My mother’s family in 1945: bottom left, the dog Nigger

I was looking through old family photo albums recently for images to save digitally before they deteriorate. Unexpectedly, on the back of one faded picture, I noticed some handwriting. The wobbly scrawl was penned by my mother as a girl, and lovingly listed the names of those who appear in the photograph: Dad, Mam, John, Peter… Nigger.

Evidently, when she was a kid, my mum had a dog named Nigger. His murky outline is faintly visible in the bottom corner of the photo. Finding out the family dog answered to the n-word was a shock. Even more so when you consider that my mum went on to marry my father—a black man—and is anti-racist with a passion you only see in parents of mixed-race children.

Why had I never heard about Nigger before? Neither my mum nor anyone else in