Nigger: The Strange Career Of A Troublesome Word (4 page)

A century later, during the civil rights revolution, whites who joined black civil rights protesters were frequently referred to as nigger lovers. When white and black “freedom riders” rode together on a bus in violation of (unlawful) local Jim Crow custom, a bigoted white driver took delight in delivering them to a furious crowd of racists in Anniston, Alabama. Cheerfully anticipating the beatings to come, the driver yelled to the mob, “Well, boys, here they are. I brought
you some niggers and nigger lovers.”
⁵¹
Speaking to a rally in Baltimore, Maryland, a spokesman for the National States Rights Party declared confidently that most “nigger lovers are sick in the mind” and “should be bound, hung, and killed.”
⁵²

The term
nigger lover
continues to be heard amid the background noise that accompanies racial conflict. Whites who refrain from discriminating against blacks, whites who become intimate with blacks, whites who confront antiblack practices, whites who work on the electoral campaigns of black candidates, whites who nominate blacks for membership in clubs, whites who protect blacks in the course of their official duties, and whites who merely socialize with blacks are all subject to being derided as “nigger lovers.”
⁵³

Over the years,
nigger
has become the best known of the American language's many racial insults, evolving into the paradigmatic slur. It is the epithet that generates epithets. That is why Arabs are called “sand niggers,” Irish “the niggers of Europe,” and Palestinians “the niggers of the Middle East;” why black bowling balls have been called “nigger eggs,” games of craps “nigger golf,” watermelons “nigger hams,” rolls of one-dollar bills “nigger rolls,” bad luck “nigger luck,” gossip “nigger news,” and heavy boots “nigger stompers.”
⁵⁴

Observers have made strong claims on behalf of the special status of
nigger
as a racial insult. The journalist Farai Chideya describes it as “the all-American trump card, the nuclear bomb of racial epithets.”
⁵⁵
The writer Andrew Hacker has asserted that among slurs of any sort,
nigger
“stands alone [in] its power to tear at one's insides.”
⁵⁶
Judge Stephen Reinhardt
deems
nigger
“the most noxious racial epithet in the contemporary American lexicon.”
⁵⁷
And prosecutor Christopher Dar den famously branded
nigger
the “filthiest, dirtiest, nastiest word in the English language.”
⁵⁸

The claim that
nigger
is the superlative racial epithet—the
most
hurtful, the
most
fearsome, the
most
dangerous, the
most
noxious—necessarily involves comparing oppressions and prioritizing victim status. Some scoff at this enterprise. Objecting to a columnist's assertion that being called a honky was not in the same league as being called a nigger, one reader responded, “We should be in the business of ending racism, not measuring on a politically correct thermometer the degree to which one is more victimized than another.”
⁵⁹
Declining to enter into a discussion comparing the Holocaust with American slavery, a distinguished historian quipped that he refused to become an accountant of atrocity. His demurral is understandable: sometimes the process of comparison degenerates into divisive competitions among minority groups that insist upon jealously defending their victim status.
⁶⁰
Because the Jewish Holocaust is the best known and most widely vilified atrocity in modern times, many use it as an analogical yardstick for the purpose of highlighting their own tragedies. Hence Iris Chang dubbed the Japanese army's Rape of Nanking during World War II “the forgotten holocaust,”
⁶¹
Larry Kramer titled his reportage on the early days of the AIDS crisis
Reports from the Holocaust,
⁶²
and Toni Morrison dedicated her novel
Beloved
to the “sixty million and more”—a figure undoubtedly calculated to play off the familiar six million, the number of Jews generally thought to have perished at
the hands of the Nazis.
⁶³
At the same time, some who are intent upon propounding the uniqueness of the Holocaust aggressively reject analogies to it, as if comparing it to other atrocities could only belittle the Nazis’ heinous crime.
⁶⁴

We could, of course, avoid making comparisons. Instead of saying that the Holocaust was the
worst
atrocity of the twentieth century, we could say simply that the Holocaust was terrible. Instead of saying that
nigger
has been the
most
socially destructive racial epithet in the American language, we could say merely that, when used derogatorily,
nigger
is a socially destructive epithet. Although such a strategy may have certain diplomatic merits, it deprives audiences of assistance in making qualitative judgments. After all, there is a difference between the massacre that kills fifty and the one that kills five hundred—or five thousand or fifty thousand. By the same token, the stigmatizing power of different racial insults can vary.

A comedy sketch dramatized by Richard Pryor and Chevy Chase on the television show
Saturday Night Live
makes this point vividly. Chase is interviewing Pryor for a job as a janitor and administers a word-association test that goes like this:

It is impossible to declare with confidence that when hurled as an insult,
nigger
necessarily inflicts more distress than other racial epithets. Individuals beset by thugs may well feel equally terrified whether those thugs are screaming “Kill the honky” or “Kill the nigger.” In the aggregate, though,
nigger
is and has long been the most socially consequential racial insult. Consider, for example, the striking disparity of incidence that distinguishes
nigger
from other racial epithets appearing in
reported court opinions. In reported federal and state cases in the LEXIS-NEXIS data base (as of July
2001
),
kike
appears in eighty-four cases,
wetback
in fifty,
gook
in ninety, and
honky
in
286
.
⁶⁶
These cases reveal cruelty, terror, brutality, and heartache. Still, the frequency of these slurs is overwhelmed by that of
nigger
, which appears in
4,219
reported decisions.
⁶⁷

Reported court opinions are hardly a perfect mirror of social life in America; they are merely an opaque reflection that poses real difficulties of interpretation. The social meaning of litigation is ambiguous. It may represent an attempt to remedy real injury, or it may mark cynical exploitation of increased intolerance for racism. The very act of bringing a lawsuit may express a sense of empowerment, but declining to bring one may do so as well, signaling that a person or group has means other than cumbersome litigation by which to settle scores or vindicate rights. That there is more litigation in which
nigger
appears could mean that usage of the term is more prevalent than usage of analogous epithets; that its usage is associated with more dramatic injuries; that targets of
nigger
are more aggrieved or more willing and able to sue; or that authorities—police, prosecutors, judges, or juries—are more receptive to this species of complaint. I do not know which of these hypotheses best explains the salience of
nigger
in the jurisprudence of racial epithets. What cannot plausibly be doubted, however, is the fact of
nigger's
baleful preeminence.

Nigger
first appears in the reports of the United States Supreme Court in a decision announced in
1871
. The case,
Blyew v. United States
,
⁶⁸
dealt with the prosecution for murder of two white men who, for racial reasons, had hacked to death
several members of a black family. According to a witness, one of the codefendants had declared that “there would soon be another war about the niggers” and that when it came, he “intended to go to killing niggers.”
⁶⁹

In the years since, federal and state courts have heard hundreds of cases in which the word
nigger
figured in episodes of racially motivated violence, threats, and arson. Particularly memorable among these was the successful prosecution of Robert Montgomery for violation of federal criminal statutes.
⁷⁰
In
1988
, in Indianapolis, state authorities established a residential treatment center for convicted child molesters in an all-white neighborhood. From the center's opening until mid-
1991
—a period during which all of the residents of the center were white—neighbors voiced no objections. In June
1991
, however, authorities converted the center into a shelter for approximately forty homeless veterans, twenty-five of whom were black. Soon thereafter trouble erupted as a group of whites, including Montgomery, loudly proclaimed their opposition to the encroachment of “niggers” and burned a cross and vandalized a car to express their feelings. An all-white cadre of child molesters was evidently acceptable, but the presence of blacks made a racially integrated group of homeless
veterans
intolerable!

If
nigger
represented only an insulting slur and was associated only with racial animus, this book would not exist, for the term would be insufficiently interesting to warrant extended study.
Nigger
is fascinating precisely because it has been put to a variety of uses and can radiate a wide array of meanings.
Unsurprisingly, blacks have often used
nigger
for different purposes than racist whites. To lampoon slavery, blacks created the story of the slave caught eating one of his master's pigs. “Yes, suh, Massa,” the slave quipped, “you got less pig now, but you sho’ got more nigger.”
⁷¹
To poke fun at the grisly phenomenon of lynching, African Americans told of the black man who, upon seeing a white woman pass by, said, “Lawd, will I ever?” A white man responded, “No, nigger, never.” The black man replied, “Where there's life, there's hope.” And the white man declared, “Where there's a nigger, there's a rope.”
⁷²
To dramatize the tragic reality of Jim Crow subjugation, African Americans recounted the tale of the Negro who got off a bus down south. Seeing a white policeman, he politely asked for the time. The policeman hit him twice with a club and said, “Two o'clock, nigger. Why?” “No reason, Cap'n,” the black man answered. “I's just glad it ain't twelve.”
⁷³
And to satirize “legal” disenfranchisement, African Americans told the joke about the black man who attempted to register to vote. After the man answered a battery of questions that were far more difficult than any posed to whites, an official confronted him with a headline in a Chinese paper and demanded a translation. “Yeah, I know what it means,” the black man said. “It means that niggers don't vote in Mississippi again this year.”
⁷⁴
In the
1960
s and
1970
s, protest became more direct and more assertive. Drafted to fight a “white man's war” in Vietnam, Muhammad Ali refused to be inducted into the U.S. Army, explaining, “No Vietcong ever called me ‘nigger.’ ”
⁷⁵
Emphasizing the depth of white racism all across the United
States, activists joked, “What is a Negro with a Ph.D.?” Their response? “Dr. Nigger.”

In his famous “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” Martin Luther King Jr. continued to agitate, listing in wrenching detail the indignities that prompted his impatience with tardy reform. He cited having to sleep in automobiles because of racial exclusion from motels, having to explain to his children why they could not go to amusement parks open to the white public, and being “harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tip-toe stance never quite knowing what to expect next.” Among King's litany of abuses was the humiliating way in which whites routinely addressed blacks: “Your wife and mother,” he observed, “are never given the respected title ‘Mrs.,’ ” and under the etiquette of Jim Crow, “your first name becomes ‘nigger’ and your middle name becomes ‘boy’ (however old you are) and your last name becomes ‘John.’ ”
⁷⁶

For some observers, the only legitimate use of
nigger
is as a rhetorical boomerang against racists. There are others, however, who approvingly note a wide range of additional usages. According to Professor Clarence Major, when
nigger
is “used by black people among themselves, [it] is a racial term with undertones of warmth and good will—reflecting … a tragicomic sensibility that is aware of black history.”
⁷⁷
The writer Claude Brown once admiringly described
nigger
as “perhaps the most soulful word in the world,”
⁷⁸
and journalist Jarvis DeBerry calls it “beautiful in its multiplicity of functions.” “I am not aware,” DeBerry writes, “of any other word capable of
expressing so many contradictory emotions.”
⁷⁹
Traditionally an insult,
nigger
can also be a compliment, as in “He played like a nigger.” Historically a signal of hostility, it can also be a salutation announcing affection, as in “This is my main nigger.” A term of belittlement,
nigger
can also be a term of respect, as in “James Brown is a straight-up nigger.” A word that can bring forth bitter tears in certain circumstances,
nigger
can prompt joyful laughter in others.
⁸⁰