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Well it is

Yes, it’s what kids have said for at least the last thirty years or so. But it isn’t what we said on the playground in the 50s, or our parents said in the 20s or our grandparents said in the 1880s. The original goes back even farther back in time and refers to making a runaway slave pay you to keep quiet.

I never heard ‘tiger’ until well after the Civil Rights movement. Where I grew up, the ‘N-word’ wasn’t used in polite company, yet it was used in the rhyme. Don’t know if we even thought of it referring to black people when we chanted it—the point of the rhyme being to pick someone.