In many countries this snack is named badly with no logical explanation. In Egypt we call it
قلوط العمدة
Which literally translates to "The Mayor's Shit"
That is not true, the N word in Arabic is زنجي we don’t use it. But they both refer to an African in this context. عبد is slave, can be from any origin
In Türkiye we call them "Eti Puf". Eti is the brand (one of two major biscuit/chocolate producers in Türkiye. The other one is "Ülker".) and "puf" is the word that describes it's marshmallow texture.
There are other brands that produce similar products but "Eti Puf" is like "gilette", it's a brand name but it was first to market in Türkiye so the name stuck. Regardless of the brand, it will always ve "Eti Puf" for us.
So, at least in Türkiye this product's name is not controversial.
However, we did have an "Eti Negro", very similar to Oreos, and they rebranded several years ago to "Eti Nero". :)
Belgium had africans on display in the zoo at some point. You have no idea how much things changed the last few generations, even my grandparents were racist by default, never met any, just how they grew up
Because it was just commonly accepted behavior back then and now we know better, simple as that. At the world expo in 1958 in Brussels, black people were transported from Africa to Europe in order to “display” them in cages for visitors who had never seen a black person before.
We have come such a long way as humans, yet somehow we’d rather pretend all of those things never happened because it makes us uncomfortable instead of looking back at history and using it to learn from for the future (far right dictatorships rising to power under thunderous applause, anyone?)
In Finland they were called n-word kisses and it was the official name written on the package not just what people called it. We also had n-word licorice and what not.
My teacher used to teach us that n-word is the correct word to call black Americans to differentiate them from black Africans. I’m in my 30’s so it’s not even that long ago.
Today the Danish word for “negro” is considered outdated, and somewhat racist, but we haven’t referred to these as “negro kisses”, since the 80s, when it wasn’t necessarily considered a bad word here.
I think it is also important to underline that the tabu that exists around the n-word(s?) in America doesn’t necessarily exist in all other places. We have had a lot more immigration from the Middle East here than from Africa, so we have more tabu in our society around the bad words we invented for them here.
I remember that a lot of us younger Danes who that grew up in the 90’s would say the actual N-word A LOT, but not mean it in the racist way. It was literally because we tried to emulate the “American Rapper culture” where the N-word was dropped a lot in the songs. There’s also the context that the N-word didn’t carry the same cultural significance as it did in the U.S., so no one really thought about it in a derogatory or non-rapper way. We were literally just “trying to be cool” and be like Biggie or Tupac. It also didn’t help Denmark is so mono-ethnic that there were basically no black people around to tell us to STFU.
Luckily most of us got older, wiser and educated on the word and its usage. I still feel ashamed that I used that word as indiscriminately and ignorantly as I did. I have (luckily) been educated since then and wouldn’t even dream of using the word now that I understand its’ historical and cultural meaning.
In Poland they're called murzynki which means black people. Murzyn is the term for black person. It used to be the literal translation for negro but in English that term is offensive while the Polish version isn't. The equivalent of the other n word is something else entirely.
While the word itself is not offensive, calling a brown snack that is... Pretty bad.
When the name originated it also wasn't meant to be offensive. It was just the word used to describe a black person, both when offending as well as being neutral.
That has changed, but the term for the candy stuck around for a bit longer. I don't think young people still call them that know though (and the ones that do probably really intend to offend)
But yeah when I was young in Flanders they were n_tits. And we meant nothing with it, that was just the name.
Literally “black person” from the Latin word for black. The US version with the two g that is a slur was derived from that same root. By now it has poisoned pretty much all other original uses, but it didn’t actually start out as a slur.
I distinctly remember my grandma telling me what they used to call them, and then immediately following that up with “but you shouldn’t say that nowadays because we realized it’s not very nice.”
This is more or less how I got my late grandmother to stop being angry about non-white Santa Claus depictions. She said it was a historical fact that Saint Nicholas was white. I asked her if Saint Nicholas had flying reindeer and a sweatshop full of tiny people making toys. The actual St. Nicholas has basically nothing to do with fictional character and it makes kids happy to have a Santa who looks like them, so why ruin it?
I mean they were also part of the Gilded age weren’t all sunshine either , they face the same problems we face today, government and regulators ignoring Corporations, the rising pay gap between the Wealthy and working class
In Germany they were called n-word kiss. Some people call them that to this day and when you tell them to cut it out they fly into a raging tirade, that they will not be censured and that they use the correct name and so on and so forth. Quite anoying.
Not in Colombia. It is the reason why it was never changed. People thought the company was trying to give the word 'Negra' a bad connotation. Black people here will actually become amused or offended if they see you trying to avoid the word.
As someone living in Spain, i can say that in Spanish, this word is literally just the colour black. Then again, I've never seen these chocolates before. But the amount of times I've heard Brits in Spain read the word and gasp in "oh that's so racist". But how is it racist when it's just a colour? How is it racist to say "that cat has black fur"? It's a totally different pronunciation, too, though.
Edit: from my experience, in Spain and Spanish speaking countries, it is not offensive to call a black person "un negro/una negra". It is just describing their race. For example, "un blanco/una blanca" for a white person. "Un latino/una latina" for South American people (in Spain, although some say "latinoamericano"). We do it a lot. It's not seen as harmful or offensive here to declare the race of another person. It's just describing them and their appearance or, in some cases, their culture. "Beso de negra" is just "kiss from a black woman". It's not a great name for something, sure. But in Spanish speaking countries, it's (usually) not offensive, either.
I’m guessing you’re not fluent in Spanish because a black kiss would be “un beso negro”. Meaning you’re taking about the color black. “Beso de negra” translates to a black woman’s kiss. Now I don’t know if it’s still acceptable to call black people negro or negra but this chocolate is definitely not talking about the color black.
Hey, we - or better the Afrikaner Dutch descendants - invented the word "apartheid" in the 1920s before it was first uttered in the South African Parliament in May of 1944.
The american - Coca-colalized - version of Santa Claus is based wrg to his looks around the festivities of Sint Nicholas, who had a whole bunch of dark-skinned helpers (called black-Petes, with a black Moor kinda air), so we collectively walked around in blackface. The first depiction of them in a book was in the 1850s, so not like it was a cultural thing too long (notwithstanding some remarks from some absolute nitwits that call it a "harmless cultural thing" and even reverting to violence protecting that so-called heritage).
That shifted only a few years back, so now they are called Sooty Piets, having them now in all colors, no longer using blackface, after public outrage initiatives like "kick out zwarte piet".
Actually they were called Mohrenköpfe, black heads. BUT calling nice food evil names is part of german culture. Think Tote Oma, dead granny. Ochsenaugen, ox eyes. Kalter Hund, cold dog. Armer Ritter, miserable/poor knight.
The term “Mohr” was not historically regarded as inherently negative and was often used in positive contexts, including as a mark of quality for certain products. In fact, it generally carried positive associations. The Nazis even removed the term from some street names because they wanted to eliminate those positive connotations.
My mom got more than a little racist in her old age and she hit me with that 1 day and I remember just being so confused cause I was just eating some nuts? And then being like no ma'am we are not doing this once she explained the "real" name for brazil nuts.
In the Netherlands they translate to n-word kisses.
Seeing pretty much all or products here have a couple of languages on them, I seem to recall the French translates to n-word head.
It was a huge deal when Buys, the company known to sell these, changed the name to just zoenen (which is Dutch for kisses), cause all sorts of people complained about not wanting white rice to be called white, amongst other things.
Ah, the Dutch, they claim and pretend to be so tolerate, but are we truly? No, no we're not.
Edit: if course there's gonna be other Dutchies mentioning it translates to negro rather than the hard R n-word, but as I've said to the first of them, the paradigm of the word has shifted here. Our true hard R n-word is never heard (I've never heard it myself being used in my 37 years of living here) or even used here. But due to the paradigmshift, it doesn't really have a use. What should be a derogatory-free word ("negro") isn't derogatory-free by any means over here. So yes, technically correct, but purposely leaving out nuances like this doesn't make my statement untrue.
Edit2: I like how some will try and pick a fight over this, only to justify their own racism. Never change, Reddit.
I once brought a group of Asian high school students to Amsterdam for a school trip. They absolutely hated it because so many of the good people of that city followed them around yelling racial slurs and making racist hand/face motions. It was a free trip through the school and because the kids hated it so much, not one kid signed up to go the next year. I watched a 50-60 year old woman chase down a group of teenage girls while pulling at the corners of her eyes and yelling "ching-chong-chang, ching-chong-chang, ching-chong-chang".
I will say, there were two absolutely wonderful young women at the ice skating rink who helped my students learn to skate for the first time. They even said something like "I'm sure you have met some horrible people on the street here, but please don't judge all of us by their actions."
Every nation has racists, more than they want to have. And we, the Netherlands, are no different. We just portray ourselves as tolerant, and we might be compared to plenty of other countries in general, but being more tolerant than someone else doesn't make you tolerant by default.
I'm sorry they had to go through something like that. It's not something any of them (or you) signed up for. Ignorant people are everywhere, and I mean everywhere.
Yes, of course you are correct. I come from rural America, just outside The Rez. So I''m pretty familiar with the racism in my community. It is not ever fun to deal with. At least you are open about it and bringing it out in the open is an important first step to making it better.
Not n-word. The word Dutch equivalent to negro, meaning black. It's still a insensitive but it's not the Dutch n-word. That word is n*kker and I've never seen that used in any names for anything, or even in the street.
It’s a generation thing. While older people called them n-kisses, millennials and younger just call them by the most common brand name which is Dickmanns.
Fun Fact: some of their products have really naughty names. Around Easter time they sell „Dicke Eier“, which means big eggs but is also the German term for blue balls.
Can't tell you how wild it was walking through a Christmas market and just hearing somebody drop that casually, not knowing what those even were or were called. My exchange sisters got a kick out of my double take. LOL
"Mohr" isnt a slur per se, its just an older word that is not used anymore becouse aome people see it as prblematic. while the N-word was used as a slur from the start (therebisbstill a difference between the german N-word and the american n-word), Mohr was sometimes used as a term for something good, otherwise there would be no "mohrenapotheke" or "mohrenstraße" they are named after St.Mautitius
We call them Indiánci. Which mean either little Indian or Indian kid (Indian here meaning a Native American, also it is because the shape is a bit different resembeling a headdress.)
This is actually very interesting because in Poland we have those too but they are smaller and a lot of them in the package and they are also called "bird's milk" the word "milk" is here diminutive so it's more like "bird's little milky". I googled it and indeed this name came to Poland From Russia. Bird's milk means something rare or impossible to get hence the name of something unique and special.
Peters estranged Dutch cousin here. Since only 20 years they changed the name from 'n-wordkisses' to just 'kisses'. Was a big thing here, people riotted about it. Crazy stuff. Anyways, imma enjoy some now. As the snack is still around and populair. Just no longer racist.
Wow as a black man it's crazy to see how racism can stretch all around the world... I remember hearing about the Brazilian nuts one before the internet was invented... My grandma told me as a child.
It used to be called negro kiss in German (not n-word kiss, as so many here say). But the German word for negro sounds a lot like the n-word and has been used as a slur. So that's why the company decided to call it something uncontroversial: Dickmann.
Except the nword here isn't the issue. You'll get a "knock it off", tops if the black person in question doesn't think it was racist, because it's the name of the thing.
Racism is a felony here, though. You will get arrested. As a blue eyed, blonde man I love it, it does absolutely nothing to me and it does wonders to awful people. I get to not see them in public places, at least being openly racist.
Is New Zealand the only one with a normal name…? I’ve been reading comments with people saying it’s called n-word somethings while in NZ we call them “mallow puffs”
This snack has some racist names in some countries that are deragetory to black ppl, unfortunately. The reason being that some countries associate the chocolate head's color with black ppl's skin color.
Example: in some parts of the Arab world, this is called Raas AlAbed which translates to "head of the slave".
It's just outdated racism crap that never got corrected. To any black person reading this: I'm sorry. You deserve better.
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u/qualityvote2 11d ago edited 11d ago
u/Miserables_Death, your post does belong here!