

This leads me to something newer, though just as dark, albeit vividly so.

An Oxford-trained acquaintance who lives and works in the rich commercial land Dubai has become refers to the people of that region, those from the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, as sand niggers. The slur is not new, and he utters it almost casually.

Do not recoil.

Mine is a language probe, no insult-spreading intended. Words are alive but sometimes require heavy petting to awaken.

Nigger is a slur known to all, one now banned in American speech and excised from texts — even if part of direct quotes. Derivatives, for example including the tonally apt “niggardly” to mean stingy behavior, have also been erased. This allegedly righteous censorship means whole chunks of speech vanish and few get to the root of — to borrow from Joseph Conrad — the horror (it also and ironically means that the Conrad novel “The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ ”is now largely unavailable in U.S. bookstores. Similarly exiled is Randy Newman’s supremely ironic 1974 ballad “Rednecks,” which uses nigger to mock the ample hypocrisies of the allegedly tolerant, colorblind  American North. A hit fifty years ago, no mainstream radio station will touch it now.

Before going any further, some basic context is in order.

The word niger means black in Latin, and therein is its most rudimentary linguistic source — though there is no evidence it was applied as a racial pejorative, and two modern states, Niger and Nigeria, have no quarrel with the word in and of itself. But the French word for black, noir, would later become a colonial staple with cultural consequences that would extend well beyond the Africa then owned by Belgium and France. A négresse denoted a black woman, and the word, with its exotic lilt, became fashionable in French literature. The French usages collided with English and American slang to musically spawn nigger, since all that is offensive begs its own pay-attention music. Hate is a song. Sometimes many songs.

“Sand niggers” is interesting because it is relatively new and in spoken contexts reflects a warped form of envy.

Who are sand niggers, aside from those who possess a specific, desert-rich geography?

In the English language, they are the upper-crust caste of people, many of them sheiks and princes, who, by dint of accident only, sit atop oil riches. The implication is that they did nothing to obtain their wealth and are estranged from the West’s library of cultural heritage. Worse still, they are non-Christian, which makes them low-lifes, hence exotic sand and nigger combined.

The elite of petroleum-rich states and their partners appear to literally have been lucked into boundless wealth, which for some in the West is intolerable, a violation of basic socio-economic and religious tenets. You work to become rich, do you not?

No, not really, not if you include colonial plundering. But let us set history aside for an instant.

What is most characteristic of the sand nigger epithet is how it so loosely veils envy.

Wouldn’t we all desire to have instant riches? Wouldn’t we all want to reside on land beneath which sits caves of gold or natural gas or rare earth, the rubric for the unusual metals essential to the making of chips for phones, land on which Chinese neo-colonialists have set up shop in many parts of Africa? China-hating, too, is not merely a slant-eyes cultural exercise these days.

Envy is the word.

Say it loud and say it clear: ENVY.

Had England managed to hold onto the sprawling acreage of Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, the Emirates (the list is a long one), there would be no wealthy sand niggers, only British colonialists, plunderers by need and nature. All would be well because the “right” people controlled fertile oil lands. But the wrongs gained independence, installed or perpetuated sultanates and monarchies, and, well, now look.

Sand niggers rule.

And those calling them down insultingly are often subjects of the diminished crown. Please, pray tell, what does cancer-stricken King Charles own?

So then, this is not a ditty about raw hate but about raw envy.

Hate speech is directed toward haves who have without right or those who seek to have but should not have — read immigrants of all stripes.

It is ancient.

It is vulgar.

It is central to the least agreeable part of the human spirit, the part that cannot bear sharing, whether a man, a woman, or a plate of food.

As for the sand niggers, they ignore it all, or seem to. They travel to London, shed traditional dress, and wear suits or hoodies. They know how the game is played. They are aware of the dislike whispered in their direction.

Which they place under a bell jar while they go about making and spending money and purchasing what can seem at times like whole nations. How they treat women at home is their business, not London’s or Washington’s.

If one side monopolized Conrad’s horror for three centuries, it’s now time for a changing of the guard. Read it and weep.