Uttering the word in some quarters is like an act of violence, causing ructions, riots, court cases, shame, disgrace, and summary dismissals. Though it has Latinate roots (from niger, black) and seems to be a coarse and mumbled variation of “Negro,” even words that sound the same, such as “niggardly” (of Scandinavian origin, meaning stingy or parsimonious) and “niggard” (a stingy person), the verb “niggle” (to trifle with), and “snigger,” a form of “snicker,” have been execrated for their phonetic similarity and have gotten people who used them into trouble. None of these are cognates, they bear no relation to it, yet they seem like dark whispers of the explosive word, and people avoid them as they avoid using the word “crapulous,” believing it to imply defecation rather than drunkenness.
This suggests paranoia, which is understandable. Yet it is just a word, and it is part of the South’s subtext—there is hardly a work of Southern fiction, from Huckleberry Finn to the present, that doesn’t use it somehow. “When John Rolfe recorded in his journal the first shipment of Africans to Virginia in 1619, he listed them as ‘negars,’” Randall Kennedy states in his exhaustive and judicious examination of the word, Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word (2002). The Oxford English Dictionary cites its first use in print as 1786, by Robert Burns, in his poem “The Ordination,” characteristically dense with dialect, in these lines:
Come, let a proper text be read,
An’ touch it aff wi’ vigour,
How graceless Ham leugh at his dad,
Which made Canaan a nigger . . .
Coleridge also used the word (1849), speculating on the race of Shakespeare’s Othello, and so did H. Rider Haggard (1889) in an aside about Allan Quatermain’s wife. The Victorians understood the word was insulting. The explorer Richard Burton, known for his African exploits as “the White Nigger,” seldom used the word but employed a variant, “niggerling,” to denote a black child, in both his book on Brazil and his account of the Cameroon mountains. A significant distinction that Thomas Carlyle made in 1849, when he wrote his bigoted essay about the West Indian plantation economies and the inferiority of blacks, was that he titled it “Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question,” rebutted by John Stuart Mill in a wiser and more temperate essay, “The Negro Question.”
In Britain the word, until about the 1960s, was an agreed-upon color. “They dropped an amused eye on the pale butter-colored waves in the white lambs’ fleeces, the nigger-brown waves in the black lambs’ fleeces,” Rebecca West writes in her classic travel book Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941), making a casual observation in the course of her tour of Dalmatia. Black or brown dogs and cats were given the word as a name by many English owners, until its use made them self-conscious. “Nigger” was the name of the black cat on Captain Scott’s Antarctic expedition. The mascot of the Royal Air Force’s 617 (“Dam Buster”) Squadron during World War Two was a black dog named Nigger, much loved and adoringly depicted in campaign photographs; though for a film recounting the heroic exploits of that squadron, the dog was renamed Digger.
Faulkner’s writing, which is a fictional history of Southern life from the years of the dispossessed Chickasaws in the early nineteenth century until roughly the 1940s, bristles with it. In his most earnestly praised work we come across expressions such as “wild niggers,” “monkey nigger,” or, for a household slave, “monkey dressed nigger.”
“All the niggers make fun of me because of the way she treats me,” says redneck Lov Bensey, whose twelve-year-old wife, Pearl, refuses to sleep with him in Erskine Caldwell’s Tobacco Road. Uttered through literature, the word has a wicked history, but the word persists.
Here is an apparent and bewildering paradox. Though it is construed in some circumstances as hate speech, actionable as a racial slur, and whites have been disgraced for using it, the word is blared constantly in popular music, especially in the lyrics of rap and hip-hop. In many songs it is the most often repeated word, usually in its more colloquial form, “nigga.” Now and then a black commentator asserts that the words “nigger” and “nigga” are distinct lexical items, the former offensive, the latter acceptable; but of course the latter is a phonetic version of the former.
After the celebrated 2013 trial in Florida in which George Zimmerman was acquitted of killing the black teen Trayvon Martin, a prosecution witness, one Rachel Jeantel, explained the word in an interview on CNN. Jeantel said, “People say it’s a racist word. They change it around.” For emphasis, she spelled it: “N-i-g-g-a. That means a male, any kind of male, even Chinese. A man. But nigger”—stressing of the second syllable as gerrh—“that’s a racist word.”
On the evidence of the songs, it sometimes implies a word of endearment among blacks, a way of saying “friend,” or someone more intimate than a friend, a bosom buddy. The songs to this effect have similar titles: Lil Wayne’s “My Nigga,” Killa Kyleon’s “My Nigga,” Trae’s “Still My Nigga,” and many others, including the lyrics to the songs of Timothy Thedford (Jay Electronica), one of whose lines is “Kill a nigga, rob a nigga, take a nigga.” Shawn Carter, who calls himself Jay-Z, a friend and donor to the campaigns of Barack Obama, a frequent guest at the White House, and an honored invitee at two presidential inaugurations, has an estimated worth of half a billion dollars, much of it earned from songs such as “Nigga What, Nigga Who,” “Nigga Please,” “Niggas in Paris,” “Ain’t No Nigga,” and “Jigga That Nigga.”
Pressed by Oprah Winfrey in a televised interview in 2011 on why he used the word so frequently, Carter/Jay-Z said, “By using the word so much we took the power out of it,” and, unapologetic, he went on to explain that the word was used affectionately.
Still, in this twenty-minute segment neither he nor Oprah spoke the word. Oprah frowned and sourly referred to it as “the N-word.” Carter called it “this word.” At the close of the interview Oprah twinkled and said, “We’ll have to agree to disagree,” as Carter shrugged, muttering, “It’s a generational thing.” It is doubtful that Oprah would have smiled and been so cheerfully accommodating had she interviewed a similarly intransigent white person on that same subject.
In his book on the word, Randall Kennedy, who is black, quotes Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. on a subtle distinction in words generally, how “‘a word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged’ but is instead ‘the skin of a living thought [that] may vary greatly in color and content, according to the circumstances and time in which it is used.’” Kennedy speaks of how the word was used in his household in North Carolina, and how “I learned at an early age that it could be said in many ways, put to many uses, and mean many things. Big Mama [his mother] peppered her speech with references to ‘niggers,’ by which she meant discreditable Negroes, a group that, in her view, constituted a large section of the African American population. If Big Mama saw blacks misbehaving, she would often roll her eyes, purse her lips, and then declare in a mournful tone, ‘Nigguhs!’ According to Big Mama, ‘niggers can’t get along, even in church’ and ‘are always late, even to their own funerals.’ She swore that she would never allow a ‘nigger doctor’ to care for her and repeatedly warned that ‘if you see a bunch of niggers coming, turn around and go the other way.’”
In his fair-minded and I think overlooked examination, Kennedy concludes that such uses of the word by Big Mama and others are examples of a black person internalizing black prejudice. Perhaps so, but there are notable contradictions. The confounding issue of the oddity, and license, of blacks using the word is summed up in an essay by two academics, on a scholarly website, the African American Registry, which is devoted to black issues:
When used by Blacks, nigger refers to, among other things, all Blacks (“A nigger can’t even get a break.”); Black men (“Sisters want niggers to work all day long.”); Blacks who behave in a stereotypical, and sometimes legendary, manner (“He’s a lazy, good-for-nothing nigger.”); things (“This piece-of-shit car is such a nigger.”); enemies (“I’m sick and tired of those niggers bothering me
!”); and friends (“Me and my niggers are tight.”). This final habit, as a kind word, is particularly challenging. “Zup Niggah” has become an almost universal greeting among young urban Blacks. When asked, Blacks who use nigger or its variants argue that it has to be understood in its situation; repeated use of the word by Blacks will make it less offensive. It’s not really the same word because Whites are saying nigger (and niggers) but Blacks are saying niggah (and niggaz). Also it is just a word and Blacks should not be prisoners of the past or the ugly words that originated in the past.2
I sometimes felt that hearing my Yankee accent, a Southerner, especially in a rural area, and nearly always uneducated and poor, said the word as a hostile taunt to challenge my sensibilities, to get a rise out of me. But the black rappers who spoke it, far from “taking the power out the word” or making it “less offensive,” seem also to be testing it, uttering it as a dare, defying any white person to repeat it, and risk the penalty of saying it. Round about the time I was traveling, a celebrity chef from Georgia, the TV personality and restaurant owner Paula Deen, admitted in an obscure court deposition that she had sometimes used the word in the past (“but it’s been a very long time”). When her admission became public, thunder crashed around her head: her TV show was canceled, she was abandoned by her sponsors, and though she wept in atonement in TV interviews, her reputation was seriously damaged, if not destroyed.
She was white and she was wealthy. But for many blacks, especially poor ones—poor in everything except their traditions—it is as though the word has value to them, because it has an unambiguous power to provoke. Certain words can have class associations; some people can be said to own their language. There is an upper-class manner of speaking in England, both in accent and in peculiar words and turns of speech. “We had a simply ripping time on our hols, masses of sunshine and bags of fun, and the chinky-chonks were just marvelous” is not the way a working-class English person would describe a vacation in Hong Kong.
In Tonga, you know from the way a person speaks whether he is a royal, a noble, or a commoner, and it is forbidden for a commoner to speak using words of a higher rank of person. Until about fifty years ago the emperor of Japan spoke in courtly language that was reserved to him; no one else was allowed to speak in this manner. And there is, around the world, the private language of the underclass that identifies the speaker and is exclusive to that group: Cockney, street slang, and thieves’ argot, and verbal formulas that are distinct to secret societies, to baffle and vex and exclude outsiders. During the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s, the writers Zora Neale Hurston, Wallace Thurman, and Langston Hughes, well-respected black literati, called themselves “the Niggerati.”
Hughes’s “Christ in Alabama,” controversial, and powerful in its simplicity, is a poem he wrote in reaction to the nine black teenagers, falsely accused of rape, who became known as the Scottsboro Boys. First published in 1931, Hughes later reprinted it with slight changes, insisting on the word. The poem begins:
Christ is a nigger
Beaten and black
Oh, bare your back!
By implication, by insisting on the word in songs, irrespective of how it is spelled (because it is pronounced the same), and in their private lives, blacks are implying ownership, claiming it as a cultural artifact belonging to them alone. And rappers have created an outlaw priesthood of black exclusivity based on this word, while seeking white approval and white audiences for their music. But there is not a white person in America who could quote the words of these lingo-laden songs in public without risking his job or his reputation, or conceivably being accused of race baiting.
SO WHAT DO we have here? We have not simply a word of abuse but a complex example of a taboo word. Taboo is the appropriate way of describing the word’s aura, because the precise Polynesian motive for creating a taboo, such as the Hawaiian sanction, before kapu was outlawed, forbidding a commoner (maka‘ainana) from walking in the shadow of a noble (ali‘i), was to maintain power. Some shadows were sacred and had to be respected, others were not.
The subtitle of Jabari Asim’s The N Word (2007)—Who Can Say It, Who Shouldn’t, and Why—is a succinct definition of a taboo word and its paradoxical nature, and in the book, Asim—writer, scholar, and editor—is exhaustive in explaining the uses of the word in relation to the black experience in America from the early seventeenth century to the present. Like Randall Kennedy, Asim is African American. In spite of his provocative subtitle, though, Asim ends up conceding that the word is poisonous, demeaning, divisive, and unspeakable; nor does he deal with it as a taboo. Randall Kennedy comes down in favor of neutralizing the word by using it in specific ways, and he is against the elimination of the word by the outraged people he calls the “eradicationists,” who would rewrite Huckleberry Finn and many other books.
As a white man I hear the word differently, as a strange ritualized artifact that has become a taboo. Declaring the word taboo is one of the ways—one of the very few ways—a black person can control a white, penalizing him for using a word that he, a black, in a subtler declaration, is licensed to speak freely. In this context, the use of the word by a white belittles (if not degrades) a black person by reclaiming the word, violating the taboo, infuriating and taking power from the black. As a taboo, it is not a forbidden word to all but only to some, as in the Polynesian instances where the sanction applies to commoners but not to nobles. Taboos are created by those who want power, in this case blacks, who can use it freely while punishing whites for violating the taboo. If the word were simply a racial slur, it would be forbidden to everyone who spoke it. As rap music shows, it is often used joyously.
Because of this social complexity the word has more power now than it has ever had. And as historically—etymologically—a white word, it is fair to ask whether in the distant past, in slave times, and during the civil rights era of the mid-twentieth century this word was used by blacks in common speech. Harriet Beecher Stowe thought so. The word appears on most of the pages of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, spoken by slaves and slave owners alike. Here is part of a conversation between Eva, the slaveholder’s daughter, and Topsy, the slave girl.
“But, Topsy, if you’d only try to be good, you might—”
“Couldn’t never be nothin’ but a nigger, if I was ever so good,” said Topsy. “If I could be skinned, and come white, I’d try then.”
“But people can love you, if you are black, Topsy. Miss Ophelia would love you, if you were good.”
Topsy gave the short, blunt laugh that was her common mode of expressing incredulity.
“Don’t you think so?” said Eva.
“No; she can’t bar me, ’cause I’m a nigger!—she’d ’s soon have a toad touch her! There can’t nobody love niggers, and niggers can’t do nothin’! I don’t care,” said Topsy, beginning to whistle.
We can doubt whether Harriet Beecher Stowe (a Northerner, who prior to writing her novel had no firsthand experience of plantation life) was accurately transcribing black speech. But Mark Twain’s black characters often use the word, and so do Margaret Mitchell’s. Of the hundreds of instances of the word in Gone with the Wind, none occurred in the movie adaptation, where the word “darky” predominated.
“My grandmother, born in the 1880s, was a small farmer, and she used the word ‘darky’ or ‘darkies’ all the time,” a middle-aged white man was to tell me in rural Hale County, Alabama. “When I was growing up, most other whites around here said ‘Nigra,’ but without any sort of malice.”
The word frequently appears in the work of black writers, notably Zora Neale Hurston, her novel Mules and Men being a vivid example. Hurston’s best-known novel, Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934), was originally titled Big Nigger.3
Upper-class blacks, “when angry with their children . . . accused them of talking or acting like ‘common alley-niggers’” is one of the observations in Deep South (1941), a lengthy “social anthropological study of caste and class” in 1940s Natchez—called Old Town in the
book. The fieldwork was carried out by two black and two white Harvard researchers, who lived for two years in the town, “with the same perspective and minimum bias which their fellow anthropologists have used . . . [among] the natives of New Guinea, the Indians of the Amazon, or the aborigines of Australia.”
“We ought to give invitation dances and keep those common nigguhs out of here,” one well-to-do black adolescent is quoted as saying; and another, “Those nigguhs don’t know how to act or talk at a decent dance.”
Among the oral histories recounted in Plain Folk in the New South, 1880–1915, by I. A. Newby (1989), is the memory of an old black field hand who recounted how some black children used to chant:
I had a little dog
His name was Dash.
I’d rather be a nigger
Than po’h white trash.
I’d rather be a nigger
an’ plow ol’ Beck,
Dan a white hill-billy
Wid a long red neck.
In rap music, which is saturated with the word, Northern rappers accuse Southern rappers of being imitative, deriving their imagery from Northern songs that are now passé. The Southern rapper Percy Robert Miller, who calls himself Master P (and has an estimated net worth of $350 million, most of it earned from his music), has replied to this criticism by rapping that “New York niggas” called “southern rappers lame” while “jacking our slang.”