Newsday
Jan 21, 2002
By Ron Howell
THIS IS ABOUT a word so offensive many people here don't want to see it in the paper.
A few years ago, hate-word haters tried to get it removed from the dictionary. Merriam-Webster, while refusing to go that far, added a section saying it "ranks as perhaps the most offensive and inflammatory racial slur in English."
The word, of course, is nigger.
Given its past association with slavery, lynching and segregation, it is ironic that the term is all but in vogue today, especially among young blacks who call their best friends "niggas" and sometimes use the word to refer to anyone at all.
Even more distressing to some is that Latinos, Asians and whites are saying it also. Like the young blacks, they are using the presumably friendly form of the word, with an "a" rather than an "er" at the end.
But in their ignorance, or perhaps even callousness, the non- black n-word-users are laying verbal time bombs around schools and workplaces, risking flare-ups with those who loathe the term.
Now, adding fuel to the controversy, Randall Kennedy, a black Harvard law professor, is arguing that it is good that people are employing the n-word in this supposedly benign fashion.
N-word-using rappers and comedians are brave pioneers, "trying to seize this word away [from the racists]. . . and turn it into a different sort of word," Kennedy said in an interview from his office in Cambridge, Mass.
He spoke as his new book, "Nigger," published by Pantheon, made its way onto shelves of bookstores around the nation.
One of Kennedy's cultural heroes is Chris Rock, the black comedian with a CD titled "Niggers vs. Black People." Rock uses the word to poke fun at muggers and welfare recipients. "I think that is a brilliant satirical piece that enhances our culture. . . . [H]e's documenting conversations that we've all heard in beauty parlors and in barber shops," Kennedy said.
The gadfly professor maintained that blacks will have to lose their "hypersensitivity" to the n-word, saying, "Our culture is a remarkably mobile, changeable culture, so that words don't stay the same."
Even before his current book, Kennedy had a knack for rankling other black scholars with his renegade views.
Derrick Bell, a black New York University Law School professor, once called him the "visiting scholar from Mars" and an "apologist" for white neo-conservatives.
Richard Delgado, a University of Colorado Law School professor, complained that Kennedy's book cover - with its bold-faced title "Nigger" - was chosen simply for its "shock effect, because it sells books."
He called Kennedy an "exploiter." "My position," said Delgado, a Mexican-American and author of "Words that Wound" (Westview Press, 1993), "is that generally words like spic, nigger, kike and faggot should be retired from the public vocabulary."
Despite the apparent growing acceptability of the n-term, it still causes pain, embarrassment and anger to millions of blacks, whites and others in America.
Publicist Nicole Balin complained that more and more whites are spicing their conversations with it, unconcerned that they might be offending liberal, socially conscious whites like herself.
"There's one expression they use so much. It's, 'Nigga, puh- lease.' Like, 'What the hell are you saying?' That's totally common for people to say at this point," said Balin, of Los Angeles, president of the public relations company Ballin' Entertainment.
Balin said she also was tired of whites going around repeating Chris Rock lines that disparage lower-class blacks. "I just can't handle that," she said. "I think it's kind of unfortunate that Chris Rock said that because it gives people the authority to say it."
The n-word, even used in Professor Kennedy's endearing sense, has created tension in offices where blacks and whites work together. A year ago, a white editor at New York-based Source magazine continually used it in his banter with others, even blacks.
One black female editor in particular blew a gasket. "She flipped," said one person familiar with the incident, who refused to be quoted by name. The black editor also got angry at some of her black colleagues.
"She said, 'How's this guy going to be saying this and you all black men are not doing anything?' She said if he said it in her presence she was going to punch him out herself," the person familiar with the encounter said.
Kim B. Narisetti, managing editor of the hip-hop publication, confirmed the episode. She said the white editor involved is well liked among the staff of about 22 editors and writers, but that the black woman's reaction was understandable, because "anytime you hear the word, it can get your back up."
Kennedy acknowledged that the phrase will continue to cause pain, but argued it will likely lose its sting as it's used more and more in neutral or affectionate ways.
Lenny Bruce, another of Kennedy's cultural heroes, said that very same thing back in the early 1960s.
In a 1963 skit quoted in Kennedy's book, Bruce said: "...if President [John F.] Kennedy got on television and said, 'Tonight I'd like to introduce the niggers in my cabinet,' and he yelled 'Nigger...till nigger didn't mean anything anymore ... you'd never hear any 4-year-old nigger cry when he came home from school."
BRUCE, HAD he lived, might have believed that some people were following his advice. With the emergence of hip-hop music and gangsta rap in the 1980s and '90s, many black entertainers began to embrace the n-word with a mystical fervor. The late Tupac Shakur had a song titled "Strictly 4 My Niggaz" and declared that for him, "nigga" was an acronym meaning, "never ignorant, getting goals accomplished."
In his book, Kennedy raises what some consider a central issue in the n-word controversy: Many blacks insist that while they are free to say it, whites and others should not.
"When we say 'nigga,' it means, 'You're my dog, you're my friend. . . . I'm going to ride for you, I'm down with you,'" said Mookie Jenkins, 17, a junior at Springfield Gardens High School in Queens.
One of his favorite hip-hop artists is DMX, who has a piece titled "For My Dogs," in which he raps:
"You my nigga to the death, so I treat you like my blood. If push comes to shove and they try to send you back to the street, I give my last to put you back on your feet."
The n-word is used 15 times, and Jenkins said that for him and his friends it signifies nothing less than undying affection and loyalty.
But in 1999, while attending school in Brunswick, Ga., he punched a white student who used the word, and was suspended for a week, Jenkins said.
Jenkins was unapologetic. "When a white person says it, we're gonna [hurt him] something serious," he said.
Kennedy finds that attitude - I can do it, you can't - unacceptable. He said that if he has a single complaint against Rock, it's that the comedian "seems to take the position that white people can never appropriately use the word. And on that, I disagree with him."
Truth be told, black hip-hoppers do often allow for an exclusion to the you-can't-say-it rule: Latinos, more specifically Puerto Ricans and Dominicans, who often live side by side with blacks in New York.
"I've got a Puerto Rican friend and . . . he says it just like we do. . . . They go through the same stuff, like cops stoppin' us all the time," Jenkins said.
But the power-packed sensitivity of the word hit home last year to diva Jennifer Lopez after she used it on a remix of her song "I'm Real."
Lopez, who used to date rap impresario Sean Combs, was verbally raked over the coals on black radio stations in New York. She told NBC television the reaction was "hurtful to me" and that "the use of the word . . . was never meant to be hurtful in any way to anybody."
The Rev. Calvin O. Butts, pastor of Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem and president of SUNY Old Westbury, finds the who-can-say-it issue to be irrelevant.
He doesn't want anyone, especially blacks, to use it.
"You call yourself nigger long enough," said Butts, "you begin to believe you're a nigger, which means you are not human, you are a second-class citizen, you cannot achieve above a certain level in intelligence."
Although Butts has publicly berated hip-hop artists over their lyrics, he reserves his strongest criticism for other "hypocritical" blacks who say it behind closed doors.
"If you go into the homes of the middle class and very well- educated, they'll 'nigger' you to death," Butts said. "And that goes especially for many black preachers. ... When they are referring often to their congregants, almost like the master-overseer, they say, 'My niggers bought me for my anniversary, this or that, a coat, a car, shoes, whatever."
Butts had not yet read Kennedy's book but said he believes the Harvard professor "deserves credit" for writing it, and that "the discussion needs to go on more and more."
SUBTITLED "The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word," Kennedy's book is a scholarly but highly readable history of the n-word, combined with reflections on the legal and social issues linked to it. It is 176 pages of text and 50 additional pages of endnotes and indexes.
Kennedy appeared sensitive to complaints he did not include memoir-like stories about his own experiences with the n-word. "Maybe for the next edition of this book, if there is a next edition, I'll say something about my own encounters," he said.
Asked during an interview if he had ever been called that word, he said: "Yeah, I've been called nigger and have responded in a wide variety of ways, sometimes with fists, sometimes by ignoring it. . . . I remember this so distinctly, that I thought that the world was actually divided into two teams, the white people and the black people. And if we got caught in the white boys' neighborhoods and they beat us up, and, well, that was fair. And if the white boys were caught in our neighborhood, we could beat them up, and that was fair."
Much water has passed under the bridge since those days. Fed up with the racism there, his family left South Carolina when he was a child. He attended the prestigious St. Albans School for Boys in Washington, D.C., and then went on to Princeton, where he got his undergraduate degree. He received his law degree from Yale.
Now tenured at Harvard, he called himself a political "progressive" who is "in favor of redistributing wealth, power and opportunity in American life." He writes for the neo-conservative New Republic as well as the left-of-center Nation magazine.
One black expert said he disagreed with Kennedy's permissive views on the n-word, but believes so many people are using it now that it is futile to try to stop it.
"I think that 10 years ago something could have been done about it," said Bakari Kitwana, author of "The Hip Hop Generation: Young Blacks and the Crisis in African American Culture," scheduled to be published by Basic Books this spring.
"But when something becomes a part of colloquial usage, that's what it is - colloquial usage. And that's what's happened with this word, particularly among the young."
And so, into the foreseeable future, Americans sensitive to the history and power of the word will have to cope with hearing it in public places. And they will have to decide how to react. It is a kind of cultural crisis, not just for the genteel elderly, but young people as well.
Dannielle Caro, a 16-year-old of African-American and Puerto Rican descent who attends Bayside High School in Queens, is one of them.
"It's like, if a group of Asians are really close, they use it toward each other, to mean, like, your best friend," she said. Black and Latino students use the word most openly. She said Asians try not to say it in earshot of others, knowing trouble could erupt.
"But I don't say it," Caro said.
"I don't feel comfortable saying it. I feel weird saying that word, because I know the background and how it was used against us in the past. If someone were to call me that, I would feel really upset by it. I don't feel it's the kind of word you should use to say 'that's my friend.'"