Nigger: The Strange Career Of A Troublesome Word

Acclaim for
NIGGER
by Randall Kennedy

“Kennedy's commitment to racial justice is plain.… He frequently throws the cold water of common sense upon issues that are too often cloaked in glib histrionics.”

—The New Republic

 

“A rigorous critique of the many legal and cultural controversies set off by the use of that loaded term.… Will make you think.”

—Vibe

 

“Carefully and insightfully, and from every point of view, Kennedy considers the difficult questions.”

—Boston Herald

 

“An important read for anyone who wants to comprehend the lasting presence of prejudice in our society.”

—BookPage

 

“At once an etymological, historical, cultural, even legal analysis of the N-word.… Perhaps the definitive book on a racial topic that doesn't seem to go away.”

—Los Angeles Herald-American

 

ALSO BY
RANDALL KENNEDY

 

Race, Crime, and the Law

 

Interracial Intimacies:
Sex, Marriage, Identity, and Adoption

 

RANDALL KENNEDY
received his undergraduate degree from Princeton and his law degree from Yale. He was a Rhodes Scholar and served as a law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall before joining the faculty of the Harvard Law School. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Association, and the American Law Institute, Mr. Kennedy lives in Dedham, Massachusetts.

Introduction

One The Protean N-Word

Two
Nigger
in Court

Three Pitfalls in Fighting
Nigger:
Perils of Deception, Censoriousness,
and Excessive Anger

Four How Are We Doing with
Nigger?

Afterword

Endnotes

Acknowledgements

INTRODUCTION
to the Vintage Edition

 

Nigger
has accompanied me throughout my life. As a child growing up in Columbia, South Carolina, and Washington, D.C., in the ’
50
s and ’
60
s I assumed that
nigger
(along with various other racial slurs including
cracker
or
peckerwood)
would be in the minds, if not on the lips, of participants in any altercation pitting whites against blacks. I do not remember the first time that a white person called me “nigger,” but I do remember the first time that responding to it gave rise to a discussion between me and my parents. The episode occurred in the early
1960
s. After battling a white boy for what seemed like hours on a D. C. playground (at the Takoma Elementary School), I walked home and at dinner calmly related the events of the day. I asked my parents for advice on how best to react to a white person who called me “nigger.” They gave me contradictory advice. My father said that I had standing permission
from him to “go to war.” He warned me against rushing into a fight if I was badly outnumbered. Otherwise, though, he urged me to respond with fists, or if necessary, with bottles, sticks, or bricks. My mother, on the other hand, recommended that I pay no heed to racial taunts, avoid bullies, and let bigots stew in their own poisonous prejudices. She insisted that while “sticks and stones may break your bones, words need never harm you.”

Yet it was a word—this word
nigger
—that lay at the core of a recollection that revealed to me the pain my mother continues to feel on account of wounds inflicted upon her by racists during the era of Jim Crow segregation. Several years ago I asked her to tell me about her earliest memory of the color line. She began laughingly, telling me about how, in Columbia, she had often accompanied her mother to white folks’ homes to pick up and return laundry. Although they typically traveled on public buses, my mother had failed to notice that her mother, Big Mama, always took her to the back of the bus where Negroes were segregated. One day, Big Mama asked my mother to run an errand that required her to catch a bus on which they had often ridden together. This errand marked the first time that my mother rode the bus on her own. She stood at the correct stop, got on the right bus, and deposited the appropriate fare. Being a bit scared, however, she sat down immediately behind the bus driver. After about a block, the driver pulled the bus over to the curb, cut the engine, and suddenly wheeled around and began to scream at my mother who was all of about eight or nine years old—“Nigger, you know better than to sit there! Get to the back where you belong!”

At this point in the storytelling, my mother was no longer laughing. A tear dropped onto her cheek, as she recalled running away from the bus overcome by fright.

I have been called “nigger” to my face on a couple of occasions by people who sought to convey their racial hatred or contempt for all blacks including me. In the spring of
1978
, a motorist in Oxford, England, slowed down, rolled down the window of his car, and made a gesture indicating that he needed assistance. When I reached the side of his auto, he screamed “Nigger go home!” and sped off. Seven years later, on my first day in residence as a member of the faculty at Harvard Law School, a cabbie called me “nigger” (as well as “coon,” and “jigaboo”) on the basis of no apparent provocation other than my race.

I have also encountered
nigger
in dealings with acquaintances. Explaining why there were no blacks on a swimming team to which he belonged, a white elementary school classmate innocently allowed me access to familial information that I am sure his parents would have preferred for him to have kept private. My classmate told me that he had heard his parents and their friends say that they needed some “relief from niggers.”

Years later, at a junior tennis tournament, I found myself sharing a hotel room with a white youngster from Mobile, Alabama. Late one evening, right as we were about to shut off the lights and go to sleep, this guy decided to tell me a final joke, one in which a reference to a “nigger” constituted the punch line. As soon as that line escaped his lips, his eyes bulged while the rest of his face froze. He knew immediately that he
had made himself vulnerable to a judgment that he deeply feared. Why had he done so? I suspect that he had become so comfortable with me that he ceased, at least temporarily, to see me in terms of race. Or perhaps he had merely granted me the status of an honorary white. Either way, the reference to “nigger” seems to have suddenly made him aware anew of my blackness and thus the need to treat me differently than other acquaintances. I said nothing during the awkward silence that enveloped the room as his voice trailed away from the failed joke.

He apologized.

I do not recall whether or not I actually felt offended, but I do remember that from that moment on, the ease that had marked our budding friendship vanished.

For many people, saying or hearing
nigger
is easier in mono-racial as opposed to multiracial settings. That has often been my experience. In my final year at my wonderful high school, St. Albans School for Boys, a black friend jokingly referred to me as a nigger in the presence of one of our white classmates. If he and I had been alone, I might have overlooked his comment or even laughed. But given the presence of the white classmate, I concluded immediately that a show of forceful disapproval was imperative. My concern was twofold and had to do in part with my position as student body president. I did not want the white classmate—and, through him, other white classmates—to get the impression that
nigger
was less injurious and more acceptable than what they had probably been taught at home. Aware of the ignorance of many of my white classmates regarding things racial, I regarded it as my duty to
impress upon them the conventional wisdom which declared that
nigger
is an ugly, evil, irredeemable word. For reasons I will discuss below, my real beliefs regarding the N-word were more complicated but I thought that it would be impossible to relate those nuances to my white classmates. So I decided simply to condemn “nigger” wholesale. In addition, I believed that I had to come down as hard on my black classmate as I would have come down on a white classmate or else be subject to charges of hypocrisy, or even prejudice. So I sternly told my black classmate to refrain from referring to me by “that word” and that if he failed to restrain himself I would give him demerits that would force him to attend a disciplinary session at the school on a Saturday morning.

I think that my black classmate knew what I was thinking. But he was in no mood to go along. He laughed in my face, pointed at me, and with a raised voice cackled “nigger-nigger-nigger-nigger-nigger-nigger!” I immediately gave him a couple of hours of demerits and joined him on Saturday to make sure that he was present for his punishment.

Because of the way that
nigger
was used in my household I learned at an early age that it could be said in many ways, put to many uses, and mean many things. Big Mama peppered her speech with references to “niggers” by which she meant discreditable Negroes, a group that, in her view, constituted a large sector of the African American population. If Big Mama saw blacks misbehaving she would often roll her eyes, purse her lips, and then declare in a mournful tone, “Nigguhs!” According to Big Mama, “niggers can't get along, not even in church” and “are always late, even to their own funerals.” She
swore that she would never allow a “nigger doctor” to care for her and repeatedly warned that “if you see a bunch of niggers coming, turn around and go the other way.”

Big Mama had clearly internalized antiblack prejudice. She truly believed that white people's water was wetter than black people's water, that as a rule, whites were nicer, better looking, and more capable than blacks. There was no affection or irony in her use of
nigger.
She deployed it exclusively for purposes of denigration. But life, of course, is complicated. This same Big Mama was a pillar of her all-black community in Columbia and a stalwart supporter of her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren—black folk who loved, indeed, idolized her. We recognized with sadness her antiblack prejudice but thoroughly rejected it as a consequence of competing influences, particularly the black college students who so magnificently spearheaded the southern struggle for emancipation from Jim Crow pigmentocracy

As I attained maturity in the ’
60
s and ’
70
s, relatives and friends used
nigger
but in ways that differed substantially from Big Mama's usage. Some deployed it as a signal that they understood that blacks remained mere “niggers” in the eyes of many whites. For them, referring to blacks as niggers was a way of holding up a clarifying mirror to society and reminding all within earshot of what they saw as an unchanging reality of American life—“ofays on top, niggers on the bottom.” Others used the term with a large twist of irony to speak admiringly of someone, as in “James Brown is a sho nuff nigger,” meaning that the great entertainer was wholly willing to be himself without apology. If Big Mama said that a person had acted like
a nigger, it could only mean that, in her view, someone had behaved badly. By contrast, when my cousins and their friends said that someone had acted like a nigger it might mean that that person had reacted to racist challenge with laudable militancy. Big Mama warned us about “bad niggers” by which she meant Negroes who were in trouble with the law. But among my cousins, as among many blacks, being a certain sort of “bad nigger”—the sort that bravely confronted the laws of white supremacy—was glamorous and admirable. Big Mama warned her charges against “acting like niggers.” But a popular saying among the youngsters was “Never give up your right to act like a nigger,” by which they meant that Negroes should be unafraid to speak up loudly and act out militantly on behalf of their interests.

There was often a generational difference in evidence in competing uses of the N-word with the younger people experimenting with nonderogatory versions. On the other hand, while some of my younger relatives are adamantly opposed to any use of
nigger
, believing it to be only and unalterably a debasing slur, some of my older relatives anticipated by many years the transformation of
nigger
(or “nigga”) that is now widely attributed to the hip-hop culture. Long before the rapper Ice-T insisted upon being called a nigger, my father declared that he was proud to be a “stone nigger”—by which he meant a black man without pretensions who was unafraid to enjoy himself openly and loudly despite the objections of condescending whites or insecure blacks.

How could the man who gave me permission to “go to war” against racial insult turn around and proudly refer to himself
as a nigger? My father could do so because he intuited what Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes once observed—that “a word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged,” but is instead “the skin of a living thought [that] may vary greatly in color and content according to the circumstances and time in which it is used.”

I relate some of my own direct experiences with the N-word in response to questions I have received since the publication of
Nigger;
in the afterword to this edition I address still other questions and objections. Many people have asked whether or under what circumstances I have personally had to grapple with the word. For some questioners, my book is more authentic and acceptable insofar as I have been called a nigger and have otherwise been forced to encounter it in my own life. I make no such claim on my own behalf. I do not believe that my experiences entitle me to any more deference than that which is due on the strength of my writing alone. Experience is only an opportunity; what matters is what one makes of it. The extent to which my writing is appreciated or deferred to should be determined solely on the basis of
its
character. The best evidence of that is found on the page.