Consider this open letter by Steven Boone, a New York-based critic type, about the use of the word "nigga." He wrote it after CNN did a report on the "Abolish the N-Word Movement," which, as you’ve probably guessed, is less a movement than a small non-profit with dreams of changing the world through the strategic dissemination of ideologically correct T-shirts, mugs, baseball caps, and Lance Armstrong-ish wristlets. Anyway, here’s Boone:
Dear Abolish the N-Word Crew:
I’m sure I’m far from the first black person to respond to your campaign with shrugged shoulders and a deep sigh. … When white people felt comfortable enough to use "Nigger" as a casual, public, almost clinical term for Black, it was a cancer. But I have not heard one black person utter the word "nigger" since I was born 33 years ago.
The word you are trying to erase is "nigga," one of the most beautiful and complex examples of black folks taking something meant to eradicate us and fashioning it into… a tool, a weapon, a way of instantly communicating our bloody common history, our interdependence and survival through it all. When a brother approaches me in the street, gives me a pound or a handshake and says, "What’s up, my nigga?" I feel about ten feet tall. America may not be our home, but "My nigga" says we both know this fact intimately; that we are brothers because of it; that we have each other’s back when the next wave of American ethnic cleansing comes to claim either of us. A simple "My nigga"–period– is how many young people respond to the kindess of a stranger. It means "Thank you." It also means, "If we ever happen to cross paths in the future and you need something, I’ll do my best to help you, friend."
We need "nigga." It is our Iwo Jima memorial and Vietnam Wall all in one. It is an elastic, useful, musical word that can stretch to fit all sizes of imagination, all kinds of complicated social situations. Richard Pryor, who also once made the well-intentioned mistake of trying to retire "nigga," crafted some life-changing comic poetry with it. Without "nigga," his wino-meets-Dracula skit wouldn’t be such a dizzying world-historical tap dance. Or hilarious.
Don’t worry about white people and others nudging into the "nigga" act. They want to be down. What else is new? Those are not the whites we should be concerned about, as they are merely trying on "nigga" to see if it helps express their own sense of alienation, trauma and defiant individuality in the face of dehumanizing American trends. How could I call myself thoughtful or serious and be mad at the skinny Korean hip hop kids I spot calling each other "nigga" on the corners of Flushing, Queens? I can presume that many of them don’t know every twist and turn of the word’s evolution, but I’d be foolish to presume that they don’t know the general arc–from slur to all-purpose underclass Swiss Army Knife.
There is enough to say about "nigger" and "nigga" to fill 12 encylopedia voumes, so I better cut it short. But let me leave you with a suggestion: With all your web presence and media access, why not spark a movement to come to terms with three words that really are hard at work destroying our progress right now, "thug," "pimp" and "bitch"? These words, with the full endorsement of the media conglomerates (whassup, Jay-Z!), have helped cheapen our young people’s understanding of themselves and their peer relationships. They have sexualized and criminalized the kids in their own eyes while making every social interaction a deeply cynical transaction between those who have enough muscle and possessions to live the good life and those who, as 50 Cent so idiotically put it, are merely "Window Shoppas." Our kids, rich and poor, are becoming violent, impulsive, selfish brats while the world crumbles around them, and the N-word has little to do with it.
Thanks for your time.
–Steven Boone
On some important points, Boone is right. "Nigger" is one word and "nigga" is another. They have to be dealt with as separate words which represent separate phenomena. There are, certainly, still white people out there use the word nigger as a slur against black people, but privately. The word is public poison. No one who wants to be taken seriously will say it, and so it’s meaningless to talk about abolishing it unless you’re talking about installing shock collars around people’s neck that buzz ’em when they use the word.
Boone is also right, and pretty damned eloquent, when he writes about the affection that the word "nigga" can contain, and when he points out that when non-blacks use it, it’s intended as an homage to black culture, not a denigration of it, and that it’s also a general expression of alienation and defiance. And boy, isn’t that phrase — nigga as "all-purpose underclass Swiss Army Knife" — pretty sweet on the ears?
I think Boone goes wrong, though, when he tried to completely distinguish "nigga" from the thug/pimp/bitch axis of blackculture-destroying evil. It’s too neat, too easy. Sure, when Steven Boone uses the word nigga, he uses it well, and I certainly don’t want to censure him for doing so. One of the glories of being a writer is using words that are rich with meaning, and one of the glories of being a reader is reading somebody like Boone using deep, textured words well.
But c’mon, Steve. When the skinny Korean hip-hoppers use the word, part of what they’re doing, it seems obvious, is buying into the thug/pimp/bitch paradigm. What about 50 Cent — is there any way that 50 Cent is using the word without investing it with a good deal of his know-nothing thuggery?
My point, as usual, is that it’s complicated. "Nigga" is a potent word, and in the right hands it can be poetry. In the wrong hands, it can be ignorance. I’m not signing up with the Abolish the N-Word Movement for many reasons, among them that I’m creeped out by anybody who asks me to "Download the contract. Read it. Sign it. Hang it up in a place where you can see it." But they’re not wrong that there are problems with how popular the word’s become.
