Book Sparks, in a Word, Controversy

‘Deep in the streets” is not how anyone would describe Randall Kennedy. Each morning he commutes from his home in suburban Boston to Harvard Law School. His office there is a cacophony of casebooks and culture. Sarah Vaughan tapes and Philip Roth novels join the clutter that surrounds his large desk. He sits behind stacks of papers in a gray tailored suit that complements the gray hairs that curl around his temples.

Kennedy, who wrote 1997’s acclaimed “Race, Crime, and the Law,” is the author of a pithy new book with an eye-catching title: “Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word.” Already the book has spawned debate about how the “troublesome word” can and should be used.

Under discussion as well is whether a book about the word, even one by an Ivy League legal scholar, can avoid the monolith of hip-hop culture--the word’s primary arena these days. Kennedy’s book owes far more to the canonized texts of jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. than to the lyrics of Ice Cube. And to some critics, that means that the law professor’s reading stops short of capturing the difficult issues surrounding the word’s popularity in some circles.

Kennedy, who is black, says he never set out to write a definitive history of the word. One day, just out of curiosity, he searched for “nigger” in the electronic database Lexis-Nexis to see what would come up. Thousands of documents later, he crafted his findings into a series of guest lectures he delivered at Stanford University in 1999. Kennedy mentioned his lectures to his literary agent, who suggested he pass them on to Erroll McDonald, who had edited his previous book at Pantheon. Three weeks later, Kennedy says, “That was that. Finished. Finito. We had a book.”

This is the first book to emerge that purports to chart and assess the word’s expansive history. Kennedy starts off with the word’s etymology (from “niger,” Latin for black) and then embarks upon a quick tour of the word’s place in history. He begins his journey in the estate records from the 17th century and roams onward through overtly racist jokes and personal experiences of black icons from Richard Wright to Tiger Woods. In his central chapter, “Nigger in Court,” Kennedy essentially puts the “protean N-word” on trial in history’s courtrooms, examining the legal spheres of education and employment, as well as the infamous testimony of Mark Fuhrman in the O.J. Simpson murder trial. The book then expands its focus to scrutinize use and reactions to the word in the culture, including controversies over using the word in dictionaries, and how it plays in humor from “Amos ‘n’ Andy” to Chris Rock.

Throughout, Kennedy repeatedly steps aside to reiterate that he deems the word a slippery, malleable thing and to argue for the “renovation” of the word as a “linguistic landmark”--and even a term of endearment and empowerment. “For bad and for good,” he concludes, “‘nigger’ is thus destined to remain with us for the foreseeable future--a reminder of the ironies and dilemmas, the tragedies and glories, of the American experience.”

Kennedy is entirely aware of the fury he stirs with the argument that the word’s use does not always constitute hate speech but needs to be judged in context. And in the context of this book’s sales and marketing, the word has proved to be incendiary. Since the title’s announcement, enraged correspondents have sent Kennedy heaps of mail. He glories in the thought of confronting readers with their uneasiness about the word. He says with a smirk that he envisions them walking into bookstores to ask, “Have you got any ‘Niggers’” in?’ or “Do you folks carry that ‘Nigger’ I’ve read about?”

In the Pantheon offices, the title has befuddled some of the people who have worked to publish the book. “There are some people who have not been able to bring themselves to say the title,” says editor McDonald. “I myself have been known to yell, ‘Say the title! Say “Nigger!” Say it!’”

Says Kennedy: “There’s a whole chapter to be added to the book about how people talk about it and avoid talking about it.”

Comedian and activist Dick Gregory has seen this territory before. In 1964, he scandalously titled his autobiography “Nigger” in an attempt to claim the word and eliminate its lethal sting.

He had long dreamed of forcing the word into white dinner party conversations and book clubs, wielding rather than complying with its power. “I had practically an all-white audience back then,” he says, “and I would get on stage and hold up the book and say, ‘Take a nigger to bed with you tonight.’ It cost me millions, but I did what I wanted to do, and we won--we put it out there.”

He’s thrilled that Kennedy has followed his lead in titling his book. “I hope he gets T-shirts made of the book cover--and if he won’t, I’ll do it for him!”

In many ways, Gregory was a harbinger of a linguistic revolution. With the spread of hip-hop came a mass cultural effort to transform the word from a verbal assault weapon to a self-selected identity marker.

“You look at a band like NWA--literally ‘Niggaz With Attitude’--and they made the word a standard with their first record in ’88. They made the word essential in hip-hop,” says Nelson George, the author of “Hip Hop America,” who is producing his own documentary examining the word in American culture. “NWA took something that was on the street and brought it into the culture, and that’s the recent history of it.”

But that recent history is barely evident in Kennedy’s book. While the chapter “Nigger in Court” earns 60 of the book’s 175 pages, Kennedy’s nod to youth culture and hip-hop is just a few paragraphs. Even the ancient history of “Amos ‘n’ Andy” earns a more in-depth look.

“I certainly didn’t make a conscious decision to minimize hip-hop in the book,” says Kennedy, whose general interest in hip-hop can be supported by the Public Enemy tape that resides on one of his many cluttered bookshelves. “But the focus of the book reflects my predominant interest. You know, ‘lawyer,’” he says pointing a thumb at his gray tie with a smile. And as a lawyer, Kennedy is mainly concerned about sticking to sources that could be “checked out in a library” as he makes his case that the word is ambiguous, not anathema.

“I tried to be very punctilious in setting forth my sources in the N-word project,” says Kennedy. Language noted: Kennedy, for all the spunk of his book’s title, generally doesn’t use the word in his own conversation. “I don’t casually use the term. I’ll say it if I’m retelling a joke. Or recounting what someone has said. Otherwise, I prefer to vary my language,” he says.

But Kennedy hardly represents all denizens of the academy. “Nigga--that’s n-i-g-g-a--is my favorite word,” says USC cinema studies professor Todd Boyd, who plans to take on the word in his upcoming book about how hip-hop’s cultural values won out over those of the civil rights movement. His book “The New HNIC”--an acronym for Head Nigger in Charge--will liberally sample from hip-hop. He says it’s impossible to offer an in-depth analysis of the genre’s history without a significant focus on its use of the word.

“That’s the real long-overdue debate, what’s been circulating in the culture--but you’ll see nobody has sat down to discuss it, not even Randall Kennedy,” says Boyd.

Hip-hop is “the reason why we can even have this conversation now--the book wouldn’t be out there if that wasn’t the case,” says Michael Anthony Neal, a professor at the State University of New York at Albany and the author of “Soul Baby” and “What the Music Said.” Neal believes the problem is that 47-year-old Kennedy lies on the other side of a generational divide.

And this is exactly how McDonald defends the book’s omissions. “It’s precisely because it is a generational issue,” he says. “I believe that there are actually two sets of discussions about the word. There’s the discussion of the word as it pertains to hip-hop culture, and there’s the other history of it and how that pertains to people who grew up at a certain time in American history. So those two discussions, even though they might inform each other, are not necessarily of one piece.”

The apparent contradiction is that Kennedy’s main argument in the book relies on a complete examination of context in judging the word’s use. As he writes: “What should ultimately matter most is the context in which the word is spoken--the speaker’s aims, effects, alternatives.”

To many critics, this argument is a clear one. Given a clearly intended context, “nigga,” and sometimes even “nigger,” can be used effectively and appropriately as a term of friendship and even of pride and power. And in a more limited sense, Kennedy also approves of use of the word by people who are not black “within the confines of a relationship,” such as that of the friendship he describes between the writers Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten.

Whether white youths should use the word freely--a particularly thorny postmodern development that has proliferated with hip-hop’s popularity--is an issue he fails to address in the book. Kennedy prefers to focus his analysis of more contemporary culture on the black-speaker-to-a-black-studio- audience construct of Def Comedy Jam (where he approves of the word as well), though he mentions that rapper Eminem refuses to include the word in the rhymes he performs. (He doesn’t mention that the white rapper uses it liberally when writing for his black cohort Dr. Dre.)

His conclusion is that “there is much to be gained by allowing people of all backgrounds to yank ‘nigger’ away from white supremacists, to subvert its ugliest denotation and to convert the N-word from a negative into a positive appellation,” a position that, for all its controversy, boasts many supporters.

“I, for one, use it quite liberally,” says George. To him, Kennedy’s argument is one that stands on its own, he says, and an in-depth analysis of youth culture isn’t needed to make the case for its current contextualization.

But for Tricia Rose, author of “Black Noise” and a professor at New York University, the current cultural framework is key. “I 100% agree with Kennedy that the word has to be contextualized,” she says. “But we have to take into account the context of American society when we rewrite this word for the purpose of endearment. And that’s why the absence of a discussion of hip-hop is exceptionally troubling, because it’s used with more extraordinary repetition in hip-hop than any other cultural form that is mass-produced in the history of America popular culture.”

Just because the word is accepted by some as a term of endearment, Rose says, “doesn’t mean the context around it has shifted. Exploitation is simply not gone, by any stretch of the imagination.” Rose says this isn’t just the case in discussing hip-hop culture and its marketing, but also in the title of Kennedy’s book. “The industry is cashing in on the volatility of this word, in the repressed white anxiety of the word. The marketing of the book is expressing precisely what I’m articulating here. It’s relying on deep white anxiety and not necessarily a deep interest in self-reflection.”

Stanley Crouch, a columnist for the New York Daily News and the author of “The All-American Skin Game, or, the Decoy of Race,” says he finds the book interesting. He deems it the product of an exploitative machine, one that will go straight into the hands of white readers, who, he says, are bent out of shape because their children are listening to rap.

“‘Nigger’ has become the new guitar turned up to 10 for suburban white kids who want to outrage their parents, and that’s why people are talking about this,” he says. “The question is, are [blacks] once again being exploited for a ritual that has nothing to do with you? Obviously yes.” And while Crouch lauds Kennedy for writing what he calls a “serious book,” he dismisses Kennedy’s argument that the word means different things to different people in different contexts. Says Crouch, “Nigg-a, nigg-er, whatever, it all constantly reaffirms one thing, that ‘you are inferior to us.’”

Opposition is exactly what Kennedy is expecting, from readers of any demographic. Months before the book’s release he was already collecting outraged letters that poured into his Harvard e-mail account--just what he’d hoped for.

“All you can do is have your say and hopefully say something interesting so that people will write back and carry on a conversation, and this will be a conversation I’ll carry on as long as I’m alive,” he says.

Kennedy has certainly found success in prying open the door to heady debate in the larger culture. And with the publication of Boyd’s upcoming book, and the filming of George’s documentary, this conversation will be a public as well as a private one. Gregory, for one, plans to travel to Harvard to congratulate Kennedy for the book, as well as to lambaste him for his continuing use of “the N-word” in conversation.

Rose is eager to take Kennedy up on his invitation for dialogue, which, it seems, has only just begun. “The responsibility is ours. No book can answer all these questions. As intellectuals, writers, readers and just plain people who live in this culture, the burden is on us.”

“Bring it on,” says Kennedy. “That’s what I want. Anytime, anywhere. You want a conversation? Send me your phone number, and I’ll call you. Send me your e-mail, and I’ll write you. Just bring it on.”