Nigger: The Strange Career Of A Troublesome Word (6 page)

Two additional considerations also warrant notice here, both of them having to do with the power of words to simultaneously create and divide communities. Some blacks use
nigger
to set themselves off from Negroes who refuse to use it. To proclaim oneself a nigger is to identify oneself as real, authentic, uncut, unassimilated, and unassimilable—the opposite, in short, of a Negro, someone whose rejection of
nigger
is seen as part of an effort to blend into the white mainstream. Sprinkling one's language with
niggers
is thus a way to “keep it real.”
¹⁰¹

Roping off cultural turf is another aim of some blacks who continue to use
nigger
in spite of its stigmatized status. Certain forms of black cultural expression have become commercially valuable, and black cultural entrepreneurs fear that these
forms will be exploited by white performers who will adopt them and, tapping white-skin privilege, obtain compensation far outstripping that paid to black performers. This is, of course, a realistic fear in light of the long history of white entertainers’ becoming rich and famous by marketing in whiteface cultural innovations authored by their underappreciated black counterparts. A counterstrategy is to seed black cultural expression with gestures that are widely viewed as being off-limits to whites. Saying “nigger” is one such gesture. Even whites who immerse themselves in black hip-hop culture typically refrain from openly and unabashedly saying “nigger” like their black heroes or colleagues, for fear that it might be perceived as a sign of disrespect rather than one of solidarity.

Some nonwhite entertainers have used
nigger
in their acts. John Lennon and Yoko Ono, for example, entitled a song “Woman Is the Nigger of the World,”
¹⁰²
and Patti Smith wrote “Rock 'n’ Roll Nigger.”
¹⁰³
But Lennon, Ono, and Smith performed in overwhelmingly white milieus. Rap, by contrast, is dominated by blacks. A few white rappers have achieved commercial success and won the respect of black artists and audiences. I am thinking here especially of the white rapper Eminem, a superstar in the hip-hop culture. Eminem has assumed many of the distinctive mannerisms of his black rap colleagues, making himself into a “brother” in many ways—in his music, his diction, his gait, his clothes, his associations. He refuses to say, however, any version of a word that his black hip-hop colleagues employ constantly as a matter of course; the nonchalance with which he tosses around epithets such as
bitch
and
faggot
does not extend to
nigger.
“That word,” he insists, “is not even in my vocabulary.”
¹⁰⁴

Eminem is certainly following a prudent course, for many people, white and black alike, disapprove of a white person saying “nigger” under virtually any circumstance. “When we call each other ‘nigger’ it means no harm,” Ice Cube remarks. “But if a white person uses it, it's something different, it's a racist word.”
¹⁰⁵
Professor Michael Eric Dyson likewise asserts that whites must know and stay in their racial place when it comes to saying “nigger.” He writes that “most white folk attracted to black culture know better than to cross a line drawn in the sand of racial history.
Nigger
has never been cool when spit from white lips.”
¹⁰⁶

The race line that Dyson applauds, however, is a specious divide. There is nothing necessarily wrong with a white person saying “nigger,” just as there is nothing necessarily wrong with a black person saying it. What should matter is the context in which the word is spoken—the speaker's aims, effects, alternatives. To condemn whites who use the N-word without regard to context is simply to make a fetish of
nigger.
Harriet Beecher Stowe
(Uncle Tom's Cabin)
, Mark Twain
(Huckleberry Finn)
, William Dean Howells
(An Imperative Duty)
, Edward Sheldon
(The Nigger)
, Eugene O'Neill
(All God's Chillun)
, Lillian Smith
(Strange Fruit)
, Sinclair Lewis
(Kingsblood Royal)
, Joyce Carol Oates
(Them)
, E. L. Doctorow
(Ragtime)
, John Grisham
(A Time to Kill)
, and numerous other white writers have unveiled
nigger
-as-insult in order to dramatize and condemn racism's baleful presence.

In
1967
, President Lyndon Baines Johnson decided to
appoint an African American to the Supreme Court for the first time in American history. First on Johnson's list of candidates was Thurgood Marshall—“Mr. Civil Rights,” the hero of
Brown v. Board of Education
and, of course, the man he ended up putting on the Court. But before he announced his selection, Johnson asked an assistant to identify some other possible candidates. The aide mentioned A. Leon Higginbotham, whom Johnson had appointed to the federal trial bench. Reportedly, the president dismissed the suggestion with the comment “The only two people who have ever heard of Judge Higgin-botham are you and his momma. When I appoint a nigger to the [Supreme Court], I want everyone to know he's a nigger.”
¹⁰⁷
Was the use of
nigger
in this context a venting of racial prejudice? Maybe. Johnson had been raised in a thoroughly racist environment, had supported racist policies for a long period, and, as we have seen, casually used
nigger
as part of his private vocabulary before he became president. On this particular occasion, however, it seems likely that he was merely seeking to highlight the racial exclusion against which he was acting, parodying the old regime even as he sought to reform it. If this is an accurate assessment of the situation, I see nothing wrong with what Johnson said, and I applaud what he did. Can a relationship between a black person and a white one be such that the white person should properly feel authorized, at least within the confines of that relationship, to use the N-word? For me the answer is yes. Carl Van Vechten, for instance, wrote of “niggers” in correspondence with his friend Langston Hughes,
¹⁰⁸
and Hughes did not object (though he did once write that
nigger
was a red flag for all Negroes).
¹⁰⁹
Should
Hughes have objected? No. Van Vechten, a key supporter of the Harlem Renaissance, had shown time and again that he abhorred racial prejudice, would do what he could to improve the fortunes of African Americans, and treasured his black friends. It was against this backdrop of achieved trust that Hughes (and other black writers) rightly permitted Van Vechten to use
nigger
as so many African Americans have used it—as an ironic, shorthand spoof on the absurdity of American race relations.
¹¹⁰

As we have seen,
nigger
can mean many different things, depending upon, among other variables, intonation, the location of the interaction, and the relationship between the speaker and those to whom he is speaking. Generally a reference to people of color, particularly blacks,
nigger
can refer to people of any hue. Senator Robert C. Byrd (D–West Virginia) got into trouble for saying publicly that he “had seen a lot of white niggers in [his] time.”
¹¹¹
But more and more the word is being applied ecumenically. Sociologist John Hartigan reports that poor whites in Detroit often refer to their white neighbors as
niggers.
¹¹²
Typically they mean the word as an insult. But they do not necessarily mean for it to be a
racial
insult. Responding to an inquiry about a white-on-white deployment of
nigger
, one of the participants in Hartigan's study remarked: “He's a nigger, man, and you know what I mean by that. He's an asshole, and it doesn't matter whether a person's black or white, orange or plaid, he can still be a nigger if he runs his mouth like that asshole.”
¹¹³
Another white Detroiter observed by Hartigan echoed this sentiment. “You don't have to be black to be a nigger,” he declared. “Niggers come in all colors.”
(Interestingly, he added: “We are all colored.…There's about a hundred shades of white.”)
¹¹⁴

The linguist Arthur K. Spears has also discerned an appreciable revision of
nigger's
racial usage. He writes that “White public school teachers hear themselves referred to as ‘that White nigga’ or simply ‘nigga,’ and [that] Asian Americans in San Francisco can be heard, as they navigate high school hallways, to call one another niggas.”
¹¹⁵

More vividly than most words, then,
nigger
illustrates Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes's observation that “a word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged.” A word is instead “the skin of a living thought [that] may vary greatly in color and content according to the circumstances and the time in which it is used.”
¹¹⁶

I
n September
1957
, Congressman Charles C. Diggs Jr. of Michigan traveled to Sumner, Mississippi, to see firsthand the trial of two white men charged with the murder of a black fourteen-year-old from Chicago. Emmett Till had been killed for violating Jim Crow etiquette by, among other things, whistling at the wife of one of the defendants. In Sumner, Diggs encountered segregation in full bloom. Greeting a bevy of black reporters from across the country, the local sheriff cheerfully shouted, “Hello, niggers,” without a hint of self-consciousness. One of these reporters, James Hicks of the
Amsterdam News
, sought to secure a seat in the segregated courtroom for Representative Diggs. Professor Stephen J. Whitfield tells what happened:

Although
nigger
was in the air throughout the Emmett Till case—from the promising indictment to the appalling acquittal—debate over the word did not play a central role in the litigation. In many other cases, though, such debate has occupied a salient place in the legal wrangling, generating a distinctive jurisprudence that can be divided into at least four categories. The first of these comprises cases in which a party seeks relief after it is revealed that officials within the criminal justice system—jurors, lawyers, or judges—have referred to blacks as niggers. The second encompasses cases in which an individual
who kills another seeks to have his culpability diminished on the grounds that he was provoked when the other party called him a nigger. The third type of case involves controversies surrounding targets of racial invective who sue for damages under tort law or antidiscrimination statutes. And the fourth category consists of situations in which a judge must decide whether or not to permit jurors to be told about the linguistic habits of witnesses or litigants.

In
1978
in Columbus, Georgia, a jury handed down a death sentence for one William Henry Hance, who had committed multiple murders. After the trial two jurors revealed that they had heard fellow jurors make racially derogatory remarks about the defendant. More specifically, one juror maintained that during their deliberation, other jurors had referred to Hance as a “typical nigger” and “just one more sorry nigger that no one would miss.” No court investigated the accuracy of these allegations prior to Hance's execution.
²

Any defendant who seeks to challenge a conviction or sentence on the basis of prejudiced jury deliberations is very unlikely to prevail. First, federal and state rules of evidence stringently exclude juror testimony that impeaches a jury's verdict. And second, many jurisdictions require defendants to show actual prejudice resulting from juror misconduct.
³

It is understandable that the legal system should want to promote finality, protect jurors from harassment, and shield the privacy and independence of jury deliberations. Still, it is chilling to think that a person could be sentenced to death pursuant to deliberations tainted by
nigger.
⁴
The use of the
word raises concerns not only about the attitudes of the jurors who said it but also about the attitudes of the jurors who
heard
it. In
1985
social psychologists Jeff Greenberg and Tom Pyszczynki performed an experiment aimed at determining how listeners were affected by overhearing racial slurs directed at specific targets. They asked groups of white college students to judge debates between white and black contestants. Immediately after the debates, persons working in concert with the experimenters either derogatorily referred to the black contestants as niggers, criticized them in a nonracist manner, or made no comment at all. Greenberg and Pyszczynki found that observers who overheard the insult exhibited a marked tendency to lower their evaluation of the slurred black debaters. This suggested, the researchers argued, that racial slurs “can indeed cue prejudiced behavior in those who are exposed to [such slurs],” a phenomenon that could well have practical significance in such settings as “parole board meetings, promotion committee meetings, and jury deliberations, in which [racial] slurs may be expressed by one member of a group, be overheard, and then affect the evaluations of the target by other members of the group.”
Nigger
, Greenberg and Pyszczynki concluded, was not merely a symptom of prejudice but a carrier of the disease.
⁵
The risk in
Hance
was thus not simply that the manifest racial prejudice of two jurors might have eroded
their
ability to determine facts and set an appropriate punishment, but also that the use
of nigger
might have transmitted the pair's prejudice to other jurors, awakening latent biases or creating racial animus where none had previously existed.