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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Anatomy of a Slur: A Historical and Etymological Study

The Anatomy of a Slur: A Historical and Etymological Study

Eggers, Adam

Paperback

Black American HistoryGeneral World History

ISBN13: 9798175685023
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Sep 26 2026
Pages: 106
Weight: 0.25
Height: 0.22 Width: 5.00 Depth: 8.00
Language: English
How did English build its vocabulary of contempt for Black people, and why do these words still carry so much weight?

The Anatomy of a Slur is a clear, carefully researched history of the words English has used to demean Black people, from the plantation and the minstrel stage to sheet music, advertising, pseudo-science, and colonial law. It treats slurs the way an anatomist treats a specimen: what they are made of, where they came from, how they spread, and why they lasted.

Inside:

  • Nine chapters tracing how these words were formed and marketed, from plantation society and blackface minstrelsy to children's literature, scientific racism, and the export of the vocabulary across the British Empire and southern Africa.
  • A dictionary of more than thirty terms, including the n-word, Uncle Tom, Aunt Jemima, and the Golliwog. Each entry gives a definition, a classification, the earliest recorded uses, and a historical trajectory.
  • Chapters on reclamation and the law: how communities have repurposed these words, and how courts in the United States, the United Kingdom, and South Africa have treated them.
  • Primary sources and period illustrations, including runaway-slave notices, sheet-music covers, and eighteenth-century anatomical plates.
  • Appendices on modern coded language and online moderation-evasion, a timeline, a bibliography, and an index. There are also blank pages for your own notes.
Written for readers of history and linguistics, students, teachers, writers, and editors, the book aims for clear information without sensationalism, with the gravity the subject deserves and the occasional dryness it invites.

Content note: This book prints historical slurs in full, as they were used, because a study of slurs that hides them explains nothing.

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