Etimology and Pathology of the 'N' Word

The word nigger, a word created by white people to attack or offensively reference a black person, is demeaning, offensive, inappropriate, dehumanizing and degrading, no matter who uses it, or in what context. What I cannot understand is why it is deemed acceptable to drop the "n-bomb" if the person saying it is black. Hearing a black person say it now, and mean it in a positive sense only makes it acceptable for the white people who said offensively over the past 200 years; it does nothing more than put them in the right.

Kennedy mentions so many instances of people of color fighting for the equal rights to which they are entitled. One of those rights, a more human right than legal, was to be able to go through life without feeling belittled. There are stories of blacks fighting to have the word Negro capitalized. The New York Times began to capitalize it, and it worked its way all the way up to the Supreme Court, so black American's made some serious headway in the way of gaining respect. There is a story of a certain author, Van Vechten, author of the novel "Nigger Heaven"; a story about life in Harlem. The story, which surrounded the typical life of your modern day black person growing up in Harlem, has been ignored or deemed contraband by many readers of color simply because the "N" word was on the cover. This word is so offensive, and I cannot understand why it is that black people say it with affection, or simply as a reference a person of color within the lines of a song?

I am not disputing that the "N" word is a very offensive word; I am simply questioning why it is only deemed offensive by some when a white person says it. The definition or origin of a word does not change simply because it crossed racial borders. I was in full support of Bill Cosby when Kennedy spoke about Cosby's outcry toward people of color using the "n-word". "Bill Cosby is another who attacks blacks' use of nigger. Addressing African American comedians, Cosby has argued that when nigger pops out of their mouths as entertainment, all blacks are hurt. He fears that white onlookers will have negative impressions of African Americans reinforced when blacks laughingly bandy about the N-word" (Kennedy 128). Bill Cosby and I are very much on the same page. I sincerely believe that blacks and whites are equal, we all have the forty-six chromosomes, and we are all human. There is nothing a white man can do that black person cannot do, and there is should not be any social policies for white people that do not apply to black people. When I read this in Kennedy's book I thought of two songs and a movie that I know have caused me to examine this issue in the past.

In Big Punisher's "It's so hard" the chorus is "And it's so hard, yeah. Niggaz wanna be like pun, but they don't bust they guns and it's so hard. Niggaz wanna fuck my wife, niggaz wanna take my life but it's so hard." Big Pun is black, but talking about his life being hard, and using this terminology to do so is still very degrading. In this song he singles out black people and then he talks about how blacks want to do things that we as a society consider especially heinous. He makes the black people around him sound like adulterers and murderers, and where this could be true it is not because they are black but he fails to communicate that.

In Three 6 Mafia's "Gansta Niggaz" the chorus is "We up all night (we hip, we hip)

We high off that white. We smokin' that weed (we hip, we hip). Them eyes be tight. We drinkin' them fifths (we hip, we hip). We pimpin' a bitch. Our grills are gold (we hip, we hip). Our nose be (sniff). We carried them glocks (we hip, we hip). Our hustle is rocks. Consumers or junkies (we hip, we hip). The blockies I start. If smaller or bigger (we hip, we hip). We drinkin' them triggers. Cause everybody wanna be a gangsta nigga". In this particular song Three 6 Mafia is bragging about committing crimes, they are making it cool. In the same chorus they talk about doing drugs, drinking, degrading women, being violent and then attribute it all to being black, and then state how other black people also want to behave this way! It is music like this, in the light of past prejudices, that causes people to unreasonably fear, or simply mistreat black people. It is songs like these, especially when performed by a black person, that enable the many prejudices that can still be found in many white people today.

In the opening scene of the movie Crash, Ludacris' character is ranting about how racism is still prevalent in the world today. He even takes the time to point out how a white woman (Sandra Bullock) immediately grabs onto her husband's (Brendan Frasier) arm as soon as she sees Ludacris. He spends the next 5 minutes discussing how that is not fair, and how the world needs to see that black people are no more dangerous then white people. I was agreeing with everything he was saying, until the next scene, in which he sticks a gun in their faces and steals their SUV. Things like that completely defeat the purpose of what he was saying. His actions say that it's laughable that people think that black people are no more dangerous than white people; his actions are as though he is mocking himself. Things like these demonstrate to all viewers, black and white alike, that black people by nature are dangerous, even savage-like because they simply take what they want with no regard for society.

I am by no means saying that if a black person can drop an "n-bomb" that a white person should be able to as well, I think that nobody should use the word. It is too often that a black person uses the n-word and puts black people as a race in a bad light. I think when Kennedy talks about blacks saying nigger in the chapter Pitfalls in Fighting Nigger, he really makes a very solid point. Much of the black community is still not comfortable with the use of the word, because they should not be. The word is degrading no matter how you cut it, and no race, religion or person deserves to be degraded for any reason.

Works Cited

Kennedy, Randall. Nigger. 1st. New York: Vintage Books, 2002.