one more comment on ethnic labels

[Laurence Horn]

I just dug up the New Yorker's annual Fiction Issue from last
Christmas (the Dec. 25/Jan. 1 double issue), from which I've been
reading a long short story by Junot Diaz called "The Brief Wondrous
Life of Oscar Wao".  What especially struck me is the extremely
casual use of "nigger" to refer to characters who are in most cases
Dominican (and in no cases African-American), or in some cases to
refer to the reader.  The protagonists, narrator, and I assume author
are all Dominican.  The closest equivalent to "nigger" in this story
is probably either 'person' or 'guy' and there's no obvious
denigration [sic] intended.  In fact, the sense I have is that
"nigger" is used here pretty much the way "yid" is used in Yiddish
(for 'person', 'guy', with the feature [+ Jewish] presupposed rather
than highlighted).  The style of writing is fairly colloquial, or
perhaps better profane, leavened with quite a lot of code-mixed
Spanish.  I have no idea if this usage is general (in Dominican and
more generally Latino communities) beyond this particular author, or
what it signifies.

larry