Pickaninny

Pickaninny (also picaninny or piccaninny or pickinniny) is a term in English which refers to dark-skinned children usually of African descent or a racial caricature thereof. It is a pidgin word form, which may be derived from the Portuguese pequenino (an affectionate term derived from pequeno, "little"). The term pickaninny has also been used in the past to describe Aboriginal Australians. According to the scholar Robin Bernstein, who describes the meaning in the context of the United States, the pickaninny is characterized by three qualities: "the figure is always juvenile, always of color, and always resistant if not immune to pain". At one time the word may have been used as a term of endearment, but it is now considered derogatory or racist.

Usage

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 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".