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Permanently retire the word “nigger.” This was the call from a collective of black political figures in Los Angeles recently, in the wake of Michael Richards’ racist diatribe at a Los Angeles comedy club. The press conference where the appeal made was emblematic of a moment where the circulation of the images of “blackness” throughout the globe has created a moment of crisis in some sectors of the black community. The basic tropes of “blackness” – black culture, black identity, black institutions – have been distorted, remixed, and undermined by the logic of the current global economy. At stake is the preservation of a “modern” blackness – that blackness which was posited and circulated as a buffer against white supremacy, political disenfranchisement, slavery, Jim Crow segregation and the collusion of racist imaginations and commodities culture in the early 20th century. In many sectors “blackness” is literally thought to be under siege. It is in this context that many of the contemporary tropes of “blackness” that circulate in commercial popular culture, particularly in popular music, film and music video, are deemed threats to blackness – as tropes of an erosive and inauthentic blackness that is as threatening to the Black Public proper as “death” itself. This sense of threat, has been, perhaps, most powerfully expressed in these debates over the use of the word “nigger” in popular culture which highlight a philosophical divide within “blackness.”
"In many sectors “blackness” is literally thought to be under siege."
It is in the context of this divide that I posit my own “nigger” theory. Whereas the term “nigger” references notions of “blackness” as landlocked, immobile, static, segregated, and an embodiment of black racial subjects in the pre-20th century South, I would like to argue that the term “nigga” (and its attendant variations) relates to concepts of blackness as mobile, fluid, adaptable, post-modern, urban, and embodying various forms of social and rhetorical flow that are fully realized within the narratives of hip-hop. In other words, there are myriad meanings, uses and possibilities that have always been associated with the term “nigger.” In large part the debates over the term “nigger/nigga” represent a crisis of interpretation. The failure of some to discern the distinction is akin to what Samuel R. Delaney calls a discursive collision. According to Delaney, “The sign that a discursive collision has occurred is that the former meaning has been forgotten and the careless reader, not alert to the details of the changed social context, reads the older rhetorical figure as if it were the newer.” (See Samuel R. Delaney, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue [New York: New York University Press, 1999], 119.)
There is perhaps no word within American Vernacular English (AVE) that has elicited more animus among blacks than the term “nigger.” There is little dispute over the fact that the term “nigger” has been a staple of white supremacist discourse often employed to shorthand commonly held societal beliefs about black folk as being less than human or more powerfully less than “American” (as in “just a nigger”), while also tactically deployed as a direct attack on individual and group black self esteem, hence its power as a racial epithet. Indeed legal scholar Randall Kennedy writes in his book “Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word” that “If nigger represented only an insulting slur and was associated only with animus, this book would not exist, for the term would be insufficiently interesting to warrant an extended study.” Kennedy further describes “nigger” status as “paradigmatic slur…the epithet that generates other epithets.”
"By the time I was three, nigger was as familiar as mama, daddy, brother, uncle, aunt."
“Nigger’s” status as “paradigmatic slur” highlights the complexity of it’s usage, even in the face of the word’s obvious negative connotations. Kennedy cites the autobiography of Helen Jackson Lee who in describing her Cousin Bea, acknowledged she had “a hundred different ways of saying nigger.” (See Helen Jackson Lee, Nigger in the Window [New York: Doubleday and Company, Inc., 1978], 27). Lee acknowledges her familiarity with the word growing up in Virginia during the during the World War I era, reflecting that “By the time I was three, nigger was as familiar as mama, daddy, brother, uncle, aunt.” But it was her Cousin Bea’s use of the word – the first person she heard use the term – that brought the word’s complexity alive for her:
“[L]istening 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 feelings.”
Lee’s comments suggest the possibility of seeing “nigger” not simply as a word entrenched in racist discourse, but as the basis for a hybrid black identity – one that speaks the complexity of people of African descent who live in the United States. Though many blacks in the United States and elsewhere are likely to reject such logic as a meaningful defense of the word’s casual use, such examples of “nigger” usage prominently circulate throughout the world of Hip-Hop culture and by extension American youth culture.
