Nigger: The Strange Career Of A Troublesome Word (5 page)

A candid portrayal of the N-word's use among African Americans may be found in Helen Jackson Lee's autobiography,
Nigger in the Window.
It was Lee's cousin who first introduced her to
nigger's
possibilities. As Lee remembered it, “Cousin Bea had a hundred different ways of saying
nigger;
listening to her, I learned the variety of meanings the word could assume. How it could be opened like an umbrella to cover a dozen different moods, or stretched like a rubber band to wrap up our family with other colored families.…
Nigger
was a piece-of-clay word that you could shape … to express your feelings.”
⁸¹

Nigger
has long been featured in black folk humor. There is the story, for example, of the young boy inspired by a minister's sermon on loving all of God's creatures. Finding a frozen rattlesnake, he nicely put the animal under his shirt to warm it up. “Nigger, I'm gonna bite the hell out of you!” the snake announced upon its revival. “Mr. Snake,” the boy asked, “you mean to say you gonna bite me after I followed the preacher's teaching and took you to my bosom?” “Hell yeah, nigger,” the snake replied. “You knew I was a snake, didn't you?”
⁸²

Before the
1970
s, however,
nigger
seldom figured in the
routines of professional comedians. It was especially rare in the acts of those who performed for racially mixed audiences. Asserting that unmentionable slurs derived much of their seductive power from their taboo status, the iconoclastic white comedian Lenny Bruce recommended a strategy of subversion through overuse. In a
1963
routine, Bruce suggested with characteristic verve that “if President Kennedy got on television and said, ‘Tonight I'd like to introduce the niggers in my cabinet,’ and he yelled ‘Niggerniggerniggerniggernigger-niggernigger’ at every nigger he saw… till
nigger
didn't mean anything anymore, till
nigger
lost its meaning… you'd never hear any four-year-old nigger cry when he came home from school.”
⁸³

But Bruce was unusual, and in terms of the N-word, he failed to inspire emulation. While the hip comedians of the
1950
s and
1960
s—Dick Gregory, Nipsey Russell, Mort Sahl, Godfrey Cambridge, Moms Mabley, Redd Foxx—told sexually risqué or politically barbed jokes,
nigger
for the most part remained off-limits.

All that changed with the emergence of Richard Pryor.
⁸⁴
Through live performances and a string of albums, he brought
nigger
to center stage in stand-up comedy, displaying with consummate artistry its multiple meanings.

Pryor's single best performance may be heard on the aptly titled
That Nigger's Crazy
, winner of the
1974
Grammy Award for best comedy recording. The album explores Pryor's professional fears (“Hope I'm funny… because I know niggers ready to kick ass”), blacks’ alleged ability to avoid certain sorts of danger (“Niggers never get burned up in buildings.…

White folks just panic, run to the door, fall all over each other.… Niggers get outside,
then
argue”), black parenting styles (“My father was one of them eleven-o'clock niggers”), comparative sociology (“White folks fuck quiet; niggers make noise”), racial anthropology (“White folks… don't know how to play the dozens”), and social commentary (“Nothin’ can scare a nigger after four hundred years of this shit”).

The bit that often provokes the most applause from black listeners is Pryor's “Niggers vs. Police”:

Mel Watkins has rightly maintained that what made Richard Pryor a path-breaking figure was that he “introduce[d] and popularize[d] that unique, previously concealed or rejected part of
African-American humor that thrived in the lowest, most unassimilated portion of the black community.”
⁸⁵
He broke free, at least for a while, of all those—whites and blacks alike—who, sometimes for different reasons, shared an aversion to too much realism. He seemed radically unconcerned with deferring to any social conventions, particularly those that accepted black comedians as clowns but rejected them as satirists. Nothing more vividly symbolized his defiant, risk-taking spirit than his unprecedented playfulness regarding the explosive N-word in performances before racially mixed audiences.
⁸⁶

In the years since the release of
That Nigger's Crazy
, the N-word has become a staple in the routine of many black comedians. Among these, the one who most jarringly deploys it is Chris Rock, whose signature skit begins with the declaration “I love black people, but I hate niggers.” He goes on:

According to Rock, “niggers always want credit for some shit they're
supposed
to do. They'll say something like ‘I took care of my kids.’ ” Exploding with impatience, Rock interjects:

Rock asserts that “the worst thing about niggers is that they love to
not know.”
That's because, he says, “niggers don't read. Books are like Kryptonite to a nigger.”

Aware that some may condemn his routine as latter-day minstrelsy, racial betrayal, or a false pandering to antiblack prejudice, Rock exclaims near the end of his performance,

Rap is another genre of entertainment suffused with instances of
nigger.
A cursory survey just of titles yields Dr. Dre's “The Day the Niggas Took Over,” A Tribe Called Quest's “Sucka Nigga,” Jaz-Z's “Real Nigger,” the Geto Boys’ “Trigga Happy Nigga,” DMX's “My Niggas,” and Cypress Hill's “Killa Hill Nigga.” In “Gangsta's Paradise,” meanwhile, Coolio declares,

Ice-T says in one of his songs, “I'm a nigger not a colored man or a black or a Negro or an Afro-American.”
⁸⁹
Ice Cube, for his part, dubs himself “the Nigga ya love to hate,”
⁹⁰
And Beanie Sigel promises

One of the seminal influences in gangsta rap called itself N.W.A, short for “Niggaz Wit Attitude.” One of this group's
most popular albums was
Efilyzaggin
, which, read backward, is “Niggaz
4
Life. ”Tupac Shakur proclaimed that for him,
nigga
stood for “Never Ignorant, Gets Goals Accomplished.”
⁹²

Some people—I call them eradicationists—seek to drive
nigger
out of rap, comedy, and all other categories of entertainment even when (perhaps
especially
when) blacks themselves are the ones using the N-word. They see this usage as bestowing legitimacy on
nigger
and misleading those whites who have little direct interaction with African Americans. Eradicationists also maintain that blacks’ use of
nigger
is symptomatic of racial self-hatred or the internalization of white racism, thus the rhetorical equivalent of black-on-black crime.

There is something to both of these points. The use of
nigger
by black rappers and comedians has given the term a new currency and enhanced cachet such that many young whites yearn to use the term like the blacks whom they see as heroes or trendsetters. It is undoubtedly true, moreover, that in some cases, blacks’ use of
nigger
is indicative of an antiblack, self-hating prejudice. I myself first became aware of the term as a child in an all-black setting—my family household in Columbia, South Carolina—in which older relatives routinely attributed to negritude traits they disparaged, including tardiness, dishonesty, rudeness, impoverishment, cowardice, and stupidity. Such racial disparagement
of
blacks
by
blacks was by no means idiosyncratic. It is a widespread feature of African American culture that has given rise to a distinctive corpus of racial abasement typified by admonishments, epigraphs, and doggerel such as:

This tendency toward racial self-abnegation has been much diminished since the civil rights revolution. But it still retains a grip on the psyches of many black Americans and is searingly evident in a phrase well known in black circles: “Niggers ain't shit.”
⁹⁶

Self-hatred, however, is an implausible explanation for why many assertive, politically progressive African Americans continue to say “nigger” openly and frequently in conversations with one another. These are African Americans who, in their own minds at least, use
nigger
not in subjection to racial subordination but in defiance of it. Some deploy a long tradition, especially evident in black nationalist rhetoric, of using abusive criticism to spur action that is intended to erase any factual predicate for the condemnation voiced. An example is writing by the Last Poets, a group established in
1968
that merged poetry, music, and politics in forms that anticipated certain types of rap. A famous item in the Last Poets’ repertoire
was “Niggers Are Scared of Revolution,” in which they charged that:

Describing their intentions, Umar Bin Hassan writes that the poem constituted a “call to arms” because “niggers are human beings lost in somebody else's system of values and morals.”
⁹⁸

Many blacks also do with
nigger
what other members of marginalized groups have done with slurs aimed at shaming them. They have thrown the slur right back in their oppressors’ faces. They have added a positive meaning to
nigger
, just as women, gays, lesbians, poor whites, and children born out of wedlock have defiantly appropriated and revalued such words as
bitch, cunt, queer, dyke, redneck, cracker
, and
bastard
⁹⁹

Yet another source of allegiance to
nigger
is a pessimistic
view of the African American predicament. Many blacks who use
nigger
in public before racially mixed audiences disdain dressing up their colloquial language. They do not even attempt to put their best foot forward for the purpose of impressing whites or eroding stereotypes because they see such missions as lost causes. They like to use
nigger
because it is a shorthand way of reminding themselves and everyone else precisely where they perceive themselves as standing in American society—the message being, “Always remember you's a nigger. As Bruce A. Jacobs observes,
l
o proclaim oneself a nigger is to declare to the disapproving mainstream, ‘You can't fire me. I quit.’ Hence the perennial popularity of the word. Among poor black youth who… carry a burning resentment of white society. To growl that one is a nigga is a seductive gesture… that can feel bitterly empowering.”
¹⁰⁰