Nigger: The Strange Career Of A Troublesome Word

by Randall Kennedy

  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.

  THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED TO

  The Board

  Gary E. Bell, Chairman for Life

  Thaddeus J. Bel

  Reginald S. Bel

  Veta T. Bell Faison

  William Hopkins

  Henry H. Kennedy Jr.

  Angela S. Kennedy Acree

  Randall L. Kennedy

  James L. Price Jr.

  Clement A. Price

  Jarmila L. Price

  Cyril O. “Butch” Spann Jr.

  This book is also dedicated to the parents of all the board members.

  Special recognition is given to Anna Spann Price, Hattie Lillian Spann Bell, and Rachel Spann Kennedy, the surviving daughters of Sellers Spann and Lillian V. Spann (Big Mama). These three extraordinary women have generously offered guidance, support, discipline, wisdom, and love to all the members of The Board.

  CONTENTS

  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 ’50s and ’60s 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 1960s. 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 nigg
er 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 ’60s and ’70s, 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.

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Protean N-Word

  How should nigger be defined? Is it a part of the American cultural inheritance that warrants preservation? Why does nigger generate such powerful reactions? Is it a more hurtful racial epithet than insults such as kike, wop, wetback, mick, chink, and gook? Am I wrongfully offending the sensibilities of readers right now by spelling out nigger instead of using a euphemism such as N-word? Should blacks be able to use nigger in ways forbidden to others? Should the law view nigger as a provocation that reduces the culpability of a person who responds to it violently? Under what circumstances, if any, should a person be ousted from his or her job for saying “nigger”? What methods are useful for depriving nigger of destructiveness? In the pages that follow, I will pursue these and related questions. I will put a tracer on nigger, report on its use, and assess the controversies to which it gives rise. I have invested energy in this endeavor because nigger is a key word in the lexicon of race relations and thus an important term in American politics. To be ignorant of its meanings and effects is to make oneself vulnerable to all manner of perils, including the loss of a job, a reputation, a friend, even one's life.1

  Let's turn first to etymology. Nigger is derived from the Latin word for the color black, niger.2 According to the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang, it did not originate as a slur but took on a derogatory connotation over time. Nigger and other words related to it have been spelled in a variety of ways, including niggah, nigguh, niggur, and niggar. When John Rolfe recorded in his journal the first shipment of Africans to Virg
inia in 1619, he listed them as “negar s.” A 1689 inventory of an estate in Brooklyn, New York, made mention of an enslaved “niggor” boy. The seminal lexicographer Noah Webster referred to Negroes as “negers.” (Currently some people insist upon distinguishing nigger—which they see as exclusively an insult—from nigga, which they view as a term capable of signaling friendly salutation.)3 In the 1700s niger appeared in what the dictionary describes as “dignified argumentation” such as Samuel Se wall's denunciation of slavery, The Selling of Joseph. No one knows precisely when or how niger turned derisively into nigger and attained a pejorative meaning.4 We do know, however, that by the end of the first third of the nineteenth century, nigger had already become a familiar and influential insult.

  In A Treatise on the Intellectual Character and Civil and Political Condition of the Colored People of the United States: and the Prejudice Exercised Towards Them (1837), Hosea Easton wrote that nigger “is an opprobrious term, employed to impose contempt upon [blacks] as an inferior race.…The term in itself would be perfectly harmless were it used only to distinguish one class of society from another; but it is not used with that intent.… [I]t flows from the fountain of purpose to injure.” Easton averred that often the earliest instruction white adults gave to white children prominently featured the word nigger. Adults reprimanded them for being “worse than niggers,” for being “ignorant as niggers,” for having “no more credit than niggers;” they disciplined them by telling them that unless they behaved they would be carried off by “the old nigger” or made to sit with “niggers” or consigned to the “nigger seat,” which was, of course, a place of shame.5