Before the 1970s, 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 1950s and 1960s—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”:
Cops put a hurtin’ on your ass, man, y'know? They really degrade you.
White folks don't believe that shit, don't believe cops degrade you. [They say,] “Oh, c'mon, those people were resisting arrest. I'm tired of this harassment of police officers.” Police live in [a white] neighborhood, and [all his white neighbors] be knowin’ the man as Officer Tim-son. “Hello, Officer Timson, going bowling tonight? Yes, nice Pinto you have. Ha, ha.”
Niggers don't know 'em like that. See, white folks get a ticket, they pull over [and say], “Hey Officer, yes, glad to be of help.” Nigger got to be talkin’ about “I am reaching into my pocket for my license! 'Cause I don't wanta be no muthafuckin’ accident!”
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:
It's like our own personal civil war.
On the one side, there's black people.
On the other, you've got niggers.
The niggers have got to go. Every time black people want to have a good time, niggers mess it up. You can't do anything without some ignorant-ass niggers fucking it up.
Can't go to a movie the first week it opens. Why? Because niggers are shooting at the screen.…
You can't have anything in your house. Why? Because the niggers who live next door will break in, take it all, and then come over the next day and go, “We heard you got robbed.”
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:
You're supposed to, you dumb motherfucker. “I ain't never been to jail.”
Whaddya want? A cookie? You're not supposed to go to jail, you low-expectation-having motherfucker.
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,
I know what all you black [listeners] think.
“Man, why you got to say that? … It isn't us, it's the media. The media has distorted our image to make us look bad. Why must you come down on us like that, brother? It's not us, it's the media.”
Please cut the shit. When I go to the money machine at night, I'm not looking over my shoulder for the media.
I'm looking for niggers.
Ted Koppel never took anything from me. Niggers have. Do you think I've got three guns in my house because the media's outside my door trying to bust in?87
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,
I'm the kind of nigga
little homies want to be like
on their knees in the night
saying prayers in the streetlights88
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
I'ma ride with my niggas
die with my niggas
get high with my niggas
split pies with my niggas
till my body gets hard
soul touch the sky
till my numbers get called
and God shuts my eyes 91
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 whic
h 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:
Stop acting like a nigger.
I don't want nothing black but a Cadillac.93
Niggers and flies. Niggers and flies. The more I see niggers, the more I like flies.94
If you're white, you're right,
If you're yellow, you're mellow,
If you're brown, stick around,
If you're black, step back.95
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:
Niggers are scared of revolution but niggers shouldn't be scared of revolution because revolution is nothing but change, and all niggers do is change. Niggers come in from work and change into pimping clothes to hit the streets to make some quick change. Niggers change their hair from black to red to blond and hope like hell their looks will change. Niggers kill other niggers just because one didn't receive the correct change.…
Niggers shoot dope into their arms. Niggers shoot guns and rifles on New Year's Eve, a new year that is coming in where white police will do more shooting at them. Where are niggers when the revolution needs some shot? Yeah… you know, niggers are somewhere shooting the shit. Niggers are scared of revolution.97
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 bastard99
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, lo 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
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
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