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I’m not going to RT the small account that said this, but this is actually what part of my dissertation is about, so sorry, I have to thread for a minute.
Although most of us can immediately recognize "savage" as a slur, the etymology may not be well known. (I didn't know it, anyway, until looking it up because of its interchangeability with "brute.")
The "wild" aspect is well understood, but the important part for me is that the term was originally used to refer to nonhuman animals.
Unsurprisingly, it very quickly was used to apply to human beings as well, but built into it is the assumption that this is a term for nonhumans.
It also begins its word life as an adjective, but becomes a noun as well pretty early on.
By the time it becomes a noun, the adjective is being used on human beings as well, but the noun still initially refers only to nonhuman animals.
Here are some dates from the OED for comparison. Please note that this does not mean that the word was never used prior to these dates, but these are still useful indicators.
The earliest example of the word as an adjective ("sauage") refers to nonhuman animals and comes from 1275. Their first example referring to a human being is from 1473.
That first example of a savage human being is a mythological figure, Callisto, a woman transformed into a bear.
So the first example is actually still nonhuman. She's savage because she's a bear.
The second example is another mythological figure, Merlin. The date on this is unclear, as the documentary evidence is from 1500, but the text is thought to be from around 1450.
The first example of use as a noun refers to a nonhuman animal and comes from 1425. The first example of use as a noun to refer to a human comes from 1578, and is a now-familiar usage: a human who lives in a wild or "primitive" state.
1609 is their first example of savage as a noun to refer to a cruel or "brutal" person. (Brutal from brute, which means nonhuman animal.)
Savage is an intentionally dehumanizing word. There are animal metaphors that emphasize qualities admired in nonhuman animals. Savage, however, refers to living in a lower state of being than a human. (I'm not offering this as my personal opinion of nonhuman animals.)
It is applied frequently over the years to peoples colonized by Europeans because colonization is a brutal (lol) act that requires distancing oneself from one's own shared humanity with the people upon whom one is acting.
It is both easy and hard to get human beings to brutalize one another. Hard in that most humans are predisposed to get along with others they recognize as human. Easy in that it's not that hard to otherize some human beings as outside of humanity.
It is a word that can be reclaimed by colonized and formerly-enslaved peoples. Not a word that can be reclaimed by people to whom it was not broadly applied. Many of the qualities labeled "savage" by Europeans were in fact admirable.
This is how literal the animalization of human beings was. The issuance of the papal encyclical Sublimis Deus in 1537 was to declare that indigenous Americans were human beings with souls.
Why issue a circular making this declaration? Because Europeans had been debating it.
And to be clear, making humanity a matter of debate is inherently dehumanizing. It turns it into an open question. Even arguing *for* someone's humanity suggests that it can be argued against.
One of the things I'm interested in my diss is how quickly the marginalized identified these words and turned them against their oppressors, whose behavior they identified as nonhuman.
"Savage," at bottom, means nonhuman, and specifically less-than-human. *fin*
