Nigger: The Strange Career Of A Troublesome Word Read online

  The musician Branford Marsalis has said he cannot remember a time when he was not being called “nigger.” “If you grew up in the South,” he observed, whites “called you nigger from the time you were born.”44

  Reminiscing about the first time someone called her “nigger,” the journalist Lonnae O'Neal Parker described a trip she took to Centralia, Illinois, with her parents when she was five years old. She was playing in a park when

  two white girls walked up to me.… They were big. Impossibly big. Eleven at least. They smiled at me.

  “Are you a nigger?” one of the girls asked.…

  I stood very still. And my stomach grew icy.… “I, I don't know,” I told her, shrugging my shoulders high to my ears.…

  Then the other repeated, more forcefully this time, “Are you a nigger? You know, a black person?” she asked.

  I wanted to answer her. To say something. But fear made me confused. I had no words. I just stood there. And tried not to wet my panties.

  Then I ran.45

  Responding to Parker's published recollection, a reader shared two stories of her own. Brenda Woodford wrote that in the predominantly white middle-class community where she grew up, little white boys on bicycles would constantly encircle her, chanting, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” Later Woodford continued to be shadowed by nigger. On one occasion, the word flew out of the mouth of a white man during an argument; at the time, she thought he loved her.46

  In 1973, at the very moment he stood poised to break Babe Ruth's record for career home runs, the baseball superstar Hank Aaron encountered nigger-as-insult on a massive scale, largely in the form of hateful letters:

  Dear Nigger,

  Everybody loved Babe Ruth. You will be the most hated man in this country if you break his career home run record.

  Dear Black Boy,

  Listen Black Boy, we don't want no nigger Babe Ruth.

  Dear Mr. Nigger,

  I hope you don't break the Babe's record. How can I tell my kids that a nigger did it?

  Dear Nigger,

  You can hit all dem home runs over dem short fences, but you can't take dat black off yo face.

  Dear Nigger,

  You black animal, I hope you never live long enough to hit more home runs than the great Babe Ruth.…

  Dear Nigger Henry,

  You are [not] going to break this record established by the great Babe Ruth if you can help it.…Whites are far more superior than jungle bunnies.… My gun is watching your every black move.47

  An offshoot of nigger is nigger lover, a label affixed to non-blacks who become friendly with African Americans or openly side with them in racial controversies. In the Civil War era, Republicans’ antislavery politics won them the appellation “black Republicans” or “nigger lovers.” To discredit Abraham Lincoln, his racist Democratic party opponents wrote a “Black Republican Prayer” that ended with the “benediction”

  May the blessings of Emancipation extend throughout our unhappy land, and the illustrious, sweet-scented Sambo nestle in the bosom of every Abolition woman… and the distinction of color be forever consigned to oblivion [so] that we may live in bands of fraternal love, union and equality with the Almighty Nigger, henceforth, now and forever. Amen.48

  One of Senator Charles Sumner's white constituents in Massachusetts suggested sneeringly that his exertions in favor of abolition amounted only to “riding the ‘nigger’ hobby.”49 Another dissatisfied constituent maintained that the senator suffered from “a deep-seated nigger cancer,” that he could “speak of nothing but the ‘sublime nigger,’ ” and that his speeches offered nothing but “the nigger at the beginning, nigger in the middle, and nigger at the end.”50

  A century later, during the civil rights revolution, whites who joined black civil rights protesters were frequently referred to as nigger lovers. When white and black “freedom riders” rode together on a bus in violation of (unlawful) local Jim Crow custom, a bigoted white driver took delight in delivering them to a furious crowd of racists in Anniston, Alabama. Cheerfully anticipating the beatings to come, the driver yelled to the mob, “Well, boys, here they are. I brought you some niggers and nigger lovers.”51 Speaking to a rally in Baltimore, Maryland, a spokesman for the National States Rights Party declared confidently that most “nigger lovers are sick in the mind” and “should be bound, hung, and killed.”52

  The term nigger lover continues to be heard amid the background noise that accompanies racial conflict. Whites who refrain from discriminating against blacks, whites who become intimate with blacks, whites who confront antiblack practices, whites who work on the electoral campaigns of black candidates, whites who nominate blacks for membership in clubs, whites who protect blacks in the course of their official duties, and whites who merely socialize with blacks are all subject to being derided as “nigger lovers.”53

  Over the years, nigger has become the best known of the American language's many racial insults, evolving into the paradigmatic slur. It is the epithet that generates epithets. That is why Arabs are called “sand niggers,” Irish “the niggers of Europe,” and Palestinians “the niggers of the Middle East;” why black bowling balls have been called “nigger eggs,” games of craps “nigger golf,” watermelons “nigger hams,” rolls of one-dollar bills “nigger rolls,” bad luck “nigger luck,” gossip “nigger news,” and heavy boots “nigger stompers.”54

  Observers have made strong claims on behalf of the special status of nigger as a racial insult. The journalist Farai Chideya describes it as “the all-American trump card, the nuclear bomb of racial epithets.”55 The writer Andrew Hacker has asserted that among slurs of any sort, nigger “stands alone [in] its power to tear at one's insides.”56 Judge Stephen Reinhardt deems nigger “the most noxious racial epithet in the contemporary American lexicon.”57 And prosecutor Christopher Dar den famously branded nigger the “filthiest, dirtiest, nastiest word in the English language.”58

  The claim that nigger is the superlative racial epithet—the most hurtful, the most fearsome, the most dangerous, the most noxious—necessarily involves comparing oppressions and prioritizing victim status. Some scoff at this enterprise. Objecting to a columnist's assertion that being called a honky was not in the same league as being called a nigger, one reader responded, “We should be in the business of ending racism, not measuring on a politically correct thermometer the degree to which one is more victimized than another.”59 Declining to enter into a discussion comparing the Holocaust with American slavery, a distinguished historian quipped that he refused to become an accountant of atrocity. His demurral is understandable: sometimes the process of comparison degenerates into divisive competitions among minority groups that insist upon jealously defending their victim status.60 Because the Jewish Holocaust is the best known and most widely vilified atrocity in modern times, many use it as an analogical yardstick for the purpose of highlighting their own tragedies. Hence Iris Chang dubbed the Japanese army's Rape of Nanking during World War II “the forgotten holocaust,”61 Larry Kramer titled his reportage on the early days of the AIDS crisis Reports from the Holocaust,62 and Toni Morrison dedicated her novel Beloved to the “sixty million and more”—a figure undoubtedly calculated to play off the familiar six million, the number of Jews generally thought to have perished at the hands of the Nazis.63 At the same time, some who are intent upon propounding the uniqueness of the Holocaust aggressively reject analogies to it, as if comparing it to other atrocities could only belittle the Nazis’ heinous crime.64

  We could, of course, avoid making comparisons. Instead of saying that the Holocaust was the worst atrocity of the twentieth century, we could say simply that the Holocaust was terrible. Instead of saying that nigger has been the most socially destructive racial epithet in the American language, we could say merely that, when used derogatorily, nigger is a socially destructive epithet. Although such a strategy may have certain diplomatic merits, it deprives audiences of assistance in making qualitative judgments. After al
l, there is a difference between the massacre that kills fifty and the one that kills five hundred—or five thousand or fifty thousand. By the same token, the stigmatizing power of different racial insults can vary.

  A comedy sketch dramatized by Richard Pryor and Chevy Chase on the television show Saturday Night Live makes this point vividly. Chase is interviewing Pryor for a job as a janitor and administers a word-association test that goes like this:

  “ ‘White,’ ”says Chase.

  “ ‘Black,’ ” Pryor replies.

  “ ‘Bean.’ “ ‘Pod.’ ”

  “ ‘Negro.’ “

  “ ‘Whitey,’ ” Pryor replies lightly.

  “ ‘Tarbaby.’ ”

  “What did you say?” Pryor asks, puzzled.

  “ ‘Tarbaby,’ ” Chase repeats, monotone.

  “ ‘Ofay,’ ” Pryor says sharply.

  “ ‘Colored.’ “

  “ ‘Redneck!’ “

  “ ‘Jungle bunny!’ “

  “ ‘Peckerwood,’ ” Pryor yells.

  “ ‘Burrhead!’ “

  “ ‘Cracker.’ “

  “ ‘Spearchucker!’ “

  “ ‘White trash!’ “

  “ ‘Jungle bunny!’ “

  “ ‘Honky!’ ”

  “ ‘Spade!’ ”

  “ ‘Honky, honky!’ ”

  “ ‘Nigger,’ ” says Chase smugly [aware that, when pushed, he can always use that trump card].

  “ ‘Dead honky!’ ” Pryor growls [resorting to the threat of violence now that he has been outgunned in the verbal game of racial insult].65

  It is impossible to declare with confidence that when hurled as an insult, nigger necessarily inflicts more distress than other racial epithets. Individuals beset by thugs may well feel equally terrified whether those thugs are screaming “Kill the honky” or “Kill the nigger.” In the aggregate, though, nigger is and has long been the most socially consequential racial insult. Consider, for example, the striking disparity of incidence that distinguishes nigger from other racial epithets appearing in reported court opinions. In reported federal and state cases in the LEXIS-NEXIS data base (as of July 2001), kike appears in eighty-four cases, wetback in fifty, gook in ninety, and honky in 286.66 These cases reveal cruelty, terror, brutality, and heartache. Still, the frequency of these slurs is overwhelmed by that of nigger, which appears in 4,219 reported decisions.67

  Reported court opinions are hardly a perfect mirror of social life in America; they are merely an opaque reflection that poses real difficulties of interpretation. The social meaning of litigation is ambiguous. It may represent an attempt to remedy real injury, or it may mark cynical exploitation of increased intolerance for racism. The very act of bringing a lawsuit may express a sense of empowerment, but declining to bring one may do so as well, signaling that a person or group has means other than cumbersome litigation by which to settle scores or vindicate rights. That there is more litigation in which nigger appears could mean that usage of the term is more prevalent than usage of analogous epithets; that its usage is associated with more dramatic injuries; that targets of nigger are more aggrieved or more willing and able to sue; or that authorities—police, prosecutors, judges, or juries—are more receptive to this species of complaint. I do not know which of these hypotheses best explains the salience of nigger in the jurisprudence of racial epithets. What cannot plausibly be doubted, however, is the fact of nigger's baleful preeminence.

  Nigger first appears in the reports of the United States Supreme Court in a decision announced in 1871. The case, Blyew v. United States, 68 dealt with the prosecution for murder of two white men who, for racial reasons, had hacked to death several members of a black family. According to a witness, one of the codefendants had declared that “there would soon be another war about the niggers” and that when it came, he “intended to go to killing niggers.”69

  In the years since, federal and state courts have heard hundreds of cases in which the word nigger figured in episodes of racially motivated violence, threats, and arson. Particularly memorable among these was the successful prosecution of Robert Montgomery for violation of federal criminal statutes.70 In 1988, in Indianapolis, state authorities established a residential treatment center for convicted child molesters in an all-white neighborhood. From the center's opening until mid-1991—a period during which all of the residents of the center were white—neighbors voiced no objections. In June 1991, however, authorities converted the center into a shelter for approximately forty homeless veterans, twenty-five of whom were black. Soon thereafter trouble erupted as a group of whites, including Montgomery, loudly proclaimed their opposition to the encroachment of “niggers” and burned a cross and vandalized a car to express their feelings. An all-white cadre of child molesters was evidently acceptable, but the presence of blacks made a racially integrated group of homeless veterans intolerable!

  If nigger represented only an insulting slur and was associated only with racial animus, this book would not exist, for the term would be insufficiently interesting to warrant extended study. Nigger is fascinating precisely because it has been put to a variety of uses and can radiate a wide array of meanings. Unsurprisingly, blacks have often used nigger for different purposes than racist whites. To lampoon slavery, blacks created the story of the slave caught eating one of his master's pigs. “Yes, suh, Massa,” the slave quipped, “you got less pig now, but you sho’ got more nigger.”71 To poke fun at the grisly phenomenon of lynching, African Americans told of the black man who, upon seeing a white woman pass by, said, “Lawd, will I ever?” A white man responded, “No, nigger, never.” The black man replied, “Where there's life, there's hope.” And the white man declared, “Where there's a nigger, there's a rope.”72 To dramatize the tragic reality of Jim Crow subjugation, African Americans recounted the tale of the Negro who got off a bus down south. Seeing a white policeman, he politely asked for the time. The policeman hit him twice with a club and said, “Two o'clock, nigger. Why?” “No reason, Cap'n,” the black man answered. “I's just glad it ain't twelve.”73 And to satirize “legal” disenfranchisement, African Americans told the joke about the black man who attempted to register to vote. After the man answered a battery of questions that were far more difficult than any posed to whites, an official confronted him with a headline in a Chinese paper and demanded a translation. “Yeah, I know what it means,” the black man said. “It means that niggers don't vote in Mississippi again this year.”74 In the 1960s and 1970s, protest became more direct and more assertive. Drafted to fight a “white man's war” in Vietnam, Muhammad Ali refused to be inducted into the U.S. Army, explaining, “No Vietcong ever called me ‘nigger.’ ”75 Emphasizing the depth of white racism all across the United States, activists joked, “What is a Negro with a Ph.D.?” Their response? “Dr. Nigger.”

  In his famous “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” Martin Luther King Jr. continued to agitate, listing in wrenching detail the indignities that prompted his impatience with tardy reform. He cited having to sleep in automobiles because of racial exclusion from motels, having to explain to his children why they could not go to amusement parks open to the white public, and being “harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tip-toe stance never quite knowing what to expect next.” Among King's litany of abuses was the humiliating way in which whites routinely addressed blacks: “Your wife and mother,” he observed, “are never given the respected title ‘Mrs.,’ ” and under the etiquette of Jim Crow, “your first name becomes ‘nigger’ and your middle name becomes ‘boy’ (however old you are) and your last name becomes ‘John.’ ”76

  For some observers, the only legitimate use of nigger is as a rhetorical boomerang against racists. There are others, however, who approvingly note a wide range of additional usages. According to Professor Clarence Major, when nigger is “used by black people among themselves, [it] is a racial term with undertones of warmth and good will—reflecting …
a tragicomic sensibility that is aware of black history.”77 The writer Claude Brown once admiringly described nigger as “perhaps the most soulful word in the world,”78 and journalist Jarvis DeBerry calls it “beautiful in its multiplicity of functions.” “I am not aware,” DeBerry writes, “of any other word capable of expressing so many contradictory emotions.”79 Traditionally an insult, nigger can also be a compliment, as in “He played like a nigger.” Historically a signal of hostility, it can also be a salutation announcing affection, as in “This is my main nigger.” A term of belittlement, nigger can also be a term of respect, as in “James Brown is a straight-up nigger.” A word that can bring forth bitter tears in certain circumstances, nigger can prompt joyful laughter in others.80

  A candid portrayal of the N-word's use among African Americans may be found in Helen Jackson Lee's autobiography, Nigger in the Window. It was Lee's cousin who first introduced her to nigger's possibilities. As Lee remembered it, “Cousin Bea had a hundred different ways of saying nigger; listening 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 your feelings.”81

  Nigger has long been featured in black folk humor. There is the story, for example, of the young boy inspired by a minister's sermon on loving all of God's creatures. Finding a frozen rattlesnake, he nicely put the animal under his shirt to warm it up. “Nigger, I'm gonna bite the hell out of you!” the snake announced upon its revival. “Mr. Snake,” the boy asked, “you mean to say you gonna bite me after I followed the preacher's teaching and took you to my bosom?” “Hell yeah, nigger,” the snake replied. “You knew I was a snake, didn't you?”82