Entry · catalog no. 2404
pink chaser
/ /ˈpɪŋk ˈtʃeɪsər/ /PINK CHAY-ser
noun · Harlem, New York City · 1920s
✓ Verified
1.
A Black person who seeks out white company and white approval — someone who arranges their social life, and often their loyalties, around proximity to white people. The word carries contempt. It marks the person as trading their own community's regard for a standing among whites that, in the usual telling, is never actually granted.
“He had not been back to the block in two years; folks had him down as a pink chaser and left it there.”
Origin & Attribution
The term is Harlem Renaissance-era Black slang, in circulation in New York by the 1920s. It is built on pink meaning a white person — a Black usage attested in the Chicago Defender as early as 1913 and current for decades after, alongside ofay, Miss Anne and Mister Charlie — plus chaser for one who pursues. It belongs to a whole Harlem vocabulary for policing the color line from the Black side of it, sitting near handkerchief-head and Uncle Tom but aimed specifically at social climbing rather than at deference. The earliest documented appearance is in Carl Van Vechten's 1926 novel, where a character complains of a room having too many pink-chasers in it; the book's appended glossary defines pink as a white person. Nathan Van Patten recorded it as a Black vocabulary item in American Speech in 1931, and it was still being logged in the Dictionary of American Underworld Lingo in 1950. One correction is required, because it is commonly repeated: the term is not from Zora Neale Hurston's glossary to Story in Harlem Slang (1942). That glossary is real and important and it does carry ofay, monkey chaser, Miss Anne, Mister Charlie and handkerchief-head — but it does not carry pink chaser, and the word is roughly two decades older than 1942. Worth naming as well: the word is Black, and every surviving written record of it was made by an outsider.
1913
Pinks for white people appears in the Chicago Defender; the base term is already in Black print use
1926
Earliest documented appearance of pink-chaser, in Carl Van Vechten's Harlem novel, whose glossary defines pink as a white person
1931
Nathan Van Patten logs pink-chaser as Black vocabulary in American Speech
1950
Still recorded in the Dictionary of American Underworld Lingo
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
The Northeast
Harlem, New York City · 1920s
Spoken by
Black Harlemites of the 1920s through mid-century, used among themselves as a judgment on someone else's company
$PINKCHThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Historical100 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
16/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1926
in the culture
Cultural energy indexed from documented usage, search interest, and citation frequency. The recorded date is the archive’s permanent point of record.
Hear it spoken
By region — how it actually sounds
@bxgriot
The Bronx, NY
@phillyanne
Philadelphia, PA
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Citations & Sources
■
Carl Van Vechten, Nigger Heaven (Alfred A. Knopf, 1926) — pink-chasers in the Prologue; the appended Glossary of Negro Words and Phrases defines pink as a white person
book
■
Nathan Van Patten, The Vocabulary of the American Negro as Set Forth in Contemporary Literature, American Speech, vol. 7, no. 1 (1931)
glossary
■
Hyman E. Goldin, Frank O'Leary and Morris Lipsius, eds., Dictionary of American Underworld Lingo (Twayne Publishers, 1950)
glossary
■
+ Cite a sourceZora Neale Hurston, Story in Harlem Slang, American Mercury, July 1942, with appended glossary — cited as a negative receipt: the glossary was checked in full and does not contain pink chaser
glossary
See also