Say It Loud, Say It Proud: Nigger vs. The-N-Word

There’s a movement to eliminate “nigger” from American vernacular, and replace it with “the N-word”. Only an angst-hobbled Caucasian or an African-American surrounded by angst-hobbled Caucasians could think up such a harebrained scheme. I’ve got news for fans of the insipid “the N-word.” “Nigger” is here to stay.

Many white folks would have been denied early entree to Black America without the rough and ready use of “Nigger”.  I was six when Johnny Northrup made the necessary introductions. We were standing at the end of his driveway on Garden Street, in Rocky Hill, Connecticut (In spite of our northness of the Mason-Dixon line, we Yankees still had occasion to use the word).  We just stood there, me not knowing for what. Just as Johnny knew would happen right about that time, the front door to Johnny’s house opened up and out popped a woman. “That,” Johnny proclaimed, as sure as a steel I-beam, “is a nigger.” I squinted at what he was pointing at and thought in one of those straight inferential lines that only a six-year-old can think – What’s different? Oh! Black face. Nigger! Another truckload of tar on the road to enlightenment.

It came in handy after we moved to Connecticut’s hardscrabble capital city, Hartford, home to more blacks and Puerto Ricans than whites.  At age 11, my best friend was a black kid named Bruce Vaughan. One day, we were playing King-of-the-hill on the dirt pile that Reverend Zezzo was going to use as the base of a new stone patio. Bruce was getting the best of me, so I elbowed him, and he slugged me in the gut as payback. I had learned a few things since I learned “nigger”. Between gasping and tears, I unleashed “All you niggers should go back to Africa!” This was my ace-in-the-hole. Bruce’s face dropped. He took on the quiet countenance of a boy without a meaner retort. Without a word, he trudged down the dirt pile, through three backyards, back home.

Next day, Bruce called. “Hey, Geoff. My Mom’s not home. Wanna come over? We can go up on the roof and throw chunks of chimney brick at cars.” “Sure,” I answered. Even then, we knew that words, dictionary definitions, and intent, did not always march together in lockstep.

One day, Bruce and I caught a couple of Puerto Rican kids our age in the neighborhood. Black and white in the same neighborhood is one thing. Puerto Ricans are another. We had to draw the line somewhere, we thought.  They were amazingly fast. We were fast, too, and could run all day without getting winded. But they somehow stayed a hundred feet in front of us for a solid mile, over dirt, pavement, and chain link fences. Fear will do that to you. Maybe it’s also what kept us a hundred feet back.

Johnny Northrup hadn’t taught me about territorial limits. The chase ended at Cherry Street, which Bruce and I quickly learned was a colony of Puerto Rico. Bruce must have thought that behind every Puerto Rican was a black avenger, because he plunged into the thick of a crowd of relatives and acquaintances of our quarry. I stayed back a safe distance. There was lots of amused laughter from the crowd. Oye! When was the last time we had a nigger on Cherry Street? It was cause for celebration and a few flurries of fists. No permanent damage. Just a message to the unwise and unwelcome. Bruce was sniffling a bit, but no blubbering, as he meekly shuffled back to me, the rear guard, while holding his sore gut. He never questioned my cowardice, and I never questioned his bravery.

Back home, I sought solace from my father, who was fixing something in the basement. I described for him a mob of filthy Spics mercilessly whaling on “us.” “What is it with those goddamned Spics?” I asked, in a rising, quavering voice. His answer was a withering look, like I was a dog turd that had sprouted legs and lips. “Get outa here,” he snarled. “And don’t come back until you can talk some sense.” More tar.

That was one thing about Dad. Never once did I ever hear him say “nigger” or “Spic” or any term that denigrates any possible category of human beings other than evil-doers, whom, he made clear, is a sub-category of the human race in all its colors and creeds. Not that I didn’t think he had occasional cause. Once, Grandma got mugged by a black man outside her apartment, on Dauntless Lane, in Hartford. She was thrown to the sidewalk so violently that her hip shattered. Another time, Dad was trying to help some young black man get a job. The man threw a fit about something or other and cold cocked him. Our house was often broken into by black burglars. And every summer, from 1967 to 1970, Hartford was torn by race riots. Still, no “nigger” from Dad. It was one of his non-negotiable verities: There is one standard, and one only, by which you judge a man – his character.

Coincidentally, as I write this on Feb. 24, 2007, a fresh CNN headline has come into view that reads “Alabama college hosts n-word conference.” The conference is described as a “four-day forum to address origin of epithet, whether variations are acceptable.” What could possibly suck the life out of a party faster than a debate, in all earnestness, about whether “nigga” is okay, but “nigger” is not. Imagine intelligent, well-meaning folks carrying on in that vein for four days! Someone could have saved them a lot of time and aggravation by handing out the lyrics to “Colored Spade”, from the 1967 musical “Hair” -  the standard reference for all acceptable variations of “nigger”:

The CNN article quotes a professor who claims that while Whites are using the word less frequently, they are still thinking it.  They must be alluding to some new contraption at the airport: Sir, would you please step through the n-word thought-detector? Remove all racially-insensitive paraphernalia and place it in the bin.

There will be serious economic and cultural consequences of a successful purge of “nigger” from our vocabulary. As “nigger” goes, so will go “ho’”, “booty”, “beatch”, and a whole host of irreplaceable terms, without which the entire Rap and Hip-hop music industries will collapse. Comedy will also suffer a body blow. Every Richard Pryor album and joke will have to go under the censor’s scalpel. A sanitized Richard Pryor joke would go something like this:

“Ya know what Chinese people can do? Eat with sticks! Swear to deity-word! I seent a Chinese man have two sticks like this and a bowl of food, didn’t drop a deity-word opposite-of-blessed-word speck! N-words lose three pounds of food with a knife and pronged-eating-utensil-word¹!”   

What lurks behind this misguided effort is the fear that the constant, casual, benignly intentioned usage of “nigger” is depriving youngsters of an appreciation of the original sense of the word as an expression of hatred, ignorance, and malign intent. This fear, like so many other fears in America, is overwrought. It implies that we and future generations are too stupid to deal with the variety of intentions and meanings of those who continue to use “nigger.”

 Another misconception is that the current usage of “nigger” and its variants leads to lower self-esteem. Here they have the cart before the horse. Or, more accurately, a cart without a horse. Being born out of wedlock, with an absentee father, should be the focus of those concerned about self-esteem. Having no father figure to help a hard-working mother check homework, mete out punishment and guidance, and show up for parent-teacher conferences, is a combination of haymakers to one’s self-esteem. Those are the personal and familial components of self-esteem. Use of the word “nigger” supposedly affects a racial component of self-esteem. Yet the racial component is the easiest to vigorously, positively reinforce. What other race or nation of people have been subjected to centuries of oppression, yet emerged with such dignity and cultural strength? Now that African-Americans are free to find or lose their way with the rest of us, it is too easy to ask “Why do African-Americans have such entrenched problems - high rates of out-of-wedlock births, high rates of violent crime, and relatively low levels of educational achievement? Why do their communities seem so bereft of leadership?” Equally valid questions are: “Why are there any African-Americans left? Why didn’t they all commit suicide or get hauled off to the asylum after all the lynching, raping, cultural pillaging, enslavement, Jim Crow, poll taxing, segregation.  Every conceivable insult and injury has been committed against the African-American community for over two hundred years. How in God’s name did they have the superhuman fortitude and spirit to overcome such unrelenting oppression?”

After all that African-Americans have overcome, to claim that the 21^st century use of the word “nigger”, which predominantly occurs in conversations between African-Americans, could have a significant impact on their self-esteem is a bunch of F-word B-word.

 1 – “fork” is a little too close to the F-word for comfort. And “the-FO-word” is already taken.

 Acknowledgment: The title of this essay was partly inspired by the James Brown hit “Say It Loud (I’m Black and I’m Proud).”