Nigger: The Strange Career Of A Troublesome Word by Randall Kennedy Read Free Book Online Page B

writers) rightly permitted Van Vechten to use
nigger
as so many African Americans have used it—as an ironic, shorthand spoof on the absurdity of American race relations. 110
    As we have seen,
nigger
can mean many different things, depending upon, among other variables, intonation, the location of the interaction, and the relationship between the speaker and those to whom he is speaking. Generally a reference to people of color, particularly blacks,
nigger
can refer to people of any hue. Senator Robert C. Byrd (D–West Virginia) got into trouble for saying publicly that he “had seen a lot of white niggers in [his] time.” 111 But more and more the word is being applied ecumenically. Sociologist John Hartigan reports that poor whites in Detroit often refer to their white neighbors as
niggers.
112 Typically they mean the word as an insult. But they do not necessarily mean for it to be a
racial
insult. Responding to an inquiry about a white-on-white deployment of
nigger
, one of the participants in Hartigan's study remarked: “He's a nigger, man, and you know what I mean by that. He's an asshole, and it doesn't matter whether a person's black or white, orange or plaid, he can still be a nigger if he runs his mouth like that asshole.” 113 Another white Detroiter observed by Hartigan echoed this sentiment. “You don't have to be black to be a nigger,” he declared. “Niggers come in all colors.”(Interestingly, he added: “We are all colored.…There's about a hundred shades of white.”) 114
    The linguist Arthur K. Spears has also discerned an appreciable revision of
nigger's
racial usage. He writes that “White public school teachers hear themselves referred to as ‘that White nigga’ or simply ‘nigga,’ and [that] Asian Americans in San Francisco can be heard, as they navigate high school hallways, to call one another niggas.” 115
    More vividly than most words, then,
nigger
illustrates Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes's observation that “a word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged.” A word is instead “the skin of a living thought [that] may vary greatly in color and content according to the circumstances and the time in which it is used.” 116

CHAPTER THREE
Pitfalls in Fighting
Nigger:
Perils of
Deception, Censoriousness,
and Excessive Anger
     
    A fter the Civil War, a former master approached a former slave while she was tending livestock. “What you doin’, nigger?” he asked, as he had probably done on many previous occasions. But this time her response was different: she replied, “I ain't no nigger. I's a Negro and I'm Miss Liza Mixon.” Stung, the former master chased his former slave with a whip. 1
    Until the civil rights revolution of the 1960 s, whites in the South typically refrained from addressing blacks as “Mr.” or “Mrs.” but instead called them by their first names or by titles signifying a senior with servile status—titles such as “Uncle” or “Auntie.” Addressing all black men as “boys,” regardless of their age, was another way for whites to observe Jim Crow etiquette.
    Positive modifications to such practices have been effectedonly through struggle. To avoid or at least minimize belittlement, some blacks made a habit of identifying themselves only by their last names. Blacks furiously objected to
Negro
being spelled with a lower- as opposed to an uppercase
N
, and on March 7, 1930 , the editors of the
New York Times
announced that the paper would henceforth capitalize the
N
in
Negro.
The U.S. Government Printing Office followed suit three years later. Within a decade, capitalization would become the rule at the Supreme Court as well. 2
    Referring to blacks derogatorily as niggers, however, was the custom to which blacks objected most strongly. In 1939 , when David O. Selznick was in the throes of producing
Gone With the Wind
, he received hundreds of letters from blacks warning him to remove all “nigger” references from his upcoming film. The letter