Page 3 of 3
"Real capital accumulation comes from the circulation of black 'representations' (niggas) throughout the globe."
Judy is of course talking about very traditional notions of labor – cotton picking, sharecropping, factory and domestic work and other forms of menial labor – the kind of labor that has defined the black experience in the United States that is, per Mexican President Vincente Fox, now largely the province of new immigrant workers from Mexico. In the context of the contemporary labor force, the “field nigger” is now rendered too expensive, though some might argue that many “field niggers” view themselves as being above such labor in the aftermath of the social gains made by blacks since the late 1950s. Regardless, some young black laborers were forced into illicit and underground sites of labor, including the prison industrial complex – the drug economy and the ****ography industry being two of those sites – and in the process have helped redefine the very idea of labor by elevating hustling as an act of necessary self-preservation in an era when the kinds of jobs that sustained the working-class lifestyles of their parents and grand-parents, have been lost to foreign laborers.
Hip-Hop’s brilliance (if we could call it that), was not only to exploit the narratives of “nigga laborers,” but if we consider how much contemporary rap music and videos traffic in the bodies of nearly naked black women, hip-hop clearly also exploits the bodies of those “nigga laborers.” In fact one could argue that hip-hop produces a surplus labor – rappers, ballers, video-hoes, thugs and strippers are a dime a dozen within the discourses of hip-hop. As sociologist Roderick Ferguson suggests, this surplus labor only heightens the sense that hip-hop is outside of a normative blackness: “As surplus labor becomes the impetus for anxieties about the sanctity of ‘community’, ‘family’ and ‘nation’, it reveals the ways in which these categories are normalized in terms of race, gender, sexuality, and class. Indeed the production of labor, ultimately, throws the normative boundaries of race, gender, class and sexuality into confusion.” (See Roderick Ferguson, Aberrations in Black: Toward a ***** of Color Critique [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004], 17.)
"Banning the word ‘nigger’ will not erode the realities of white supremacy."
Judy defines authenticity as “adaptation to the force of commodification.” In this regard, Judy argues that “Nigga is not an essential identity, strategic or otherwise, but rather indicates the historicity of indeterminate identity” (Judy, 229). This notion of “indeterminate identity” is echoed in literary scholar Saidiya Hartman’s description of the black slave – the organic “nigger as property” – in her book Scenes of Subjection where she asserts that the “fungibility of the commodity makes the captive body an abstract and empty vessel vulnerable to the projection of others feelings, ideas, desires, and values; and as property, the dispossessed body of the enslaved is the surrogate for the master’s body since it guarantees his disembodied universality and acts as the sign of his power.”
While Hartman may have been talking about the white elites within a 19th century “slavocracy,” more than a century later, some within the black community use “niggas” as the empty vessel to project their hatred, disgust and embarrassment with those black bodies that don’t fit some bourgeois and idiosyncratic notion of who “real” black people are supposed to be. Banning the word “nigger” will not erode the realities of white supremacy, but at least for some, it will further diminish the visibility of those within our ranks who some feel are not deserving of the very humanity that we all seek.
- The author of four books, Mark Anthony Neal is a professor of African-American and Women’s Studies at Duke University, where he also directs the Institute for Critical U.S. Studies. This article is adapted from the essay “Nigga: The 21st Century Theoretical Superhero” from Mark Anthony Neal’s forthcoming book The TNI-Mixtape. He can be contacted at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
- Reprinted with permission from BLACK AGENDA REPORT: The Weekly Magazine of African American political thought and action
BLOG COMMENTS POWERED BY DISQUS
