Those of us who weren't destroyed got stronger, got calluses on our souls. And now we're ready to change a system, a system where a white man can destroy a black man with a single word — "NIGGER."
—Dick Gregory, Nigger
Hey Nigger — The Power Of A Word
When the following incident occurred, it seemed like a page torn from history. I was standing on the corner of Chorro and Higuera waiting for the light to change when a car full of young adults turned the corner. A young man yelled out, “Hey, Nigger!” I froze. Instantly my mind became a storm of memories of each time in my life I had been called a "nigger." My anger was overwhelming. I felt the collective rage of my entire race boiling inside my body. Why did this word slice through my flesh like a razor? Why did my body become stiff with anger? It’s just a word, isn’t it?
I remembered the first time a white playmate called me a nigger, when I was five. I ran home crying.
“What’s wrong?” my mother asked.
“Billy Tibbs called me a nigger,” I cried.
“Do you know what a nigger is?” she asked.
“No, Mommy, but it sounds bad,” I replied.
“You are not a nigger, sweetheart. Now go out and play.”
Currently there is a controversy taking place between the NAACP and Merriam-Webster over whether the dictionary’s definition of the word nigger should be “a black person” or “a racial slur referring a to a black person.” I think it might be difficult for a non-black person to understand how I felt that evening because there is no other word in the English language which is as offensive and hurtful as the word nigger. There are words which are racial slurs against white people too, but their impact is different because their history and usage is different. W.E.B. DuBois said, “The white man may not intend nigger to be derogatory — but to the black man it is always derogatory and demeaning.”
The word 'nigger' is a variant form and pronunciation of the Latin word 'niger' and the Spanish word 'Negro,' both meaning black. The early Portuguese slave traders collected most of the slaves from the Niger River valley in what is now called Nigeria on the west coast of Africa. The first recorded use of the word appeared in Samuel Sewall’s Diary, spelled with a single “g,” around 1700. Joseph Conrad used the word in the title of his book The Nigger of the Narcissus as did Dick Gregory in his autobiography simply titled Nigger. Some people want to ban The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn because of Mark Twain’s use of the word. Newspapers won’t print the word unless it is in quotation marks and TV newscasters won’t even say it. They call it the “N” word, to make it less offensive.
I teasingly educate my friends when they use words like blackball and blackmail by interjecting, “Don’t you mean white ball or white mail?” It reminds them of the sensitivity attached to the word black as always being negative. You’re “behind the eight ball” when you’re in trouble, not the cue ball. Good guys wear white hats and bad guys wear black hats. When the stock market crashed ten years age it was called Black Monday. Until the sixties the only positive references to the word black were black gold for oil and in the black for a company making a profit. During the sixties, black people began to give this negative term positive meaning. Black became beautiful, not ugly. “Say it loud, ‘I’m black and I’m proud,’” became the passphrase of a people beginning our own self-identification.
Maybe now it’s time to make another attempt to span this corridor separating the races. In the study of martial arts, I learned to disarm my adversary by turning his own flow of energy against him. My adversary in this case is not the young white man who yelled out, “Hey, nigger,” but my reaction to his epithet. True, my reaction is founded on historical as well as personal experience, but after all, it is just a word. I am responsible for how I interpret and react to the word.
Of all the possible ways this young man could have chosen to interact with me, why did he choose this way? He didn’t want interaction; he wanted to create a reaction—and he succeeded. He drove safely away in the car while I’ve thought of nothing else for the last three days. As a race, we changed an entire country’s perception of the word black by first changing how we ourselves perceived the word. “Hey, black man” yelled from a passing car today would have resulted in my laughter instead of my contempt. Thirty years ago, it felt the same as “Hey, nigger” did a few days ago.
I know this transition is going to be more difficult than the one we made in the sixties because it’s not part of a movement. I don’t think James Brown is going to compose a song to give the word nigger a positive image. I still don’t like the word. It still “sounds bad,” but any change of global consciousness must be the result of personal transformation. All I can do is understand the energy I give to this word and then disarm it, take away its razor edge as best I can, remove its demeaning quality while still recognizing it as derogatory. I can take away this word’s ability to create the reaction it did and no longer be its victim!
“You are not a nigger,” I kept repeating after the incident as I reached out to friends to help bring some order to my rage. I still don’t know what a nigger is, other than a noun. Like all nouns it represents an object without containing that object. There is no heat in the word hot, there is no coolness in the word cold and there is no anger in the word nigger.
Thanks, Mom. I’ll go out and play now.
Photo Credit: Me, 1954.