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“Yeah. But what about the history of the word? As a vile racial epithet or the essence or symbol of white supremacy.”
“That’s the complication. Most Blacks in the U.S. know what it meant. But those in other countries have no real connection to it, other than through rap and hip-hop music and language.”
“That’s the danger,” I said. “That’s a problem with Black folk calling themselves niggaz. The history cannot be undone. And it cannot be explained fully to those who don’t know.”
I began to think more about it, as we stepped out of the grand lobby into the hot sun and went our separate ways.
A couple of years earlier while sitting in the baggage claim area of Houston’s Intercontinental Airport, I overheard two Black and two Latino youths talking about their lives. Their language was unfiltered and laced with profanity and the cavalier use of the word nigger or its hybrid, nigga. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I was confused and surprised because they used the word so freely in referring to each other as well as to others who were the subject of their conversation. And, unlike me, they didn’t care who heard them.
“Nigger, don’t be so goddamn stingy with those chips.”
“Come on nigger, you just a greedy ass mutha fucka.”
“Nigger, you can kiss my Black ass.”
I realized that this demotic language usage by Blacks in the presence of whites and Latinos is a new reality embedded in popular culture, and young African Americans and other minorities have a different understanding of the forbidden word than I do. I didn’t think the word should be used by non-Blacks, and especially whites, in the presence of Blacks, because I interpret that as racist and colonialist. But what do I know? Who am I to judge? Nevertheless, the use of the word nigger or nigga has taken on overtones that have fused a connection or disconnection between persons of different races and cultures. While the usage has been fused, the meaning is still unclear when used by Japanese, Chinese, French, Germans, Algerians, Egyptians, and others who have not had the common experience of oppression like African Americans—an experience rooted in American chattel slavery. To some, this doesn’t matter. But, to me, it matters a lot because our history is a sacred memory that helps to shape our identity.
There is an appetite for the music that is felt all over the world among different races, cultures, and socioeconomic classes. Hip-hop seems to be unstoppable.
In a strange sense, rap was born long before its time. My first memory of rap was when Muhammad Ali (aka Cassius Clay) came on the television scene as a young twenty-one-year-old boxer talking trash and talking pretty. And in this sense it was born out of the resistance to the draft by Muhammad Ali, who argued that he was a pacifist—a conscientious objector to the violence of war. Ali’s resistance to American hegemony and the violence of the Vietnam War made him the focus of the news media. He was a new Negro who did not fear the white man. He did not hold his head down when he talked to white people. He looked them directly in the eyes and spoke his mind without apology. In many ways Muhammad Ali became the new symbol of Black manhood and Black pride. He was the voice of resistance and hope, so much so that every Black male I knew exhibited a new confidence because of this young, handsome, self-assured high school graduate from Louisville, Kentucky. He was strong and could fight for the system and against the system and could still talk pretty. In the language and spirit of Mark Twain’s Huck Finn, hip-hop music, and David Sedaris: “We Talk Pretty One Day, yes we does. Dad blame it!”
Thinking about Ali now forced me to reckon with hip-hop and rap music and the way these Black rappers talked. One thing led to another. Reading Huckleberry Finn caused me to think about contemporary issues and how young Blacks also use the forbidden word. The reading raised a lot of questions, and a lot of anguish and a good bit of ambivalence. I began to think more about growing up as a Black boy.
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