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Born Against
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I haven't read Randall Kennedy's book Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word (Pantheon) 2002, but it sounds like a good treatment of all the issues in this thread and more.
Here are a couple of reviews (from Harvard Educational Review and Society respectively).
Quote:
In his provocative book Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word, Randall Kennedy explores various meanings of this contentious and ambiguous word. Kennedy claims that the term "nigger is fascinating precisely because it has been put to a variety of uses and can radiate a wide array of meanings" (p. 34). He notes that words like honky, kike, wetback, and gook do not seem to capture the same attention or create the uneasiness that nigger does. Kennedy, a Harvard Law School professor, delves into the history of the word nigger as well as the countless ways and contexts in which the term is now being used by Americans of different ethnic and racial backgrounds.
Kennedy approaches the analysis of this highly controversial word in four detailed chapters. He begins chapter one, "The Protean N-Word," by retracing the origin of nigger, the various ways Americans tend to use the word and why it "generate [s] such powerful reactions" (p. 3). Nigger, Kennedy asserts, is derived from the Latin word niger for the color black, and has become part of the vocabulary of all types of people, including those Kennedy describes as "whites high and low" (p. 8). For example, Kennedy cites Supreme Court Justice James Clark McReynolds' reference to Howard University as the "nigger university" and President Harry S. Truman's reference to Congressman Adam Clayton Powell as "that damned nigger preacher" (p. 11). In this same chapter, Kennedy includes personal accounts of prominent Black Americans, such as Paul Robeson, Malcolm X, Michael Jordan, and Tiger Woods, who have been targets of this epithet. Interestingly, Kennedy points out that many Black Americans have actually embraced the word nigger and shifted its meaning to a more positive connotation that they use among themselves. For example, Kennedy documents Black American rap artist Ice Cube as saying, "When we call each other 'nigger' it means no harm. . . . But if a white person uses it, it's something different, it's a racist word" (p. 52). In contrast, Kennedy cites University of Pennsylvania professor Michael Eric Dyson, a Black American, who believes that "there is nothing necessarily wrong with a white person saying, 'nigger,' just as there is nothing necessarily wrong with a black person saying it. What should matter is the context in which the word is spoken - the speaker's aims, effects, alternatives" (pp. 51-52).
Kennedy also draws on a powerful comment made by journalist Jarvis Deberry, which describes the word nigger as "beautiful in its multiplicity of functions . . . capable of expressing so many contradictory emotions" (p. 37). To illustrate some of these "multiple functions," Kennedy cites sociologist John Hartigari's research, which describes how nigger can refer to anyone of any color or shade. For example, Hartigan's research documents how poor Whites in Detroit refer to their White neighbors as niggers, and in some cases as wiggers, which signifies a White nigger.
Having set a broad context for interpreting the word, Kennedy devotes the second chapter, "Nigger in Court," to discussing how the use of nigger has been debated over many years in court cases in the United States. He divides "Nigger in Court" into four sections that underscore Kennedy's assertion that the use of nigger is extremely complicated, and that court decisions dealing with this term reflect this complexity, as they are usually decided on contextual factors that differ from case to case.
Also in chapter two, Kennedy includes the various definitions of nigger in Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary and acknowledges that some Black Americans are not pleased with the way the term is defined. However, Kennedy is adamant that decisions "whether to note or how to define a deeply controversial word is an inescapably 'political' act, and claims to the contrary are either naive or disingenuous" (p. 136). Kennedy also incorporates the ideas of eradicationists (i.e., people who believe that any use of nigger is always inappropriate). Because he primarily sets out to describe various meanings of the term, such a view from eradicationists appears valid at best, but somewhat limited and uninformed for Kennedy's taste.
In chapter three, "Pitfalls in Fighting Nigger: Perils of Deception, Censoriousness, and Excessive Anger," Kennedy looks at how the word nigger has received much publicity when used in the media or in contexts other than the courts. To illustrate this point, Kennedy explores some White Americans' artistic use of nigger as well as Black Americans' perceptions about the word and White Americans' use of it. For instance, he mentions filmmaker's Spike Lee's belief that African American filmmakers have more of a right to use nigger than do White Americans. This chapter also addresses some people's concerns with Mark Twain's use of nigger in Huckleberry Finn. Kennedy claims that although Twain was once "inculcated with white-supremacist beliefs and sentiments," he eventually "underwent a dramatic metamorphosis" that radically changed his beliefs (p. 139). This change in Twain's perspective is actually reflected in Huckleberry Finn, which depicts the ignorance of White Americans who use the term.
Kennedy ends his third chapter with a proclamation that current Black comedians are liberally and appropriately "eschew[ing] boring conventions . . . that nigger can mean only one thing" (p. 171). Kennedy's briefest and final chapter, "How Are We Doing with Nigger?" suggests that "public opinion has effectively stigmatized nigger-as-insult," regardless of the context in which people use the term, and predicts that "as nigger is more widely disseminated and its complexity is more widely appreciated, censuring its use - even its use as an insult - will become more difficult" (p. 175).
With so many accounts of the use of nigger in various contexts, Kennedy appropriately concludes that "for bad and for good, nigger is . . . destined to remain with us for many years to come - a reminder of the ironies and dilemma, the tragedies and glories, of the American experience" (p. 170). Kennedy's provocative piece is a powerful illustration of how one term can have an array of meanings for those who use it, for those who interpret it, and in the specific situations in which the word is spoken and heard, written and read.
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Quote:
Nigger: The Strange Career of a
Troublesome Word (Book)
By Randall Kennedy. New York: Pantheon, 2002, 227 pages
I recall William F. Buckley, Jr., on his old television show, interviewing Dick Gregory. After introducing the black comedian and social activist with the usual tributes to Gregory's accomplishments, Buckley mentioned, but refused to say the name of, Gregory's then-recent autobiography. Gregory needled Buckley to utter the one-word title, but Buckley demurred.
Gregory's book was titled Nigger, the word printed in large lowercase letters along its spine. Now Harvard Law School professor Randall Kennedy, also black, has written a book with the same title, the word again in large lowercase letters on the dust jacket's front and side. (Less consistent than Gregory's, Kennedy's book shifts to block capitals when the title appears on its cloth spine, title page, and the head of even-numbered pages of text.) Where Gregory's volume was the story of his life (of part of it, really, as Gregory was barely thirty when he wrote it), Kennedy's offers the story of the word itself--a story, as Kennedy thinks, with lessons for everyone.
The new book quickly became "a national campus bestseller," its title epithet, arrayed in neat rows and columns in store-windows, on shelves and endcaps, spit in the face of salesclerks and delivery staff, shoppers and browsers, students, pedestrians, and passers-by. Why, then, pick this title? In his autobiography's last sentences, Gregory offers a possible answer, writing of his and others' determination to change a "system where a white man can destroy a black man with a single word. Nigger." He pledges that, when they are done, "there won't be any niggers any more" (Gregory, p. 224).
No such answer will do for Kennedy. He not only dismisses claims of "destr[uction]" by language as hyperbolic, but also thinks they dangerously encourage black people today to maintain a "hypersensitivity" to verbal insults that their tougher parents or grandparents would have "shaken off" before getting on with their struggles (154). He similarly theorizes that our using the term, while not without drawbacks, helps us in "taming, civilizing, and transmuting" it, "yank[ing]" it from racists and converting it into a "positive appellation" (175). So, it seems, Kennedy gives his book the title he did, in effect conscripting us who have to ask for, carry, or name the book to his campaign to take back a word we might have preferred to disown.
Kennedy's endeavor to "tame" and "convert" his target term shapes and structures his slender book. Its first chapter aims to show that, though the word is most commonly thought a racial slur, some black people (and, increasingly, others) use it in other ways, as a term of affection and familiarity, to stress commonality, to emphasize the speaker's "authenticity" or class solidarity, and so on. Here Kennedy stresses that the word has changed its meaning, and continues to change, seeing its sense as a function of intonation, audience, and other factors. The second chapter more narrowly focuses on the term in the law, where, for example, its prior use against a killer is claimed as mitigating provocation. Throughout, Kennedy downplays the term's significance, arguing, for example, that it ought not count legally as a "fighting word" whose use palliates homicide. The third chapter deals with complaints, leveled chiefly against whites who used the term, and with the speech codes some advocated on campuses and sometimes even urged as civil legislation. Again, Kennedy thinks the protests--e.g., one against a dictionary's definition of the target word--mainly "misguided" and subject to "pitfalls."
Given the preceding text, it comes as no surprise when, in the book's brief closing chapter, Kennedy complacently concludes that "major institutions of American life are handling this combustible word about right" (172). Kennedy concedes that the term's ambiguity and complexity mean its retention will have drawbacks--misinterpretations and unintended offense, on one hand, and, on the other, greater difficulty in stigmatizing and censuring its offensive use. Still, in Kennedy's judgment, these are acceptable "costs" because "there is much to be gained" from its retention and "conversion"(174-175).
Kennedy illustrates each chapter's topics with a variety of cases, moving at breakneck speed. Perhaps this accounts for the implausibility of several of his judgments and the weakness of much of his argumentation. One example will suffice. Kennedy takes little exception to a college's white basketball coach using the slur to indicate (as he later explained its use) the sort of "fearless, mentally strong, and tough" players the team needed to become. Some of those who did not quite measure up he called "half-niggers" (142-147). Kennedy thinks the school was right to ask the coach not to repeat the incident, given the risk of outsiders misunderstanding, but judges further penalties excessive (145-148). Maybe so. However, even if he is right that the coach meant no harm or insult and that the young students themselves took no offense, this free play not just with slurs but also with stereotypes mixing race, class, and sex is more problematic than Kennedy acknowledges.
The coach wanted his players to emulate some supposed standard of a driven, brutish black male, which the man's formulation (compounding metonymy with synecdoche), takes as emblematic of the whole race. (Imagine if he had used a anti-Jewish slur in urging his players to be more frugal with the team's resources!) Sometimes Kennedy seems perversely unwillingly to acknowledge problems. Rightly protesting some proposed speech codes, Kennedy notes there is little evidence to support the oft-asserted claim that incidents of racist language are on the rise, since higher incidence of reporting could, for example, stem from more sensitivity rather than more incidents. Unfortunately, Kennedy goes beyond this legitimate observation to suggest the "possib[ility] that episodes of verbal abuse are actually indicative of racial progress"! (153) He reasons the paucity of previous racial incidents on some campuses may have resulted from the small number of black students with whom the white ones interacted. Only Pollyanna could feel so cheery about increasing black enrollments when the new black students are subjected to racist abuse.
Is Kennedy correct that we are generally doing well with this term? I am not convinced. He does not object to the use of his title's epithet by, among others, black rap lyricists and singers, comedians, and young people. Kennedy himself traces these uses to pessimistic emphasis on black oppression in America, suggests that "[t]o proclaim oneself a nigger is to identify oneself as real, authentic, uncut, unassimilated, and unassimilable", and sometimes indicates a lack of concern for possible misunderstanding, especially by whites (48-49,170). He thinks this use "exhibit[s] a bracing independence" and admirable repudiation of "boring conventions" (171).
Yet these phenomena are multiply troubling. The notion of racial authenticity cannot be prized away from a wrongheaded and dangerous racial essentialism. The downward, countercultural aspiration of those who see only the disaffected and alienated as "authentic" is a recipe for deepening not only social division but also racial despair and disaster. Similarly, Kennedy must realize that the emphasis on whites' stigmatizing and degrading of black people that is implicit in black people's embracing this most degrading of anti-black insults can only harden black resentment and sense of separation.
It is, I think, Kennedy's glib treatment of his target term's meaning that most disappoints. Throughout the book, Kennedy repeats that the word shifts "meaning," "usage," "defini[tion]," "denotation," "content," and "refer[ence]," from one instance of speech to another (36 f., 54, 55, 95 f., 171, 175). However, that the same word is on one occasion (part of) "an insult" and on another "a compliment," now "a term of belittlement" and later "of respect," hardly shows the term has changed its meaning. If the sentence "There's a fire" retains its meaning across its uses as a warning, observation, threat, etc.--and it does--then surely the word "fire" does not change its denotation, meaning, or (semantic) content. Differences in use, purpose, and pragmatic potential do not suffice for difference in linguistic meaning. Kennedy offers not the slightest reason for us to understand his eponymous word through a version of the error that the philosopher John Searle called 'the speech act theory meaning' when Searle refuted it three decades ago.
This may seem a small point, but the question of the word's meaning is important for some of the cases and issues Kennedy discusses. Kennedy judges "adequate" the controversial definition offered in Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary (10th edition), deeming its critics "misguided." That definition, as he quotes it, states the term chiefly means "a black person" or "a member of any dark-skinned race," adding that its use is "usually taken to be offensive" and an "offensive and inflammatory racial slur ... expressive of racial hatred and bigotry" (133-137). One protester objected that this definition "labeled ... anyone . . . who happened to have dark skin a nigger," a position Kennedy finds "unreasonable." Kennedy is correct; it is unreasonable to say flatly that the definition affixes the defined term as a "label" to anyone, since the definition also calls such labeling offensive and an expression of hate. Nevertheless, the dictionary's definition does entail that when someone uses the term to label a black (or dark-skinned) person, then what she says is true (because what she says is that her subject is black or dark-skinned) although the way she says it (using an inflammatory racial slur) is offensive and bigoted.
Does this matter? Some of the cases in Kennedy's book suggest it does. When Charles McLaurin answered "Negro" to a Southern policeman's question "Are you a Negro or a nigger?" he got a series of beatings that stopped only when he changed his answer to "I'm a nigger." Yet this dictionary's definition implies that his later answer, while obnoxiously phrased, was as accurate as his first, and that the question put him offered no substantive alternative (because both choices attributed to him the same properties, though the first phrased the matter in an ugly way). There is reason to think neither McLaurin nor we should welcome this implication.
In another case, Kennedy tells of little Lonnae O'Neal Parker, who froze when asked "Are you a nigger?" and then "Are you a nigger? You know, a black person?" Parker did not know what to say, but the girl accosting her agreed with the dictionary in offering her gloss, because Merriam-Webster, while not claiming anyone merits the label, is committed to saying that the label is correctly and truthfully applied to any black or dark-skinned person, though it is also offensively applied. Ought Parker, then, have accepted the label as accurate, though objectionably phrased?
Consider the most disturbing case: Miss Liza Mixon, a freed slave who told her former master "I ain't no nigger. I's a Negro..." (21,23,113). While a devotee of the dictionary's definition can see why Mixon might reject use of the slur, one would be hard-pressed to find Mixon correct in her denial, as that definition commits us to judge true that which Mixon denies: that she is a black or dark-skinned person. For the dictionary holds that the epithet labels a black person as black in a way that is accurate but disparaging. However, our sympathy with Mixon indicates that we want to say more. We want to say that the targeted term mislabels the black person. It is not just that the way we describe someone when we use the word is objectionable. More important, what we say about her seems false.
Merriam-Webster's dictionary is not alone in these uncomfortable implications. Recall that Gregory thought of himself as working towards a world in which "there won't be niggers any more." That this is something to work towards, however, suggests that right now we live in world in which there are such people. Plainly, Gregory did not mean to be calling some people black in an offensive way. Perhaps he held what today would be called a "social constructivist" position, according to which the label correctly applies to someone when she occupies a degraded social position. That is what constitutes its correct application, what philosophers call its "truth-conditions." Unfortunately, someone who takes that position has even less purchase for siding with McLaurin and Parker in their hesitation, let alone with Mixon in her denial. However regrettable it may be, each did in fact occupy the degraded social status that warrants the term if the constructionist is correct. (Mixon was expressing pride in her recent status as emancipated. Nevertheless, her status as ex-slave was, as events in the South would soon show, still sufficiently degraded to merit an opprobrious label on the social constructionist interpretation of Gregory, I suggest.)
Much depends, then, on what the term means, and it is not easy to fashion an account of its meaning that avoids these disreputable implications. The philosophers Charles Stevenson and Richard Hare both offered theories at mid-century according to which such emotionally charged terms as Kennedy's title have a special "emotive" or "prescriptive" meaning in addition to the "descriptive" meaning the dictionary offered. Such accounts, basing the term's contextual meaning on the speech acts it is used to perform, might allow us to think McLaurin, Parker, and Mixon justified in repudiating the racist label, but they are difficult to defend (targets of Searle, among others) and, more important, it is not clear they justify us not just in somehow objecting to the label's use (even Merriam-Webster's definition does that) but in rejecting its application precisely as false. Interestingly, the linguist John McWhorter, in reviewing Kennedy's book, suggests that "[w]hen a white person throws 'nigger' at a black person, what he or she is saying is 'You are inferior to me because of your race'" (McWhorter, pp. 36-37). If such an evaluative account of the term's meaning can be defended, it may vindicate McLaurin, Parker, and Mixon, and it is disappointing that McWhorter seems not to notice the relevance of his suggestion to the dictionary protest and the other cases mentioned here. An account like McWhorter's would still require Kennedy to show the term significantly changes its meaning (as expressing what philosopher Lawrence Blum calls an "inferiorizing" attitude) when the speaker goes from White to Black). In any case, there are intricate and consequential questions to be answered about the meaning of Kennedy's focal term. His book seriously engages none of them.
I asked why anyone should choose the title Kennedy does, and mentioned Gregory's response from his book's close. Gregory offers a different answer in his autobiography's epigraph. Addressing his deceased mother, he writes, "Dear Momma--if ever you see the word 'nigger' again, remember they are advertising my book" (Gregory, p. 5). This is wistful, even maudlin, but his pretending to take measures to protect his mother's feelings from the term's cruelty, even in her grave, indicates that Gregory appreciates the power of such words to do real damage. One wishes Kennedy had been as sensitive, as thoughtful--in both senses of that important word--about the significance (and signification) of the "troublesome word" that provides him a brazen, eye-catching title.
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For me the word has always been taboo, something I wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole. I don't remember ever using it. I've heard it used as an insult uncountable times.
As Kennedy points out it is a very interesting word in that there is no other racial or ethnic epithet that is as taboo and negative as this word. The history that created this fact embodies much of what is negative about America. |