‘Good morning’ link to slavery a modern fabrication

AAP FACTCHECK – People should stop saying ‘good morning’ because the phrase stems from slave owners who used it to mock mourning slaves, according to viral social media posts.

The posts claim the phrase originated from when enslaved people who were grieving dead or missing family members were told to “have a good mourning”.

This is false. The phrase ‘good morning’ has been used for many centuries and dates back to before the modern colonial era.

US historians told AAP FactCheck they were not aware of the phrase “good mourning” being used in this way.

The claim was made in a Facebook Reel video, viewed almost three million times at the time of writing.

A man in the video says the term ‘good morning’ “actually stems from when the slave masters or the oppressors used to kill or harm family members of these slaves”.

He adds: “They used to tell the family, ‘have a good mourning, enjoy the mourning of your family members’.”

The man advises viewers that instead of saying ‘good morning’, they should say “rise and shine”.

A similar claim was made in a viral 2023 TikTok post, in which a woman says “white oppressors” came up with the term ‘good mourning’ as a way to mock the suffering of enslaved Black people.

“When the slaves used to cry about what happened all night long, the white slave masters, the oppressors, would wake up in the morning time, and they’ll tell the slaves, ‘did you have a good mourning?” the woman in the video says.

Dr Beth Malory, an English linguistics lecturer at University College London, said while ‘morning’ and ‘mourning’ sound the same, they are “etymologically unrelated”, meaning the words do not share a common root.

‘Mourn’ comes from ‘murnan’, while ‘morning’ has origins in ‘morgen’, according to the Online Etymology Dictionary.

“‘Mourning’ comes from the Old English ‘murnan’, meaning things like ‘to care for’, ‘to have regard for’, ‘to yearn for’, or ‘to feel or express sorrow, grief, or regret’,” Dr Malory told AAP FactCheck in an email.

“‘Morning’, on the other hand, comes from the Old English word morgen (i.e. morn), meaning ‘start of the day’.”

Dr Malory said greetings that combine ‘good’ with another word to refer to the time of day have been used consistently since the Middle English period, defined by the  Oxford English Dictionary as around 1150-1500.

This includes “good morwe’ (‘good morrow’) in Geoffrey Chaucer’s ‘Miller’s Tale’ (c.1390) and “good morrow” in William Caxton’s published works (1481). The term  ‘good morning’ is also found in Shakespeare’s Cymbeline (1623).

Spanish colonists first took enslaved Africans to the US in the 1500s.

The first enslaved Africans to arrive in the US under British colonial rule landed in Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619.

Two US historians with expertise in African-American slavery told AAP FactCheck they were not aware of any evidence the phrase ‘good mourning’ was used to mock enslaved people.

Dexter J. Gabriel, an associate professor of history and Africana studies at the University of Connecticut, said he had “never come across such an instance in the historical record”.

“Lacking any such evidence, I believe this to be a modern fabrication,” he said in an email.

“The reality is, slavery in the Americas has enough horrible and heart-wrenching stories that there’s no need for fabrication.”

Jennifer L. Morgan, a New York University professor who specialises in the history of Black America, said she had “never heard nor seen any reference in the archives or memoirs of slavery to this use of ‘good morning'”.

“This does not, of course, mean that it didn’t happen, and, of course, there are many records of slave owners using derisive or sarcastic or brutal language in their efforts to demean and control the women and men they enslaved, but the roots of the word are unconnected and the greeting significantly predates the onset of hereditary racial slavery in the Americas.”

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