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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
Kennedy notes that both Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson used the word, but also that Truman desegregated the armed forces and that Johnson secured the passage of the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act and the Fair Housing Act, as well as appointing Thurgood Marshall (for whom Kennedy clerked) to the Supreme Court. He knows, to borrow a phrase from Jesse Jackson, to attribute their use of "nigger" to their heads and not their hearts. And Kennedy notes a host of white writers who have used the word, a list that encompasses not just Mark Twain and Harriet Beecher Stowe but Eugene O'Neill, Joyce Carol Oates, E.L. Doctorow and Carl Van Vechten, whose novel "Nigger Heaven" is credited as one of the high points of the Harlem Renaissance.
Kennedy argues that our skittishness about "nigger" runs the risk of fetishizing it. In all the coverage of Mark Furhman's testimony during the O.J. Simpson trial, there was something infantilizing about the constant use of the euphemism "the N-word," as if to report accurately what Fuhrman said were the same as endorsing it. Take such squeamishness a little further and you have the shameful attack on David Howard, the white director of a Washington D.C. municipal agency who told his staff that, in light of budget cutbacks, he would have to be "niggardly" with funds. An uproar followed that resulted in Howard's resignation, which was accepted by Mayor Anthony Williams on the grounds that Howard had shown poor judgment.
Even some of the commentators who admitted that they knew that "niggardly" has no relation to "nigger" (the origins of the first word predate those of "nigger" by about 300 years) still condemned Howard. They were answered by the columnist Tony Snow, who wrote, "David Howard got fired because some people in public employ were morons who a) didn't know the meaning of the word 'niggardly' b) didn't know how to use a dictionary to discover the word's meaning and c) actually demanded that he apologize for their ignorance."
There was a similar protest about a University of Wisconsin at Madison professor who used "niggardly" during a Chaucer class -- this time the complaint came from a student to whom the professor had explained the word's origins. And a professor at Jefferson Community College in Louisville was dismissed because of the lone protest of one black student (out of nine in class of 22) upset by the professor's inclusion of "nigger" in a class discussion on taboo words.
These are examples of stupidity masquerading as sensitivity. In one sense, though, as even the professor in the Louisville case acknowledged, that sole protesting student had a point. "Nigger" is an enormously loaded word, and there's cause for worry when it's divorced from its potential to hurt (that doesn't, however, mean that hurt feelings should trump intellectual inquiry).
The irony, though, of the word's reemergence is that it's largely due to its use among African-Americans, particularly comics and hip-hoppers. Kennedy writes that the word was taboo for most of the prominent black comics of the '60s -- people like Godfrey Cambridge, Dick Gregory, Nipsey Russell and the great Moms Mabley. Not that those comics didn't address racism or the battering it inflicted on black self-image. But it took Richard Pryor to make public the shared secret of the word's use among blacks.
"He seemed racially unconcerned," Kennedy writes of Pryor, "with deferring to any social conventions, particularly those that accepted black comedians as clowns but rejected them as satirists." That Pryor, as Kennedy notes, performed before mixed-race audiences made his gambit even more daring. It may be hard to remember now, but Pryor's performances were often initially very discomforting if you happened to be white. That's not just because he brought black hostility to whites onstage ("this is my favorite part of the show -- when the white people come back and find out niggers have taken their seats") but because he was offering up black rage and at the same time wasn't afraid to make fun of it.
If you were white, it wasn't uncommon to react with a nervous titter, wondering if it was appropriate to laugh. And yet such was Pryor's artistry that, in the course of his performance, those fears and taboos melted away, if not uniting audiences, then at least making them realize they were united in their preconceptions.
Arguably, Chris Rock has gone even further. Kennedy quotes at length from Rock's incendiary routine that begins "I love black people, but I hate niggers ... You can't do anything without some ignorant-ass niggers fucking it up." Anticipating charges that he shouldn't air his people's dirty laundry, Rock mocks blacks who say, "The media has distorted our image to make us look bad." To which he answers, "Do you think I've got three guns in my house because the media's outside my door trying to bust in?"
