t
BY YOJI COLE
ARD
U?s
N-word offenders from
this century and the last
(from top to bottom):
Duane “Dog” Chapman;
Eugene Talmadge,
former governor of
Georgia; and Michael
Richards
he nation’s two largest cities symbolically banned
it and the NAACP symbolically buried it. It’s the
N-word, and it’s coming under fire as black community
leaders demand that regular citizens and music artists
stop using it.
But rappers use the word excessively in their lyrics. Tune a digital radio to a rap station—digital radio permits language prohibited on FM radio—and you’ll hear the N-word time and again.
So who is to say who can say it and who can’t? And is there a
double standard when it comes to the N-word? Why are white
people excoriated for using it and black people are not?
In November, Duane “Dog” Chapman was the latest white
person caught saying the N-word. Chapman, a bounty hunter,
became a celebrity because of a reality cable-TV program.
Chapman’s son recorded a conversation with his father, during
which Chapman used the N-word repeatedly to describe his
son’s black girlfriend. When the story got out, Chapman’s TV
career ended abruptly.
Incidents like these cause some white people to be defen-
sive. Some apologize. But often, people ask, “Why is it wrong
for Chapman or other people who are not black to use the
N-word when black people, especially black rappers, use it?”
The answer has a lot to do with the history of the word
and how it has been used by black people, white people and
others who use it to describe blacks.
AA HHiiss oorryy ooff HHaatt
“The history of the N-word is one that is deeply rooted
in oppression and dehumanization,” says Hilary O. Shel-
ton, director of the NAACP’s Washington, D.C., bureau.
“It’s a word that comes from a very troubling history in
this country of racial segregation and racial supremacy.”
The word “nigger” is derived from “niger,” the Latin
word for the color black, writes Randall Kennedy, a
Harvard Law School professor and author of Nigger: The
Strange Career of a Troublesome Word. It did not enter the
American lexicon as a derogatory word. It did, however, en-
ter into a system that treated black people derogatorily, to
put it mildly. So it is through a racist culture that the word
evolved into the current usage.
Kennedy details in his book the first instances and
different forms in which the N-word appeared: “When
John Rolfe recorded in his journal the first shipment of
Africans to Virginia in 1619, he listed them as ‘negars.’ A
