Our Word, Not Yours

My mother taught me that little ditty in 1968, when I was nine years old. We had just become the first black family within a country mile of our new home in the then lily-white southeast Denver. I was no stranger to the word “nigger.” I heard it often from the lips of black people. However, hearing it come from white people was a new experience for me and my mother wanted me to have a retort ready when it happened.

So when I got “niggered,” I dutifully whipped out my rhyme, along with my fists and some other new words I learned that summer, many with only four letters. In 1974, I saw Blazing Saddles with some of the “brothas” and laughed at loud at the dialogue, which was laced with “nigger this” and “nigger that”. In fact, my posse was so badass cool that we could allow white people to sit next to us and laugh along with us.

After all, it was “our” word. Only we could say it with the right attitude and inflection. How else could I accept my family’s regular references to blacks as “nigger” without simultaneously acknowledging that we were hypocrites for trashing white people who“niggered” us?

I got my sisters—Renee, who lives in Huntsville, Alabama, and Rosalyn, who lives in suburban Denver—on a conference call to do my own family reality check. I told them about the political firestorm that consumed former Minnesota Public Safety Commissioner Rich Stanek over his admission that he had said “nigger” and told racist jokes twelve years ago. I told them that even before this came out, Stanek had been the target of at least two police brutality lawsuits, and not trusted by many black leaders around town. Both agreed he deserved to go down in flames.

However, when I asked them if it was wrong for black folks to call each other “nigger,” the line went quiet for a long beat. Then, virtually at the same time, they both replied, “it depends.” I pushed them harder. “So, when it comes to using this word, we are privileged and white people are not?” Renee, who, along with her husband, boasts a Ph.D., replied, “Black people know the rules and understand the context. When my husband tells me that he is going out with ‘the niggas,’ I know what that means. We’re talking about ‘us.’”

Okay, I said, let’s take it one step further. “We all agree that my Swedish-Irish wife is part of our African-American family now. Does she now have the right to use ‘the word’?” Again, there was another very long pause. Rosalyn offered, “If she is willing to work within our cultural norms, our context, and not use it to slam us, well, I suppose it would be okay.”

My sisters’ views are consistent with those discussed in Randall Kennedy’s bestselling Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word. Kennedy, a Harvard Law professor, wrote that acceptable use of “nigger” depended on whether the user was trustworthy as far as black people were concerned. If the person was not a true friend of the “brothas and the sistahs,” then he or she was not to be trusted with the word. By that definition, for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas to be caught saying “nigger” would be a lynchable offense. Most African Americans see him as a Judas. Lyndon Johnson, however, who, as architect of the most sweeping civil rights legislation since the Civil War gained considerable credibility among black people, could be forgiven for his remarks to an aide in choosing to appoint the dark and well-known Thurgood Marshall over the lighter skinned and virtually unknown A. Leon Higginbotham: “The only two people who have heard of Judge Higginbotham are you and his momma. When I appoint a nigger to the Supreme Court, I want everyone to know he’s a nigger.”

Are there any lessons from my musings with my sisters for the Rich Staneks of the world, who, as they floated along the river of life, have said “nigger,” “spook,” or “jigaboo.” Clearly, “nigger” is a loaded word, one that must be handled with extreme care, especially if the user is anyone other than a black person.

However, it doesn’t matter if it’s Rich Stanek or Clarence Thomas, if a person has not demonstrated that he can be a trustworthy ally of black people, then being outed as having uttered “nigger” is a crime for which the statute of limitations never runs out.