Nigger: The Strange Career Of A Troublesome Word Read online

  Matsuda, however, minimizes the reality of cultural conflict within groups. As we have seen, for example, blacks differ sharply over the use of nigger. Some condemn it absolutely, unequivocally, across the board, no matter who is voicing the hated N-word and no matter what the setting. This has long been so. Writing in 1940, Langston Hughes remarked:

  The word nigger to colored people of high and low degree is like a red rag to a bull. Used rightly or wrongly, ironically or seriously, of necessity for the sake of realism, or impishly for the sake of comedy[,] it doesn't matter. Negroes do not like it in any book or play whatsoever, be the book or play ever so sympathetic in its treatment of the basic problems of the race. The word nigger, you see, sums up for us who are colored all the bitter years of insult and struggle in America.77

  Hughes overgeneralized. All Negroes do not react to nigger in the way he described. Hughes himself did not; he applauded his friend Carl Van Vechten's novel Nigger Heaven. He was also certainly aware that blacks used “nigger” freely when outside the presence of whites.78 Hughes was correct, though, in suggesting that some blacks—then as now—detest nigger so thoroughly that they eschew efforts to distinguish between good and bad usages of the term and instead condemn it out of hand. “Everyone should refrain from [using the N-word] and provide negative sanctions on its use by others,” black-studies professor Halford H. Fairchild has argued. What about blacks’ using the term ironically, as a term of affection? “The persistent viability of the N-word in the black community,” Fairchild writes, “is a scar from centuries of cultural racism.”79 Voicing the same message, Ron Nelson, an editor of the University of North Carolina newspaper, notes that while “most blacks… understand the implications and racist history of the word nigger, it has somehow dangerously and disturbingly found its way into everyday language.” Castigating blacks’ playful use of the N-word as “self-defeating,” “hypocritical,” and “absurd,” Nelson asserts that its usage “creates an atmosphere of acceptance [in which whites wonder,] After all, if blacks themselves do it, why can't others[?]”80 The Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist E. R. Shipp is of the same opinion. In an article revealingly entitled “N-Word Just as Vile When Uttered by Blacks,” Shipp declared that “there needs to be no confusion.…The N-word has no place in contemporary life or language.”81

  Bill Cosby is another who attacks blacks’ use of nigger. Addressing African American comedians, Cosby has argued that when nigger pops out of their mouths as entertainment, all blacks are hurt. He fears that white onlookers will have negative impressions of African Americans reinforced when blacks laughingly bandy about the N-word. He fears that many whites largely ignorant of black America will be all too literal-minded and will fail to understand the joke. Notwithstanding Cosby's criticisms and pleas, many black comedians have continued to give nigger a prominent place in their acts. Several of them were mainstays of Def Comedy Jam, a popular show that appeared on the Home Box Office cable-television network in the 1990s. Taking aim at Def Comedy Jam, Cosby likened it to an updated Amos 'n’ Andy: “When you watch [Def Comedy Jam], you hear a statement or a joke and it says ‘niggers.’ And sometimes they say ‘we niggers.’ And we are laughing [at it], just as we laughed at Amos 'n'Andy in the fifties. But we don't realize that there are people watching who know nothing about us. This is the only picture they have of us other than our mothers going to work in their homes and pushing their children in the carriages and dusting their houses.… And they say, ‘Yeah, that's them. Just like we thought.’ ”82

  Cosby's reference to Amos 'n’ Andy was intended to damn Def Comedy Jam by associating it with a program that some blacks regard as a terrible affront to African Americans.83 Amos 'n’ Andy began as a radio show in 1928. It was written and dramatized by two white men with roots in minstrelsy who animated the misadventures of a group of blacks living and working in Harlem. Episodes of the show focused on marital woes and infidelities, inept efforts to realize professional or entrepreneurial ambitions, and petty bickering within a semi-secret fraternal order named the Mystic Knights of the Sea. Among the show's personalities were Andy (an amiable dunce), the Kingfish (a schemer who constantly bilked stupid Andy), Amos (an earnest taxicab driver), Algonquin J. Calhoun (an inept and unethical attorney), Sapphire (Andy's angry, contemptuous, shrewish wife), and Lightnin’ (a slow, easily befuddled housepainter).

  Amos 'n’ Andy was one of the most successful programs in the history of radio. It inspired a comic strip, a candy bar, greeting cards, phonograph records, and a film. It coined phrases—for example, “holy mackerel”—that have become embedded in colloquial speech, and touched hundreds of thousands of Americans in all manner of surprising ways. Owners of restaurants, hotels, and movie theaters piped the show into their establishments for fear that if they didn't, customers would leave in droves to hear the latest installment. Eleanor Roosevelt was a fan, as was Huey P. Long, the flamboyant, demagogic governor of Louisiana, who nicknamed himself Kingfish under the show's influence.

  In 1951, when Amos 'n Andy moved to television, an all-black cast (the first on network TV) superseded the white men who had previously supplied the voices of the black characters. Although the show lasted only two seasons, syndicated reruns would be aired on local television stations until the mid-1960s.

  Amos 'n’ Andy's harshest critics denounced it as “the ultimate metaphor of whites’ casual contempt for blacks.”84 W. J. Walls, a bishop in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, contended in 1929 that the radio program degraded blacks by presenting African American characters with “crude, repetitional, moronic mannerisms” who spoke “gibbberish.” Bishop Walls stated that there did exist “unlettered and mentally imbecilic” Negroes. But Amos 'n Andy, in his view, focused unduly on that “rapidly decreasing” portion of the African American population, thereby allowing “the crude deeds of unfortunates to be paraded as the order and pattern of a whole people.” Responding to defenders who pointed out that the word nigger was never heard on the show, the bishop suggested that blacks needed to cease being satisfied with merely the absence of the worst racial derogation.85

  Robert L. Vann, the editor of the Pittsburgh Courier, also attacked Amos 'n’ Andy. In 1931 he launched a drive to obtain one million signatures on a petition demanding that the Federal Radio Commission ban the program. The petition complained that “two white men… have been exploiting certain types of American Negro for purely commercial gain” and that their representations “are of such character as to prove detrimental to the self-respect and general advancement of the Negro.” More specifically, “Negro womanhood has been broadcast to the world as indulging in bigamy, lawyers as schemers and crooks and Negro Secret Orders as organizations where money is filched from… members by dishonest methods, thereby placing all these activities among Negroes in a most harmful and degrading light.”86 According to the Courier, 740,000 people eventually signed the petition.

  A third important critic of Amos 'nAndy was the NAACP. When the program switched over to television in 1951, the country's foremost guardian of black advancement vigorously objected. Until that point the organization had refrained from criticism, but according to the NAACP leadership, “The visual impact [of the television show makes it] infinitely worse than the radio version.” Anticipating Bill Cosby's annoyance with Def Comedy Jam, NAACP officials asserted that Amos 'n Andy “say[s] to millions of white Americans who know nothing about Negroes… that this is the way Negroes are.”87

  A thorough assessment of such critiques requires an acknowledgment of the plurality of tastes, aspirations, interests, and perspectives within African American communities.88 While an appreciable number of blacks repudiated Amos 'n’ Andy, many others enjoyed it, a fact memorialized in letters, newspaper accounts, and the racial demographics of the show's audience. Black support, moreover, extended beyond the ranks of ordinary folk, finding a foothold in institutions and among cadres of intellectuals and activists. Thus, even as the Pittsburgh Courier was railing agai
nst the white authors of Amos 'n’ Andy, the Chicago Defender, the nation's leading black weekly newspaper, was designating them honored guests at a parade and picnic on that city's South Side. In 1930, a young black journalist who would eventually head the NAACP defended Amos 'n Andy and criticized its critics. According to Roy Wilkins, black opponents of the show should stop “sniffing about with [their] heads in the clouds,” put aside “false pride,” and start producing some humor of their own that would earn a share of the hundreds of thousands of dollars that the white producers of Amos 'n Andy were making. Wilkins saw nothing wrong with the portraiture generated by Amos 'n Andy. How would critics wish to have the show's characters presented? he asked. “In plug hats, with morning coat, striped trousers, glassined hair, spats, patent leather shoes, and an Oxford accent? Instead of having them struggling with the immediate and universal problem of how to get and keep a decent and usable spare tire for the taxicab, would [the critics] have them prating about mergers, mortgages, international loans and foreign trade balances?” Praising its “universal appeal,” Wilkins concluded that Amos 'n'Andy was “clean fun from beginning to end,” with “all the pathos, humor, vanity, glory, problems and solutions that beset ordinary mortals.”89

  Wilkins's perspective was by no means idiosyncratic. A prominent black attorney in Worcester, Massachusetts, declared that he could discern no good objection to Amos 'n Andy; he found the show truly funny and dismissed the racial critique of the series as nothing more than the whining of blacks who were “thin-skinned” and “supersensitive.”90 Interpreting the show completely differently than its detractors, a black fan in Chicago maintained that Amos 'n’ Andy showed that “the Negro race has and does… produce people who are worthwhile.”91 Theophilus Lewis, an acerbic black columnist for the Amsterdam News, suggested that the Courier's petition campaign against the program would serve one good end: “When they complete their tally of signatures we will know precisely how many half-wits there are in the race.”92

  In the 1950s, when debate shifted to the fate of Amos 'n Andy on television, black opinion remained divided, though its opponents had gained considerable ground. As head of the NAACP, Roy Wilkins switched sides and called for the show to be taken off the air. In adopting that position he was supported by, among others, Thurgood Marshall (who would later, as we have seen, become the first black Supreme Court justice) and William Hastie (who would be the first black to sit on a federal court of appeals). Nevertheless, as Bill Cosby recognized, many blacks continued to support the show. In an ad hoc “man in the street” survey conducted by the black Journal and Guide newspaper in Norfolk, Virginia, a large majority of blacks voiced approval of Amos 'n’ Andy. A poll taken by an opinion-research firm hired by an advertiser found the same result: among 365 black adults contacted in New York and New Jersey, 70 percent expressed a favorable view of the program.93

  Today's conflicts over nigger replicate yesterday's conflicts over Amos 'nAndy. Among the supporters of that show were black entertainers who stood to make money and gain visibility by participating in its production. Among the supporters of Def Comedy Jam and other, similar programs of our own day are black performers hungry for a break; to them, Bill Cosby's militant aversion to the N-word as entertainment is an indulgence that they themselves are hardly in a position to afford. Black critics of the campaign against Amos 'n’ Andy charged that the show's detractors were excessively concerned about white people's perceptions. Today a similar charge is leveled. Some entertainers who openly use nigger reject Cosby's politics of respectability, which counsels African Americans to mind their manners and mouths in the presence of whites. This group of performers doubts the efficacy of seeking to burnish the image of African Americans in the eyes of white folk. Some think that the racial perceptions of most whites are beyond changing; others believe that whatever marginal benefits a politics of respectability may yield are not worth the psychic cost of giving up or diluting cultural rituals that blacks enjoy. This latter attitude is effectively expressed by the remark “I don't give a fuck.” These entertainers don't care whether whites find nigger upsetting. They don't care whether whites are confused by blacks’ use of the term. And they don't care whether whites who hear blacks using the N-word think that African Americans lack self-respect. The black comedians and rappers who use and enjoy nigger care principally, perhaps exclusively, about what they themselves think, desire, and enjoy—which is part of their allure. Many people (including me) are drawn to these performers despite their many faults because, among other things, they exhibit a bracing independence. They eschew boring conventions, including the one that maintains, despite massive evidence to the contrary, that nigger can mean only one thing.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  How Are We Doing with Nigger?

  Although references to nigger continue to cause social eruptions, major institutions of American life are handling this combustible word about right. Where the most powerful and respected political and professional positions are at stake, public opinion has effectively stigmatized nigger-as-insult. Anyone with ambitions to occupy a high public post, for example, had better refrain from ever using nigger in any of its various senses, because the N-word rankles so many people so deeply. Political prudence counsels strict avoidance. We now know that a man can become president of the United States even if he is overheard calling someone an asshole, but the same is no longer true of a person who refers to another as a nigger: too many voters view such conduct as utterly disqualifying. It is precisely because seasoned politicians know better than ever to utter the word nigger publicly that mouths dropped open when, during a television appearance in March 2001, Senator Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia talked about having seen “a lot of white niggers in [his] time”—a remark for which he quickly apologized.1

  Reinforcing public opinion is the coercive power of government as manifested in tort law and antidiscrimination statutes. As we have seen, in certain situations victims of racial harassment can obtain money damages and other relief from their tormentors or from employers who fail to address harassment that is brought to their attention.

  Various forces prevent the complete eradication of nigger-as-insult. Some of these are negative, such as vestigial racism and toleration of it; in many settings it is still the case that a habit of using nigger-as-insult does not much hurt one's reputation. It is also true, however, that positive forces militate in favor of the survival of nigger-as-insult. One such is libertarianism in matters of linguistic expression. Protecting foul, disgusting, hateful, unpopular speech against governmental censorship is a great achievement of American political culture.

  As a linguistic landmark, nigger is being renovated. Blacks use the term with novel ease to refer to other blacks, even in the presence of those who are not African American. Whites are increasingly referring to other whites as niggers, and indeed, the term both as an insult and as a sign of affection is being affixed to people of all sorts. In some settings, its usage is so routine as to have become virtually standard. Nigger as a harbinger of hatred, fear, contempt, and violence remains current, to be sure. But more than ever before, nigger also signals other meanings and generates other reactions, depending on the circumstances. This complexity has its costs. Miscues are bound to proliferate as speakers and audiences misjudge one another. The Latina singing star Jennifer Lopez said that she was surprised when some African Americans accused her of bigotry on account of lyrics in one of her songs that referred to niggers. Maybe she was merely posturing; controversy is often good for record sales. But maybe she was expressing genuine astonishment; after all, many African American female entertainers sing lyrics containing nigger without raising eyebrows. Perhaps a dual misunderstanding was at work, as Lopez mistook how she would be perceived and disappointed listeners mistook her sentiments.2 The popular film Rush Hour spoofs this reality. In one of its scenes, a black character (played by Chris Tucker) is warmly received after saluting a black acquaintance as “my nigger,” while a Chinese man (pl
ayed by Jackie Chan) sparks fisticuffs when he innocently mimics Tucker's use of the N-word.3

  A diminished ability to stigmatize the word is another cost. As nigger is more widely disseminated and its complexity is more widely appreciated, censuring its use—even its use as an insult—will become more difficult. The more aware judges and other officials become of the ambiguity surrounding nigger, the less likely they will be to automatically condemn the actions taken by whites who voice the N-word. This tendency will doubtless, in certain instances, lead to unfortunate results, as decision makers show undue solicitude toward racists who use the rhetoric of complexity to cover their misconduct.

  Still, despite these costs, there is much to be gained by allowing people of all backgrounds to yank nigger away from white supremacists, to subvert its ugliest denotation, and to convert the N-word from a negative into a positive appellation. This process is already well under way, led in the main by African American innovators who are taming, civilizing, and transmuting “the filthiest, dirtiest, nastiest word in the English language.” For bad and for good, nigger is thus destined to remain with us for many years to come—a reminder of the ironies and dilemmas, the tragedies and glories, of the American experience.