nigger grin

plural nigger grins

1. ethnicoffensiveslangslurA large, wide grin stereotypically associated with blacks.

   As for my trip to the Never Never, well, one lives and learns. I landed safely among a tribe of blacks, and asked an old buck with a white ziff if the 'Marys' of his tribe used paint and powder. He answered with an exceedingly broad nigger grin that 'they use'm charcoal.'

   1934 April 26, The Chronicle, Adelaide, page 59, column 2

   2 more examples

   The women here were not so much frightened at strangers, or made to keep themselves so much secluded as among the Malay races; the children were more merry and had the "nigger grin," while the noisy confusion of tongues among the men, and their excitement on very ordinary occasions, are altogether removed from the general taciturnity and reserve of the Malay.

   1869, Alfred Russel Wallace, The Malay Archipelago, volume II, London: Macmillan and Co., page 193

   His own mother would not have known him as he stepped into the ring on the night appointed for the battle, clad in a complete suit of brown varnish and a pair of white drawers, his woolly scalp a mass of thick, black curls, and wearing the traditional nigger grin, with its rows of shining ivories.

   1911 April 14, The Eyre's Peninsula Tribune, Cowell, SA, page 4, column 3