booty scratcher

A distorted image from speakers of Afro-American Vernacular English, who, like other North Americans, having only vague ideas, transmitted to them by Western-centric mass media, of the geography and ethnography of other countries, filled the gap by their fantasy of what native Africans would be like, to vie with the occasional Caribbean blacks, who, though suspected to represent a more original form of the Black man, provoked atrabilious imagination as they had immigrated into the social environment of Continental American blacks but slighted the latter by excluding them from group participation in view of their lower class background hatched in a majority-white society. The internet was not sufficiently invested in yet to easily dispel the illusion, thus the caricature proliferated in the late 1990s.

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booty scratcher (plural booty scratchers)

1. (Canada, US, slang, derogatory, ethnic slur) An African person.
   • 1999, Odessa Rose, Water in a Broken Glass. A novel, La Caille Nous Pub. / Cool Water Publishing House LLC, →ISBN, page 121:

     […] What in the world is an African booty scratcher?” “Something my sister used to call me. I didn’t know what an African booty scratcher was and I still don’t, but I knew it was something negative things around me had taught me that any and everything referencing Africa had dubious admirable qualities. So what I inevitably sculpted one day were these blue-black, big-lipped, wide nosed, monkey-looking African figures with enormous buttocks, swinging naked from a tree, and landing on the jungle floor to scratch theirs or somebody else’s behinds.

   • 2004, Imani Perry, Prophets of the Hood. Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop, Duke University Press, →ISBN, page 17:

     At elite universities, Caribbean students have reportedly excluded African Americans from organizations and study groups, claiming, as part of their immigration narratives, that the latter group lacks the appropriate work ethic to participate. Young Caribbean people learn from their parents the stories of exploitation at the hands of African Americans, or other Caribbean people who had been here longer, when they newly arrived in the United States, and those stories become warning narratives. Most black Americans have minimal contact with black immigrants and derive their information about them from imperialistic and Euro-centric media constructions of third-world, black-populated countries. Hence, immigrated blacks are taunted by them with racist terms like “African booty scratcher” or references to AIDS.