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"In many sectors
“blackness” is literally thought to be under
siege."
It
is in the context of this divide that I posit my own “nigger”
theory. Whereas the term “nigger” references notions of
“blackness” as landlocked, immobile, static, segregated, and
an embodiment of black racial subjects in the
pre-20th century South, I would like to argue that
the term “nigga” (and its attendant variations) relates to
concepts of blackness as mobile, fluid, adaptable,
post-modern, urban, and embodying various forms of social and
rhetorical flow that are fully realized within the narratives
of hip-hop. In other words, there are myriad meanings, uses
and possibilities that have always been associated with
the term “nigger.” In large part the debates over the term
“nigger/nigga” represent a crisis of interpretation. The
failure of some to discern the distinction is akin to what
Samuel R. Delaney calls a discursive collision. According to
Delaney, “The sign that a discursive collision has occurred is
that the former meaning has been forgotten and the careless
reader, not alert to the details of the changed social
context, reads the older rhetorical figure as if it were the
newer.” (See Samuel R. Delaney, Times Square Red, Times
Square Blue [New York: New York University Press, 1999],
119.)
There is perhaps
no word within American Vernacular English (AVE) that has
elicited more animus among blacks than the term “nigger.”
There is little dispute over the fact that the term “nigger”
has been a staple of white supremacist discourse often
employed to shorthand commonly held societal beliefs about
black folk as being less than human or more powerfully less
than “American” (as in “just a nigger”), while also tactically
deployed as a direct attack on individual and group black self
esteem, hence its power as a racial epithet. Indeed legal
scholar Randall Kennedy writes in his book
“Nigger: The
Strange Career of a Troublesome
Word”
that “If nigger represented only an insulting
slur and was associated only with animus, this book would not
exist, for the term would be insufficiently interesting to
warrant an extended study.” Kennedy further describes “nigger”
status as “paradigmatic slur…the epithet that generates other
epithets.”
"By the time I was
three, nigger was as familiar as mama, daddy, brother, uncle,
aunt."
“Nigger’s”
status as “paradigmatic slur” highlights the complexity of
it’s usage, even in the face of the word’s obvious negative
connotations. Kennedy cites the autobiography of Helen Jackson
Lee who in describing her Cousin Bea, acknowledged she had “a
hundred different ways of saying nigger.” (See Helen
Jackson Lee, Nigger in the
Window
[New York:
Doubleday and Company, Inc., 1978], 27). Lee acknowledges her
familiarity with the word growing up in Virginia during the
during the World War I era, reflecting that “By the time I was
three, nigger was as familiar as mama, daddy, brother, uncle,
aunt.” But it was her Cousin Bea’s use of the word – the first
person she heard use the term – that brought the word’s
complexity alive for her:
“[L]istening to
her, I learned the variety of meanings the word could assume.
How it could be opened like an umbrella to cover a dozen
different moods, or stretched like a rubber band to wrap up
our family with other colored families…Nigger was a piece of
clay word that you could shape…to express
feelings.”
Lee’s comments suggest the possibility of seeing
“nigger” not simply as a word entrenched in racist discourse,
but as the basis for a hybrid black identity – one that speaks
the complexity of people of African descent who live in the
United States. Though many blacks in the United States and
elsewhere are likely to reject such logic as a meaningful
defense of the word’s casual use, such examples of “nigger”
usage prominently circulate throughout the world of Hip-Hop
culture and by extension American youth
culture.
What hip-hop culture has essentially done is make
explicit the very crisis of identity that the black public at
large faces. According to literary scholar Sharon Patricia
Holland, “identity only becomes an issue when it is in crisis,
when something assumed to be fixed, coherent and stable is
displaced by the experience of doubt and uncertainty.” (See
Sharon Patricia Holland, Raising the Dead: Readings of
Death and (Black) Subjectivity [Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2000], 137).
There is also a
perception that those of the hip-hop generation employ the
word out of a sense of historical ignorance and in the simple
pursuit of the financial opportunities encompassed in being
the “realest” nigger within the music industry. Such
perceptions hold the hip-hop generation and its artists
accountable for making explicitly public, aspects of black
life that largely remained within the confines of segregated
black spaces, just a generation or two ago. As legal scholar
Imani Perry observes, “there is no private space to
distinguish between the nigga in the black linguistic world
and the nigga in the white.” (See Imani
Perry, Prophets of the
Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop, [Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2004],
143).
"There is no private
space to distinguish between the nigga in the black linguistic
world and the nigga in the
white."
Already
accepting that they were products and inhabitants of a brave
new black world – post-Civil Rights, post-Reagan era,
post-crack, post LA Riots, post-MTV, etc. – the hip-hop
generation has been less concerned with the validity of a term
like “nigger,” but rather defining what a “real” nigga was, in
other words, the black subject that was most organically
representative of this brave new black world. Though the quest
for the “real nigga” has, as Robin D.G. Kelly suggests in his
book Yo’ Mama’s
Disfunktional,
long been the
concern of urban anthropologists, here the objects of study,
become the primary interlocutors. (See Robin D.G. Kelly’s
essay “Looking for the Real ‘Nigga’: Social Scientist
Construct the Ghetto” in Yo’ Mama’s Disfunktional: Fighting
the Culture Wars in Urban America [New York: Beacon Press,
1997], 15-42.)
The
irony of this search for the authentic “nigga” was addressed
by novelist Paul Beatty in his book Tuff. In the book,
the character Rabbi Spencer Throckmorton comes across two
young black boys wearing tee shirts that say “I Ain’t Got No
Time for Fake Nigga” and “I love Black people but I hate
niggas” respectively. The quotes are drawn from Lil Kim’s
track “No Time” and Chris Rock’s comedic sketch “Blacks vs.
Niggers.” Throckmorton says to the
youths:
“Your shirts
bespeak a bit of a familiar paradox. The quest for the real
nigger within us and the simultaneous hatred for that selfsame
nigger as other. As in I’m a real nigger, but I hate all other
niggers who don’t fit into my idiosyncratic perception of
essentialist niggerdom.” – Paul Beatty.Tuff: A Novel(New
York: Knopf, 2000), 87.
Arguably the dominant existential crisis within
contemporary hip-hop, the search for the “real nigga” was
perhaps most coherently articulated in the chorus of Lil Kim’s
track “No Time.” Throughout the song’s chorus, hip-hop artist
and mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs repeats the line “no time for
fake niggas.” The song was recorded in the midst of a virulent
exchange of threats between Combs, head of Bad Boy
Entertainment and Shug Knight, head of the Death Row Recording
company. While the latter camp embodied what was perceived as
a more authentic hardcore ghetto identity, Combs roots Bad
Boys’ authenticity in economic productivity – the distinction
between performative gesture (“talk shit”) and productive
labor (“counting bank figures”).
Combs’
distinction finds resonance in the work of theorist and
philosopher Ronald A. T. Judy. In his essay, “On Nigga
Authenticity,” Judy argues that “the ‘nigga’ (as embodied
within hip-hop discourse) is what emerges from the demise of
human capital, what gets articulated when the field nigger
loses value as labor…a nigga who understands that all
possibility converts from capital, and does not derive from
work.” According to Judy’s logic the “nigga” articulates a
distinction between the labor of actual black bodies and the
“labor” of that which ostensibly represents those black bodies
in a global marketplace. Explicitly linking this new “nigga”
to the world of hip-hop, Judy states that hip-hop is “thinking
about being in a hypercommodified world”. In other words
“niggas” – shorthand for the very idea of the hip-hop – fully
understand that with the demise of black labor’s value
(niggers), that real capital accumulation comes from the
circulation of black “representations” (niggas) throughout the
globe. Rather than a civil war between “blacks and niggers,”
it’s the labor of black popular culture vs. the labor of black
bodies. (See Ronald A.T. Judy, “On Nigga
Authenticity” Boundary 2 [Fall 1994],
212.)
"Real capital
accumulation comes from the circulation of black
'representations' (niggas) throughout the
globe."
Judy is of course talking about very traditional
notions of labor – cotton picking, sharecropping, factory and
domestic work and other forms of menial labor – the kind of
labor that has defined the black experience in the United
States that is, per Mexican President Vincente Fox, now
largely the province of new immigrant workers from Mexico. In
the context of the contemporary labor force, the “field
nigger” is now rendered too expensive, though some might argue
that many “field niggers” view themselves as being above such
labor in the aftermath of the social gains made by blacks
since the late 1950s. Regardless, some young black laborers
were forced into illicit and underground sites of labor,
including the prison industrial complex – the drug economy and
the pornography industry being two of those sites – and in the
process have helped redefine the very idea of labor by
elevating hustling as an act of necessary self-preservation in
an era when the kinds of jobs that sustained the working-class
lifestyles of their parents and grand-parents, have been lost
to foreign laborers.
Hip-Hop’s
brilliance (if we could call it that), was not only to exploit
the narratives of “nigga laborers,” but if we consider how
much contemporary rap music and videos traffic in the bodies
of nearly naked black women, hip-hop clearly also exploits the
bodies of those “nigga laborers.” In fact one could argue that
hip-hop produces a surplus labor – rappers, ballers,
video-hoes, thugs and strippers are a dime a dozen within the
discourses of hip-hop. As sociologist Roderick Ferguson
suggests, this surplus labor only heightens the sense that
hip-hop is outside of a normative blackness: “As surplus labor
becomes the impetus for anxieties about the sanctity of
‘community’, ‘family’ and ‘nation’, it reveals the ways in
which these categories are normalized in terms of race,
gender, sexuality, and class. Indeed the production of labor,
ultimately, throws the normative boundaries of race, gender,
class and sexuality into confusion.” (See Roderick
Ferguson, Aberrations in
Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2004], 17.)
"Banning the word
‘nigger’ will not erode the realities of white
supremacy."
Judy defines
authenticity as “adaptation to the force of commodification.”
In this regard, Judy argues that “Nigga is not an essential
identity, strategic or otherwise, but rather indicates the
historicity of indeterminate identity” (Judy, 229). This
notion of “indeterminate identity” is echoed in literary
scholar Saidiya Hartman’s description of the black slave – the
organic “nigger as property” – in her
book Scenes of
Subjection where she asserts that the “fungibility of the
commodity makes the captive body an abstract and empty vessel
vulnerable to the projection of others feelings, ideas,
desires, and values; and as property, the dispossessed body of
the enslaved is the surrogate for the master’s body since it
guarantees his disembodied universality and acts as the sign
of his power.”
While Hartman may have been talking about the white
elites within a 19th century “slavocracy,” more
than a century later, some within the black community use
“niggas” as the empty vessel to project their hatred, disgust
and embarrassment with those black bodies that don’t fit some
bourgeois and idiosyncratic notion of who “real” black people
are supposed to be. Banning the word “nigger” will not erode
the realities of white supremacy, but at least for some, it
will further diminish the visibility of those within our ranks
who some feel are not deserving of the very humanity that we
all seek.
The
author of four books, Mark Anthony Neal is a professor of
African-American and Women’s Studies at Duke University, where
he also directs the Institute for Critical U.S. Studies. This
article is adapted from the essay “Nigga: The 21st
Century Theoretical Superhero” from Mark Anthony Neal’s
forthcoming book The TNI-Mixtape. He can be contacted at
dr-yogi@att.net.
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