N*gga Theory. Jody David Armour

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СКАЧАТЬ First, some contend that any sentence that wholeheartedly embraces the word “nigga” cannot be a progressive performative utterance and cannot unify Blacks or produce positive social change; I respond to their concerns in a chapter devoted to ordinary language philosophy and the N-word. Others object not to the word “nigga” itself but to my self-referential use of it—that is, they see the statement call me a Nigga as a claim that cannot be authentically uttered by a respectable law professor in reference to his own privileged black self. The following blog criticizing my exhortation succinctly captures this viewpoint and the righteous invective that often accompanies it:

      Prof. Armour, I’ve met niggas. I know niggas. I have nigga clients. You, sir, are no nigga. First, you graduated high school, then you graduated college, then you became a professor. You’ve probably never even fired a gun, let alone killed anyone. Your son will never visit you in prison. You’ve probably never sold a single gram of cocaine, and I’ll bet a thorough inspecting would reveal no gang tats anywhere on your body. You drive a German sedan with GPS but not 22″ chrome wheels. You don’t receive public assistance, daydream about starting a record album, or have half-dozen illegitimate children you don’t support. You probably have a six-figure salary from legitimate sources. You are about as far away from a “nigga” as a black man can be. Hell, I may be more nigga than you.

      So I say call me a Nigga despite not fitting this popular stereotype—despite my lack of a criminal record, my light-skin privilege (I’ve been called a yellow nigga, a sand nigga, and a Spic), my Ivy League diplomas, my respectable salary befitting the occupant of the Roy P. Crocker Chair at the University of Southern California Law School, my residence in the Black Beverly Hills, my three sons who attended exclusive private high schools and colleges, my respectable rims, my fluency in “talking White,” and my red-headed Irish Catholic mom. Thanks to my lighter shade, academic pedigree, chaired professorship, tax bracket, ZIP code, speech patterns, and mixed ancestry, I am not what cognitive science would call a “prototypical” nigga.3

      If the sentence call me a Nigga were a statement of fact, or if the blood-soaked epithet on which it turns had a fixed meaning, which it does not, then perhaps I could not authentically utter it and perhaps its use could not produce “real” social change. But the boundaries of “nigga” (lower-case “n”) and “Nigga” (upper-case “N”), like most linguistic boundaries, are malleable and always up for grabs, and I, like many others, am repurposing the words as terms of art in an oppositional discourse that uses words as tools, tools that can accomplish two tasks, one critical, the other political: 1) I use “nigga” (lower-case “n”) critically, conceptually, and analytically to highlight and isolate and ultimately refute illegitimate and unreliable moral condemnations of disproportionately poor black wrongdoers whom many outside and inside the black community “nigger-” and “nigga-rize” and, 2) I use “Nigga” (upper-case “N”) politically to stand in solidarity with wrongly vilified black criminals and rally resistance to a common foe, namely, “tough on crime” “eye-for-an-eye” “lock ’em up and throw away the key” retributionists responsible for the disproportional incarceration of black criminals, especially violent ones. I say call me a Nigga to contest what that condemnatory word and concept mean, and through that contestation to unite law-abiding and law-breaking blacks and more generally to undermine the moral distinction between criminals and non-criminals of all races. This book rests on the basic premise that struggles over the meaning of troublesome and transgressive words and symbols can drive radical social change.

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      But I say call me a Nigga, first and foremost, to assert solidarity with and express love for a criminally condemned man whose conviction relegated him to the status of a nigga in the eyes of many and whose legacy lives in every word I speak or scribble about blame and punishment: I look at our criminal justice system through lenses ground and polished by his experience. I cannot think about legal writing without seeing a black man desperately click-clacking on a Royal manual typewriter on his cell floor, deep into the night, in search of his own salvation. That man, doing 22 to 55 in the Ohio State Penitentiary for possession and sale of marijuana: he was my dad. All that stood between him and a lifetime of iron bars and cell blocks and prison yards was word work—nothing but the Queen’s English he and that Royal keyboard could crank out. After teaching himself to talk and think like a lawyer from the warden’s own law books, he drafted his own writs and represented himself pro se through the state and federal court system, delivering his own oral arguments to appellate tribunals along the way, and ultimately vindicating himself in Armour v. Salisbury (492 F.2d 1032), a Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals case I now teach to my first-year criminal law students. #PoeticJustice.

      My love for and sympathetic identification with this particular black convict makes me, according to the logic of those who seek to niggerize black criminals, a Nigger Lover. That logic makes my mom, grandmom, eight brothers and sisters, and everyone else who sympathetically identified with him, Nigger Lovers. Indeed, given the millions of moms, dads, sons, daughters, relatives, and friends who sympathetically identify with black criminals, including violent and serious ones, Nigger Lovers in this poignant and supremely ironic sense number in the millions. Indeed, it will be useful to make Nigger Lover a term of art, properly applicable to anyone who empathizes or sympathetically identifies with a black criminal, including those who are violent. The substantive criminal law requires that jurors convict only morally blameworthy wrongdoers, under the ancient legal maxim actus non facit reum, nisi mens sit rea—in Blackstone’s translation, “an unwarrantable act without a vicious will is no crime at all.” Under this mens rea principle, as it has come to be known, it is unjust to punish someone who commits an “unwarrantable act”—the actus rea—unless he acted with a “vicious” or wicked will. This requirement invites jurors to fully or partially excuse wrongdoers with whom they sympathize, and so a black defendant’s freedom in a criminal trial often rides on the ability of his lawyer to transform often racially resentful jurors into Nigger Lovers. Ironically, as a child I often heard other whites refer to my mom as a “Nigger Lover” for her participation in what many around her viewed as morally condemnable conduct: the dreaded commingling of gene pools called miscegenation. Of course, the commingling of black and white gene pools has been going on in America since its inception. White male slave owners violently injected their genes into the black population through the rape of black female chattel for hundreds of years under slavery. Nevertheless, the sight rankled many in the late 1950s and early 1960s: my Irish American mom, with her head full of flaming red hair, and my 6’8” barrel-chested black dad, the two of them looking like Lucille Ball and LeBron James, kicking along main street in stride—one, two—arms locked, unmistakably matched. The obscene thought of this big black man skinny-dipping in their European gene pool provoked racially resentful cops and prosecutors to railroad him.

      I also say call me a Nigga to forcefully assert my solidarity with and love for the black boys I grew up with in Akron, Ohio, once home to all four major American tire makers (Goodyear, Goodrich, Firestone, and General Tire) and known as “Rubber Capital of the World.” Until, that is, tire makers took their unionized, good paying, low-skilled jobs to cheaper labor markets down South and overseas, leaving behind neighborhoods mired in joblessness, alienation, and crime. If the Midwest is America’s heartland, this nation suffered a myocardial infarction and gross necrosis in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s due to interruption of the job supply to this area. The destructive consequences of rustbelt necrosis never reached our family while my dad was a free man, but when he essentially got “25 with an L” (a sentence of 25 years to life) a week after my eighth birthday, his eight kids and wife went from a comfortable Cliff Huxtable and the “Cosby kids” standard of living to crumbs and roaches and rats. Most of the poor black boys I suddenly began running those cynically de-industrialized streets with have been convicted of criminal wrongdoing—especially the ones with ambition, backbone, and grit. That makes them, by the Black Criminal Litmus Test of a nigga—by our shared history, and by our bonds of mutual love and respect—“my Niggas.” In calling them my Niggas, I am saying that even though they meet the litmus test of criminal condemnation and I do not, and even though they are morally responsible for criminal acts that I have never committed, there is no real moral СКАЧАТЬ