The problem is, once that door is opened, it can't be closed. Bill Cosby (whose brilliant '60s routines of family life did much to make whites and blacks understand what they had in common, and who should be honored for it) has objected vociferously to black comics' use of "nigger," saying it reinforces the worst image of blacks. (Pryor once advised Eddie Murphy to answer Cosby's criticisms by saying, "Tell Bill to have a Coke and a smile and shut the fuck up.") And the word has become common usage among far less talented comics. Murphy himself confronted his own contribution to that dubious legacy (exemplified by HBO's "Def Comedy Jam") in "The Nutty Professor," where we see a performance by a comedian (played by the black comic Dave Chapelle) that is the worst kind of minstrelsy.

Kennedy describes a sketch on one of Rock's CDs in which a white man who approaches Rock to compliment him on the critical things he says about blacks receives a punch in the mouth. "Rock's message is clear," Kennedy writes; "white people cannot rightly say about blacks some of the things that blacks themselves say about blacks."

That may be a double standard, but it's not one that violates the basic commonsense principle that context is everything. And it's a double standard we all abide by: "Just as a son is privileged to address his mother in ways that outsiders cannot (at least not in the son's presence), so, too, is a member of a race privileged to address his racial kin in ways proscribed to others." Even Pryor, at the end of "Live on the Sunset Strip," tells us he doesn't want to use "nigger" anymore, and especially doesn't want to hear it from "hip white people" telling "nigger jokes" (presumably in the same way that white hipsters made "spade" acceptable parlance in the '60s).

So, as schoolmarmish as he sounds, Cosby has a point about the new acceptability of the word. And hip-hop deserves as much blame or credit for that change as stand-up comedy does. Despite its huge audience among white teens, hip-hop is created largely by and for a black audience, and it often seems to want to harden racial divisions. I confess to wincing at times when I hear the word employed in hip-hop even though I rarely do when I hear blacks use "nigger" as a greeting or a good-natured barb. (That could be because I'm an occasional listener and hardly as immersed in the sound as I have been with other kinds of pop.) In his recent shamefully overlooked book on minstrel performers, "Where Dead Voices Gather," Nick Tosches says, "Examining the polar temperaments of minstrelsy and rap, it is clear that the latter has grown inevitably from the former; that, polar as they are, it is the shared umbilicus of fantasy that sustains and unites them ... Is an exaggerated pretense of being bad, dangerous, and lawless anything more than a variation on the exaggerated pretense of being benign, comical, docile?"

"Nigger" is, above all, an argument for the restoration of context and intent in judging uses of the word. Kennedy isn't just a good, clear writer, he's possessed of the uncommon virtue of common sense. That's particularly evident when he's writing on legal challenges involving the use of "nigger." Kennedy abhors things like campus speech codes, but he does allow that the word can create a hostile work environment and believes employers should be held liable for such. But in every instance he cites, whether it's a legal case or not, he makes common sense his standard.

By far the most intriguing such case that Kennedy writes about is a 1988 incident in Arkansas where a white high school teacher, fed up with her all-black class misbehaving, said, "I think you're trying to make me think you're a bunch of poor, dumb niggers, and I don't think that" [emphasis added]. Parents demanded her ouster, and the school board demanded her resignation, which she gave. Except that 124 out of 147 of the school's students (all but two of them black) signed a petition asking the school board to give the woman a second chance.

Clearly, the students could see that her remark, ill-chosen as it was, was not an expression of bigotry but of frustration. Had she really thought them "poor, dumb niggers," she wouldn't have added "and I don't think that." Kennedy calls the students' actions "a sensible and humane response," and continues, "The offer of a second chance ought not to be automatic but should instead hinge on such variables as the nature of the offender's position and the purpose behind his or her remark."

If there's a weakness to the book it's that, occasionally, Kennedy is a bit shaky as a cultural critic. When Kennedy notes, of "Huckleberry Finn," that "perceptive commentators have questioned its literary merits," he unfortunately cites Jane Smiley's hapless Harper's essay on the book, a singular piece of idiocy passing itself off as criticism. You might say that anyone too dumb to see that "Huckleberry Finn" is a profoundly anti-racist novel has already displayed stupidity enough for a lifetime. Smiley (whose previous literary judgments had included professing that, as a woman, she felt excluded from "King Lear") went further, holding up "Uncle Tom's Cabin" as a far superior book.

And Kennedy seems off to me in his recounting of the brouhaha over a flattering Boston Magazine profile of Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (who holds the humanities chair in Afro-American studies at Harvard) that was trumpeted on the magazine's cover with the legend "Head Negro in Charge." Kennedy rightly notes that the phrase is a "softened" version of the black saying "Head Nigger in Charge," and that's the problem. (Imagine Boston Magazine publishing a profile of Colin Powell with the headline "House Negro.") This is, I think, the one place in the book where Kennedy's insistence on context fails him. "Boston" is marketed to and read by a largely white, urban and suburban-urban audience. Now, you can't blame the magazine if an audience fails to get an intended irony, but I lived in Boston at the time and nothing I saw of then-editor Craig Unger's public defense of the headline gave any indication that he saw the irony or even the potential offensiveness of it.

But I'm sure Kennedy would forgive me for calling these niggling flaws. Kennedy's argument that "nigger" has far too complex a history, far too many uses, to ever have just one meaning makes his book an implicit plea not to limit the richness of African-American vernacular. There have been other controversies over that heritage in recent years, most notably in the arguments over Ebonics. The most sensible response came from Stanley Crouch, who argued that of course Ebonics exist and no, they shouldn't be taught.

Crouch said that black vernacular derives its richness in relation to traditional English and that its invention and humor could only be appreciated by someone who knows what it's riffing on to begin with. (That's an appropriate argument coming from someone who's written so well about jazz. It's like saying you have to know "Someday My Prince Will Come" or "My Favorite Things" to appreciate the changes Miles Davis and John Coltrane wrought on them.) And "nigger" is part of that heritage; the comedy of Richard Pryor, to cite one example, would be unthinkable without it. The power of "Nigger" is that Kennedy writes fully of the word, neither condemning its every use nor fantasizing that it can ever become solely a means of empowerment. The word "nigger," in all its uses, will always be with us. The book "Nigger," for the pleasures of its clarity of thought and prose, deserves to be, too.

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