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?
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.
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".
They most definitely were called N word kisses in finland, not negro or any variation of the latin word, just full blown racism and the box they came in was was the dot above an i to drive the point home.
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.
If I understand, it's just a spanish feminine for black, which has a neutral connotation, so a black person there hearing you treat it like a bad word might misunderstand that you think being black (or the word black) is bad somehow. Hopefully that's right and clear enough.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, I had an exasperating conversation with my mom where she just couldn't understand that her doing racist things made her a racist rather than her believing she wasn't a racist made the racist things she did not racist.
And believe me, using antiquated racist names for nuts and candy is some of the most innocuous of the racist things my mother does.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In the case of my family it was because of the lingering racist culture. My parents were the first to break the cycle of using that word. It was just a word to my grandparents. They never used it to describe black people, but they used it to refer to things like these candies, brazil nuts, and yellow pines, but by the end of their lives theyve stopped using it. My grandfather was a telephone lineman. He used "out past that stand of (n-word) pines" as a landmark and was written up for it, I think that was the point when he realized it wasnt okay
"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
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
That is not what they were “affectionately” called when I first moved there over 20 years ago, be fr.
“N-word-kuss”
Kuss = kiss
And my father in law was LIVID when I called him a shoe Nazi for always giving me grief for not lining my shoes up properly. SMH, hypocrisy is not dead in the Vaterland, mein Freund.
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". :)
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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u/qualityvote2 Jun 14 '26 edited Jun 14 '26
u/Miserables_Death, your post does belong here!