*171 Part IV: Race, Rap, Violence & Film: A Twentieth Century Story
A bad nigger is about the lowest thing that walks on two feet.
When we went downtown, outside the ghetto, we were niggers. No one had any hesitation about letting us know it, and not only in speech.
No, now that I am free of the toils, I'll frankly admit that I'm as guilty as Cain. I did kill the nigger. He was uppity to a lady, and what else could a Southern gentleman do?
They had to have a license to kill anything but a nigger. We was always in season.
Phillip Middleton and David Pilgrim argue that the “nigger” now has a life of its own. Its evolution from a term with economic power and meaning, which dramatically influenced notions about inclusion and citizenship extended to the law and powerfully influenced social thought. Its unbridled use in creating race in America and defining blackness continues to cloud language and expressions. Throughout America's post-antebellum, Jim Crow period, the word was commercialized and popularized through what Middleton and Pilgrim describe as “venomous” use. The Dictionary of Contemporary Slang indicates the breadth of vernacularisms, including “nigger” as a verb, to spoil or destroy; niggerish, acting indolently; niggerlipping, wetting the tip of a cigarette while smoking it, and nigger stick, a police officer's baton.
However, as discussed supra, the N-word was never simply a word. Its users generated image and myth, which has been used in novels, films, cartoons, advertisements, music, and in daily social life. The image was carried on detergent boxes, toys, postcards, children's books, banks, and countless other objects used daily. The images have become familiar overtime through early *172 print and media, portraying blacks with bulging eyes, unusually thick and oversized lips, and very dark skin. In Parts IV and V, this article turns to the evolution of “nigger” through a social lens. These sections explore how language and image influence or give meaning to culture, gender, law and education. These sections also highlight on one hand the violence associated with the word, and on the other hand, the tremendous wounding power of “nigger.” Part V offers a critique of why the term is difficult to “get over.”
A. Cultural Violence
Both film and the novel are powerful mediums used to entertain, inform and sometimes influence culture. For social critics, the creative realm can be used both to offer insight on cultural norms and social mores and also to influence popular perception and opinion. They help to elucidate racial power dynamics in America, and particularly race imaging. Early films by white Americans depict the popularly imagined negro and negress. These images could also be found in novels, cartoons, caricatures in magazines, jokes, and on posters advertising comedic routines. Without counter reflections, these images informed the greater public about blackness. At times, white authors, used the word “in order to dramatize and condemn racism's baleful presence,” according to Kennedy. At other times, they fueled demeaning stereotypes perpetuated overtime in popular culture.
Consider how the story of the “Ten Little Nigger Boys,” is told for comedy, as a nursery rhyme, but has underlying tragedy, legally and socially. Note, for example, the violence in the infamous rhyme: “Ten little nigger boys *173 went out to dine: One hocked his little self, and then there were nine.” Being chopped in half does away with the other little boy. “Seven little nigger boys chopping up sticks; One chopped himself half, and then there were six.” Death and harm beset the fictional boys. In this macabre tale, joyfully recited, the little boys are stung by bees, jailed, swallowed at sea, and “fizzled up” by the sun. Agatha Christie later adopted the title, “Ten Little Niggers” for her play, and later abandoned the title for the more socially acceptable “Ten Little Indians.” Sadly, this transference was really not much better.
Among the images associated with “nigger” are those offered by legendary filmmaker D.W. Griffith who achieved notoriety for his infamous film, Birth of A Nation, and authors Thomas Dixon who penned The Clansman, a national best-seller, and Margaret Mitchell, writer of Gone With The Wind. In both the Clansman, and its screen adaptation, Birth of A Nation, the Reverend Dixon swears to his audience that “niggers” are obsessed with raping white women. They are “stupid,” with “onion soured” breath, “foul African *174 odor,” overzealously seeking citizenship and political participation by voting multiple times in elections, and attempting to gain equal rights, equal politics, and equal marriage.” Dixon persuades audiences to rise and reclaim their honor through physical and psychological violence, including burning crosses, lynching, and killing off the “niggers.” Dixon's call, with Griffith's help, was an incredible success. Not only did Klan recruitment increase, so did the number of lynchings in the United States. Birth of A Nation, almost ninety years later, continues to be used as a recruitment tool for the Ku Klux Klan.
Films, cartoons, and rap music have been powerful social informants. However, can they influence behavior? Fanon argues that every effective erethism or responsiveness to stimulation derives from cultural situations and social attitudes and behaviors. He argues “there is a constellation of postulates, a series of propositions that slowly and subtly--with the help of books, newspapers, schools and their texts, advertisements, films, radio-- work their way into one's mind and shape one's view of the world of the group to which one belongs.”
Scholars in the United States debate the extent to which violence may be informed by media such as film, television and music. However, recent studies now report a link between adolescent and early adult violence and exposure through television, films, and video games. A recent study conducted over a seventeen-year period by Columbia University scientists found “a strong link” between television watching and violent behavior. Parental ratings on television, including cable stations, as well as warning labels on music and video games indicate that there is growing social concern about how violence witnessed, observed or heard influences the public, particularly young people. *175 Aggressors in recent school shootings share that movies or music influenced them to commit their crimes. In fact, the “television intoxication” defense was made popular in a 1977 trial of a young man who claimed to have been influenced by television.
Ironically, Kennedy exercises little energy in analyzing the image conveyed through “nigger” and its use in literary and film contexts. He discusses the tension surrounding David O. Selznick's production of Gone With The Wind for the silver screen, Joseph Conrad's The Nigger of the Narcissus, and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings's The Yearling. However, Kennedy provides a critique of nigger and film in a few short passages. What is offered, does not adequately relate to such a powerfully influential medium for influencing popular culture, of not only blacks and whites in America but others domestic and abroad.
Dixon's experiment with “nigger image” in film achieved his object; it influenced generations to fear and loathe African Americans and to ascribe certain characteristics to them. The irony of social myths such as white civility and black “niggerhood” is that they can at once be turned on their heads and reexamined. Author and social critic, Tim Madigan, comments on how the myth of “nigger” helped to build membership in the Ku Klux Klan and spur fear among white women and hatred among white farmers, lawyers, doctors, carpenters, law enforcement, bankers, store clerks, and judges. The Klan, and indeed, much of America, relied upon and derived its own meaning and identity on a fixed image of blackness or “niggerness.” Blackness was interchangeable with niggerness. The myth maintained that blacks were genetically inferior, low in character, inclined to promiscuity, untruthful, and a threat to the purity of the *176 white race, particularly the chastity of white women. Sadly, the stereotype of black violence as portrayed through cartoons, films, and novels was embodied and acted out through white led mayhem in America. Cultural violence in films and texts transferred to physical violence in the cities and rural areas of the American south.
B. Physical Violence Against African Americans
Race violence in America has been characterized by public displays of aggression. Cultural violence as discussed, supra, also appealed to the broader public through the normalization of “nigger” through film, novels, jokes, detergent, soap, and other regularly used items. Ridicule was at the heart of the commonly traded expression, and the ubiquity of such images permitted all those who posed the items to stand in judgment of the “nigger” as caricature or not. Characteristic of both cultural and physical violence against African Americans in the United States, has been the insincere appeal to either rid America of the “nigger,” or the effort to give meaning to a caste-like citizenship through punishment and public discipline. Through these acts, local law has been created. Scholars have contributed in substantive measure to the growing body of literature analyzing the brutality captured by Jim Crow practices. Thus, this section aims to set forth a principle that physical brutality against blacks was a developmental process, which began in slavery and was connected with notions of citizenship, liberty, and identity. Blacks continued to be viewed as non-citizens, unprotected by laws that were viewed as “protecting” whites. Rather, special laws (legislatively-driven or mob-ruled) were created for “niggers” that did not require legislative approval.
Law, of course, is not that simply developed by legislative bodies and enforced, monitored, or regulated by courts. Law evolves, and at its instinctive (and perhaps primitive) level, may be locally controlled. The need for rules at this level is apparent as they help to regulate behaviors that impact upon the most intimate spheres of our daily lives. During Jim Crow, federal laws could not competently address the apparent angst of whites living among blacks. Federal laws strained the local liberties of whites to engage in activities that were part of a history as old as the nation itself, which included public discipline of “niggers,” frequently in the cruelest fashion. Thus, as we examine the law behind punishment, at least as related to blacks, we must explore not simply the law in text, but the law in action and law in society. Federal laws, which arguably *177 protected African Americans and perhaps limited the “control” whites previously possessed over blacks during slavery, strained Jim Crow supremacist notions of justice. The downside of local law making in this instance (for blacks) was that mob rule became the law in many southern communities. It subverted justice, ignored due process and appealed to pre-reconstruction notions about governance of bodies and violence. New laws were made and reinforced through practices that became customary and punishment that was brutal and public. These laws included lynching and castration for offending the virtue of a white woman through speech, gesture, or other action, beating or public reprimand for failure to walk in the gutter when a white woman or girl passed, the prohibition on eye contact with whites, and the prohibition of blacks sitting in the front of buses. These social laws were grounded in race imaging, but were not necessarily written into ordinances. Yet, it was clear that these rules were the law of the society and were treated as if they were written by the legislature; these laws arguably carried more local weight than the constitution. Such rules also gained legitimacy, particularly the public punishment element, through the support of local law enforcement.
Michel Foucault analyzes the psychology and sociology of public punishment and discipline. The public displays of punishment, particularly through lynching, cross burnings, and whippings by the very way in which they come to be organized, allow public assessment, law making, and judgment. One might also suggest that they deter crime; in this way, they simply affirmed the fears of African Americans. When mob violence ruled, law was made through the utilization of lynching to discipline blacks for certain behaviors and controlled or policed its enforcement.
Jim Crow violence carried with it a powerful political message as it could limit one's newly found political and economic freedom. The Klan had a distinct growth in America following the Civil War. Its early mission was one of immature evening pageantry in sheets and pillowcases, soon replaced with religious ritual, ceremony, and also purposeful destruction and violence against *178 the dark enemy and their white conspirators. The Klan assumed the responsibility for stamping out the “nigger” (indistinguishable from most blacks except perhaps the projected images of “mammies” and “uncles”) and was responsible for the deaths of black women, men, and children throughout the South.
With the Klan's rise came tremendous violence where blacks and their white friends perished at the hands of the hooded fraternal organization. With or without hoods, however, Madigan writes, whites espousing racist views took to lynching to eliminate the “nigger” among them. He chronicles, “[h]oods became unnecessary for those participating in public murders, lynchings that were often a cause for school holidays and community festivals, whose goings-on were reported in newspapers across the South like baseball box scores were.” In an 1870 report, Governor William Holden of North Carolina documented the methods used to kill black Americans, “[s]ome . . . were shot . . . [s]ome were whipped, some of them were hanged, some of them were drowned, some of them were tortured, some had their mouths lacerated with gags; one of them had his ears cropped; and others of both sexes, were subjected to indignities which were disgraceful not merely to civilization but to humanity itself.” The Klan, although starting in the South, became an “American” organization, with Northern and Southern membership, and even the membership of President Harding, whose initiation is said to have occurred at the White House in the Green Room.
What would presidential involvement in the Klan and in the eugenics movement mean for African Americans? What would it mean for America? The frightening image of “nigger” and the call to arms to “do something about it” motivated violent action from some whites. This extra-legal action was legitimized through the political process and through the enforcement process when sheriffs deputized angry mobs who could carry out a reign of terror through law enforcement. The permanence of the image also placed African Americans in a peculiar position. First, contrary to Jim Crow myths about African American intellectual inferiority, black scholars were being educated at colleges, universities, law schools, and medical schools established during and after reconstruction. As reported by Al Brophy, African Americans owned businesses ranging from movie theatres, banks, insurance companies, and even furriers. However, because of the myth, their accomplishments in white society were devalued and degraded. Second, by their very immutable characteristics, *179 they were always subject to possible harm for the most trifling infractions on the myth of white supremacy. For example, in focus groups conducted several years ago in Lexington, Kentucky, participants (mostly black women over sixty years old), shared that they were expected (and all affirmed that they had) to walk in the street, along the gutter when white women and girls were walking on the sidewalk. Their failure to abide by the local rule of law could result in physical punishment.
Arguably, the physical punishment served multiple purposes. First it more firmly established codes of permissible conduct toward whites by blacks. Second, it legitimized white superiority by punishing blacks for “stepping out of line.” Third, it undermined any expectations of equal citizenship between blacks and whites, leaving each group with the understanding that blacks belonged to a lower caste of citizenship. Fourth, there was no room for appeal, thus leaving the social rules as the legal norm for the culture. Finally, the physical punishment served to cast fear in the minds of African Americans.
At “nigger barbeques” (a term associated with burning blacks) participants and photographers memorialized lynchings “[testifying] to their openness and to the self-righteousness that animated the participants.” These events were quite popular in the communities where lynching was practiced. Lynchings were festive events, even children and women participated in the reverie.
In an informative essay on lynching, Litwick describes the social actions and atmosphere at these penal affairs. Lynching was often an arm of the law easily extendable to African Americans, as public reprimands of slaves were common during the antebellum years, and even enforced through governmental agencies. Antebellum punishment included public whippings through local jails and workhouses. A Charleston ordinance, for example, made it “lawful” for owners to send blacks to be corrected through whippings; the cost was twenty-five cents per trip. Due perhaps to mercy or because the workhouses were busy with punishing slaves, a black person could be beaten only twice per *180 week. Workhouses were common throughout the south and business, according to Wade, was very brisk, “averag [ing] over 150 [whippings per] month . . . .”
Lynchings, by extension, were a twentieth century form of extra-legal punishment. Frequently, such punishment was carried out in the gaze of law enforcement agencies, and far too often local sheriffs were complicit in the brutality. “Nigger Killing” was described as “the national pastime,” in a prominent black newspaper during Jim Crow. This would control the “nigger” who “gets ideas” about white women or disobedience to racial codes, the local law.
Litwick quotes an observer at the lynching of Thomas Brooks:
Hundreds of Kodak clicked all morning at the scene of the lynching. People in automobiles and carriages came from miles around to view the corpse dangling from the end of a rope . . . Picture card photographers installed a portable printing plant at the bridge and reaped a harvest in selling postcards showing a photograph of the lynched Negro. Women and children were there by the score. At a number of country schools the day's routine was delayed until boy and girl pupils could get back from viewing the lynched man.
Lynching shared the public spectacle characteristics described by Foucault and found in antebellum acts of violence against blacks. However, it also illumes differences, as blacks had technically made the leap to citizenship, but were yet denied the fruits of what citizenship would bear. From this passage we can discern that the public had created its own law. The law of the South was the law in action, not simply that in the text. Textual law provided protections that were codified in the evolved constitution, but clearly did not translate to all local communities and “sub-societies.” Where was the due process in lynching? To whom would one appeal? Both antebellum and Jim Crow violence, used to tame the “nigger” served to subvert any notions of black citizenship, including liberty and freedom.
For African Americans, the legal authority to exercise rights typically associated with citizenship was implicitly barred by the very threat of violence. Hence, voting, purchasing property, integrating predominantly white schools, and even interstate travel were rights or privileges beyond access for those blacks who were unwilling to risk physical harm to obtain them. The rule of law in various communities throughout the United States trumped textual law. Civil liberties and civil rights were more illusory than real, as accessing them might subject one to brutality often condoned by local law enforcement. Conversely, defending against the presumption of guilt has been equally challenging for African Americans, as the characteristics which long ago became associated with nigger, have psychologically fastened upon the collective imagination.
*181 C. Violence Scapegoat: The Presumption of “Nigger”
Somewhere in America, an evil black man lurks, preying on innocent white victims and escaping without a trace. He killed a pregnant woman in Boston, and left her husband for dead. He stabbed a woman to death in Milwaukee, and tried to kill her husband, too. He abducted two precious babies in South Carolina who were never seen alive again. Last week, he was back again, attacking an altar boy in Somerville leaving cuts all over his arms. There were many other crimes, too trivial to name, and he has been linked to even those. Yet, with all the leads, all the sighting, all the black men who have been stopped and questioned, police in no state can find this elusive terror. That is because he doesn't exist.
An element of public punishment's purpose is to assuage fear. Far too frequently unreasonable white sexual anxiety and fear culminated in strange, repugnant forms of torture directed at and experienced by African American women, men, and children as discussed supra. The myth of “nigger” dominated social psychology, affecting how whites would forever (or so it seems according to Justice Taney) view blacks. Sadly too, it affects how blacks have responded to whites. “Nigger image” has a face and it is black. This simplistic, yet profound connection probably seems odd to most non-Americans as the myth overwhelms reason, objectivity, and often morality. That the face is shaven or not, neatly presented or not, does not overcome the presumptions related to motivation to harm (e.g., Amadou Diallo), presence (to take over, producing “white flight”), or even the predisposition for violence. These fears exist on the primal level and are evidenced through whites' false claims of attacks by blacks to distance themselves from the crimes they have committed or in the case of Emmet Till, Dick Roland and others, used to justify torture. These incidents could easily be categorized as isolated, were law enforcement, prosecutors, and white juries and communities not so easily swayed. It is the support of white communities in light of unreasonable facts to support allegations that has left so many blacks disenchanted. These incidents are not confined to the American South. In fact, it would be a mistake to assume that America's racial woes can be placed squarely at the feet of the South, because they cannot. As revealed here, the “black man did it” defense has been worn not only in the South, but also the Northeast, Midwest, and West.
1. The Famous Whistle
Well, what else could we do? He was hopeless. I'm no bully; I never hurt a nigger in my life. I like niggers--in their place--I know how to work ‘em. But I just decided it was time a few people got put on notice. *182 As long as I live and can do anything about it, niggers are gonna stay in their place. Niggers ain't gonna vote where I live. If they did, they'd control the government. They ain't gonna go to school with my kids. And when a nigger gets close to mentioning sex with a white woman, he's tired o’ livin'. I'm likely to kill him. Me and my folks fought for this country, and we got some rights. I stood there in that shed and listened to that nigger throw that poison at me, and I just made up my mind. “Chicago boy,” I said, “I'm tired of ‘em sending your kind down here to stir up trouble. Goddam you, I'm going to make an example of you--just so everybody can know how me and my folks stand.”
Emmit Till's murderers expressed their helplessness, suggesting that there was no other course for them, but to kill the young man. Till was not the first black male to meet a premature death in an effort by two white men to protect the honor of a white woman who interpreted his speech as a “wolf whistle” during a grocery purchase. Till, a fourteen-year-old Chicagoan, was visiting his uncle, Mose Wright in Mississippi the summer of 1955. A survivor of polio, Till had overcome the disease but not some of its affects, including a stutter. According to Mamie Till Mobley, Emmet's mother, to overcome his stuttering, they practiced speaking more slowly, but his words from time to time had other audible qualities, including a trilling or warbling sound (e.g., if one lengthens the word “his,” with emphasis on the “s,” or when, where, what and who, with emphasis on the “wh”). Till's purchase would be his last, as he was accused of having verbally molested the storeowner's wife by whistling at her. His murderers, Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam (half-brothers), would later share that they felt justified in killing him because he had broken social rules and denigrated the honor of a white woman. For them, the local sheriff, and their jury, local law was the rule of law. Although they later confessed, Milam and Bryant never served time for their murder. The acquittal was marked by the brutality their acts and revealed in a confession made in Look Magazine, January, 1956. Milam shares with journalist William Bradford Huie the final moments of Till's life that he asked Till whether he thought “you still as good as I am?” to which Till replied “Yeah.” Till was then shot (Till having been beaten with Milam's pistol in the back of his shed), and they tied a barbwire around his neck and connected it to a cotton gin. Then they threw both Till and the cotton gin into the Tallahatchie River.
*183 Huie concluded that “[t]he majority--by no means all, but the majority--of the white people in Mississippi 1) either approve Big Milam's action or else 2) they don't disapprove enough to risk giving their “enemies” the satisfaction of conviction.” The letters to the editor following the story were perhaps as revealing as the confession itself. Richard Lauchi of Collinsville, Illinois commented “Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam did what had to be done, and their courage in taking the course they did is to be commended. To have followed any other course would have been unrealistic, cowardly and not in the best interest of their family or country.” Perhaps most interesting was the letter written by C.R.L. Rader where he suggests that all the events were “precipitated by backgrounds and events outside the main actors in the drama. Regrettable to be sure. But you and I are as much to blame for [the] killing as the ones who were directly involved . . .”
2. Charles Stewart
“Nigger image,” although never dead, had a very public revival in the 1980s and 1990s through false claims levied by whites against blacks involving murders instead of rapes. Interesting parallels can be drawn, however, as these were white males claiming that white women had been killed by black men, or, in the case of Susan Smith, that her children were the victims of a black male attacker. These false claims sadly heightened racial tensions and catalyzed racial harassment, punishment, and misconduct on the part of police and other law enforcement officials.
I lived in Europe during the time of the Charles Stewart murder case. I was troubled by the story as soon as the details were learned. It was a tragic murder, an act of loathsome, premeditated violence. Mrs. Stewart was a pregnant white woman who was shot in her stomach. The very thought of this was only comparable to the brutality rendered on pregnant slaves or Jim Crow lynchings where wombs would be cut from the mothers.
There were additionally troubling facts not easily reconciled for me. The alleged killer was black. Supposedly the murderer had brutally shot and killed the pregnant wife, but allowed the husband to live. This seemed odd. It was not that a black man could not kill a pregnant woman, because that was conceivable, although to kill a white woman would not be ignored as it might with a black woman. A person motivated to such violence would seem inconsistent in his malevolence to leave the husband alive. I wondered why the husband did not struggle and why a murderer would allow an eyewitness to later identify him--this act of mercy did not fit with the act of brutality. The two were difficult to *184 reconcile for me.
Charles Stewart claimed the murderer was black. American history has made clear that an accusation by whites of black male violence against white women deserves honest, fair evaluation and heightened scrutiny. Thousands of lives were lost on false claims that the “nigger” did it. I concluded that it seemed most logical that the husband had orchestrated the murder. From the limited amount that was learned from Perry Mason as a child, and, as I had not yet gone to law school, knowing little more than what is described, I wondered about the value of Mrs. Stewart's life insurance policy. Most blacks that I spoke to had similar leanings. It was curious why the Boston Police Department did not consider the same.
Perhaps most tragic about this false claim was that the police had charged William Bennett, a black man with the crime after a “massive police search for the black attacker.” Charles Stewart identified Bennett in a police lineup. In a later lawsuit against the police, Bennett accused the Boston Police Department of conspiring to violate his civil rights by threatening witnesses into falsely identifying him, and by threatening to plant evidence and drugs in Bennett's girlfriend's apartment to coerce her into testify against him. Were it not for Charles Stewart jumping off a bridge and his brother's confession, Bennett might be serving his fourteenth year in prison.
3. Susan Smith
Stereotypical and negative media representations of minority youth, particularly African American young men . . . become difficult to overcome . . . in the minds of people who believe they are accurate portrayals of African American youth and men. An example of negative media representation can be found in the case of Susan Smith, the South Carolina mother who accused an African American man of car-jacking her car with her children inside, when, in fact, it was she who murdered her children by drowning them in a local lake.
The nation was gripped a South Carolina's woman claim on October 25, 1994 that a black man, between the ages of thirty and forty with a medium build, car-jacked her automobile, taking her two sons with him. Law enforcement agencies from throughout the United States became involved in the tragic case. The story made headlines throughout the world. The FBI was involved in the “hunt” for the suspect. Susan Smith was surely being honest when she revealed, “I can't even describe what I'm going through. I mean, this--my heart is--it just aches so bad. I can't sleep. I can't eat. I can't do anything but think about *185 them.” In response to her plea for help, the nation responded, offering money, search teams, and sophisticated police support, as the FBI, “on day five, brings in a highly sophisticated computer to focus on leads.” Suspects were detained, literally from across the railroad tracks.
Yet, it was Susan Smith who “strapped her two young children in her Mazda Prot‚g‚ and rolled it into a lake.” According to reports, it was “nine days in 1994 before she broke down and admitted the truth.” Her case is matched in some ways with the bizarreness found in a case of a San Antonio, Texas woman who claimed that a black man set her afire and robbed her. Sheriff Wells, however, the lead investigator in the Smith case, seemed to show an enlightenment not present in either the Till case or that of Charles Stuart's investigators.
4. Jessie Anderson
On April 21, 1992, Mrs. Jessie Anderson, age 33, was brutally stabbed twenty-one times in the head at a Milwaukee Mall. Anderson's husband, Jesse, claimed that two black youths accosted them at the mall's parking lot, leaving a sporting knife in him and fatally wounding his wife. Anderson's claim stirred local racial tensions, as undoubtedly it was meant to do. His claim was not unintentional. Milwaukee police searched for a suspect matching Anderson's description. To support his story, Anderson produced a sports hat, not uncommonly worn by teenage African American boys in Milwaukee, only it was later revealed that he had purchased the hat from a young man in the mall the day of the stabbing. Anderson was convicted of the murder after the young man who sold Anderson the hat (straight off his own head) realized that he was being implicated in the murder.
Most bizarre in each of these cases was the reliance on race to target attention away from the true murderers. That race itself is evidence in such cases is a daunting proposition. Leonard Greene characterizes this as “that sinister black man sure does get around.” Greene's observations provide glimpse into how we as a nation have struggled with “nigger.” Greene captures the synonymy between blackness and “nigger image,” he calls him the “black phantom.” He suggests, “the black phantom is a work of fiction, a fabrication *186 contrived by minds that border between racism and desperation. When a white criminal in trouble collides with the law, there is no better way out than to blame a black man.” The alibi works according to Greene because “it fits an image held by much of America.” Indeed, it is not that the Smith, Stuart, Anderson, or Milam were so believable. Their stories were pathetically contrived, but America believed because “it wants to believe.” The potency of “nigger image” has survived like a fine, but sturdy antique, winding its way from slavery, through Jim Crow, past the Civil Rights Movement, through the 1980s and 1990s. Does “nigger image” live in the new millennium? To be sure, it does.
D. Interracial Violence: Rap, Race & Gender:
Kennedy persuasively argues for context to be at the center of discourse about the N-word, rightfully pointing out the myriad of expressions and uses which surround the word, along with the diversity of those who use it. But his discussion of blacks that use the N-word in drama, comedy, and rap music suffers from some very serious flaws. Here he seems to assume that blacks could not equally harm other blacks or themselves through the use of culturally emasculating images. This position neglects intra-group differences according to gender, sexuality, class, age, and education, while embracing the essentialist perspective that there is no diversity within groups--a position that most often ignores women. Surely, rap artists and comedians do not speak for the entire black community.
Indeed, he overlooks the psychological challenges here for whites, ignoring several hundred years of legalized discrimination, violence, and racism that has accompanied use of the N-word by white Americans in plain view of the law. The problem with “nigger” is only partially addressed by responding to its victims. To actually study the causes of why people use the word and the power it wields requires reaching beyond rhetoric and sensationalism. In doing so, it is not only logical, but also imperative, to focus attention on the users (whites, blacks, and others) and ask questions that would lead to understanding. For example, why does “nigger” possess such a lasting power in the white American lexicon? What significance does the N-word convey? How strong of a word is it for white Americans? Why do they use it? Do white Americans view the word *187 as harmful? If they believe that it is harmful to its recipients, why do they use it? How do whites feel after using the word? Why, as a society do we need what is conjured by the N-word? In what ways have we as a society relied upon projecting “nigger” as an image?
Professor Kennedy challenges his fellow black Americans to “get over” the hurts inflicted by the word and leave its emasculating powers behind. He refers to the N-word used in university settings as “rude but impotent.” In the final chapter of the book, entitled, “How Are We Doing With Nigger,” he suggests “there is much to be gained by allowing people of all backgrounds” to use the N-word, and “yank nigger away from white supremacists.” By doing so, Kennedy foresees a day when the N-word will be transformed from a “negative into a positive appellation.” But at what cost to racial awareness and understanding should we conduct such a social experiment? The truth is, the use of the N-word is disruptive in many contexts, including some of those in which Kennedy frequently points out as intra-cultural examples in rap music and jokes.
Kennedy opens Nigger with a chapter entitled: The Protean N-Word. Kennedy provides a rich sampling of jokes, comedic routines, rap lyrics and even statistics on the frequency of “nigger” in legal cases, informing us that in a Lexis search, “nigger” emerged over four thousand times. However, the frequency of the word's use only provides us with an interesting fact or detail. The fact, unstudied, unchallenged, unanalyzed is simply a number on a page, lacking content, context and meaning. We come away understanding very little if one simply investigates alarming statistics without exploring what they mean to his or her society. Fanon observes, ‘what matters for us is not to” collect statistics, “but to find their meaning.”
Although Kennedy reminds us that blacks use “nigger” too, in fact asserting that “nigger” is fascinating because of that, he does little to explain why. For example, although he includes an excerpt from a Richard Pryor routine, where the comedian uses the N-word, Kennedy chooses not to inform the reader (in the same passage) that years later, Pryor denounced his own use of the N-word. Pryor remarks:
I left [Africa] enlightened. I also left regretting ever having uttered the word nigger onstage or off it. It was a wretched word. Its connotations weren't funny, even when people laughed. To this day I wish I'd never *188 said that word. I felt its lameness. It was misunderstood by people.
The fact that Pryor used the word and stopped later may not seem interesting. However, Pryor's reason for doing so would seem as important to share with readers as his jokes.
Kennedy correctly informs his readers about the multiple uses of “nigger” and that its use has been embraced by some African Americans. Were the word only associated with racial animus, he argues it would not be worthy of “extended study.” Professor Kennedy tells us that “nigger” has been used to “lampoon slavery . . . poke fun at lynching” and decry voting prohibitions. However, these references are treated in a page of text, in contrast to multiple pages devoted to chronicling jokes, comic routines and rap lyrics. Kennedy seems more occupied with variety than with complexity. The reader is left no better informed about the psychology or political force behind African Americans retooling the word “nigger” as gays have done with “queer” and recast it into a new discourse, “queer theory.”
The question of language is too complex to hope to analyze it in a few pages. Kennedy does not substantively critique African American use of the word; he simply reports that it happens. Sadly, the recitation of facts leaves the reader uninformed about the complexity of “nigger” and African Americans. What interests us here is African Americans confronted by and readapting a haunting term. Fanon asked the question in connection to Africans and their fondness for French, but it has significance here. Why, he might question, are some African American rap artists comedians, and others so fond of using “nigger?” Although this question is substantively unanswered for us, greater attention to the diversity of blacks and the “African American experience” might reveal black male emasculation, inferiority complex, and sexism within the African American community.
*189 1. Claiming
Kenji Yoshino writes about claiming, covering, adopting and the various ways disenfranchised groups, particularly gays have adapted to, fought against, and “covered” to resist or overcome discriminatory practices and pejorative references. Faced with discrimination, “othered” groups adapt to overcome their particular type of oppression, exclusion, or rejection. Through the adoption of the term “queer” for example, gays have turned a spurious word on its head, and reduced the term's venomous effect. This act of claiming redefines the word and shifts its political aspects, arguably diffusing the term sufficiently that members of gay communities, typically threatened by the term can be more relaxed when the term is uttered. Kennedy proposes the same with “nigger.” He argues that perhaps we are on track with diffusing “nigger” through comedic routines and rap music. Through these venues, he argues, African Americans have offered a different version of “nigger”; one that can avoid leading to victimization, but rather display artistry and multiple meanings. What are those meanings?
Arguably, African Americans are not quite there with reclaiming “nigger” as gays have done with “queer.” Perhaps part of the reason for this may lie in the fact that race is the divider, although both terms have been used in the commission of violent acts and spurred hatred. Perhaps “nigger” is a bit more potent because of its direct and exclusive target. In this way, all ethnic groups can have a “queer” population that builds a coalition. Legal academics of color, including Pamela Bridgewater, David Cruz, and Darren Hutchinson, write and speak about “queer theory” utilizing race as a subset of a necessary dialogue. Yet, “nigger” is not a word that others voluntarily take on. Indeed, it was always meant to be black, but with horrible exaggerations as discussed supra. If “nigger” simply meant black, without other added characteristics, probably many would want to call themselves “nigger” (i.e., if it meant intelligent, industrious, creative, spontaneous, beautiful, dignified, etc). Instead, “nigger” has meant black plus, indolent, lazy, oversexed, aggressive, deadly, heathenish, and immoral. “Queer” also lost some of its potency with gay men and women “coming out.” This act of defiance placed a face on homosexuality that revealed our neighbors, cousins, siblings and friends. “Nigger,” on the other hand, has always been out of the closet in that way. It is a fantasy that no matter what an individual African American might have achieved, he or she could still be considered nothing more than “a nigger.” Of course, the immutable characteristics of blackness and its historical association with “nigger,” leaves most detectable African Americans without a closet to enter. Thus, while other subordinated groups might yet “drive while . . .” it does not necessarily translate into random police stops and profiling.
“Nigger” seems to have an immutable quality that cannot be found *190 elsewhere. Moreover, it seems that the move to politically use queer had an agenda, and perhaps America was more sensitive for opening such a dialogue. AIDS was embraced as a devastating disease, in a way in which black loss has never truly been embraced. It was a time when admitting to having a gay person in one's family was far less shocking than for a white person to claim black relatives (compare the reaction to Newt Gingrich's sister coming out to the Jefferson family's reaction over Thomas Jefferson's black progeny). And while there has been some power it seems in reclaiming “queer” other ethnic groups have been far more reluctant to normalize incredibly offensive slurs such as “kike,” “wop,” “wetback,” and others. For them, and as well for blacks, perhaps the history of brutality is too near, and perhaps too pervasive.
Randall Kennedy's Nigger was a starting point in a dialogue about creative or empowering uses of “nigger,” however, blacks have been saddled with promoting other causes, including education, employment, meaningful voting rights, and housing. On the other hand, blacks have fought against media misrepresentations, hate speech, cross burnings, land theft, and racial profiling. It is difficult to develop a psychology where one laughs about being called a “nigger” during a racial profiling street stop, while going to school, or during a cross burning.
Arguably, through blacks' very use of “nigger” there has been some cultural appropriation of the term, as it was a word developed not by blacks, but by whites with a very specific political agenda. However, this now-shared product is the unfortunate byproduct of one of the most loathsome periods in American history, and has steadfastly maintained its potency. However to assume that all African Americans use the word in some healthy fashion is to presume too much and scrutinize too little. African Americans are not immune from embracing self-denigrating images or self hate.
Some question whether “nigger” can be a slur if other blacks use it. Arguably it can, just as sex discrimination can occur if one has an employer or supervisor who happens to be a woman, but who engages in discriminatory conduct. The victim's affinity with the perpetrator does not lessen the injury or harm. One assumes that a woman would choose not to harm another woman, however, such a presumption removes human frailty from consideration. Throughout history men have hurt men, and women have done the same. Gender affinity is no excuse for harm, as race is not. A discriminatory supervisor is not immune from legislation proscribing sex discrimination. Likewise, African Americans can be harmed from discrimination imposed intragroup.
2. Rap
The adoption by some blacks of “nigger” is a fascinating evolution, however, the reader of Nigger is hardly empowered with information about the psychology of this journey for African Americans after traveling through the section of chapter one where the topic is addressed. It seems impossible that the enslaved would leave antebellum conditions completely freed of the psychological chains that bound them for centuries. Indeed, Painter describes *191 that even Sojourner Truth had unwittingly and unknowingly embraced elements of her enslavement. Painter writes, “Sojourner Truth, recalling herself as a slave, realized that she had been incapable of separating [her master's] interest from her own, even when serving him meant depriving her own children and setting herself against her fellow slaves.” Painter describes this as “slave mentality,” noting that it does not “appear in a vacuum.” Rather, she argues, slave mentality is marked by a “lack of self confidence, personal autonomy, and independent thought, a sense of one's own insignificance in comparison to the importance of others, a desire to please the powerful at any cost, and, finally, a ferocious anger that is often turned inward but can surge into frightening outbursts.” Painter describes these conditions as precisely the traits of one who has been victimized.
Ironically, some of these conditions appear to mark some of the more flamboyant of rap artist who frequently use the N-word. Clearly, not all rap artists use the N-word, and even some that choose to do so appear to limit its reference. However, others embrace the term, suggesting that it is a term of endearment and connotes a brotherly connection. They make inconsistent distinctions between “nigga” and “niggaz” and “nigger,” distinctions not wholly recognized by those outside of the rap industry. Nonetheless, their music is often passionately angry, intensely sexual, in a most brutal fashion, and speaks to money, sex and cars being demonstrative of power, and that power is conveyed in videos boasting of available sex, bouncing automobiles, and jewelry studded with diamonds and other stones. In a recent sampling of lyrics, one notices not only the anger and violence, but also sexual subordination and violence against women, as discussed infra. In this light, contemporary artist who strongly embrace the use of “nigger” appear more in profitable minstrelsy than independent artistry. Rap is a billion dollar industry, and sadly those who purchase “nigger” in the newly redesigned black signature, are perhaps buying the same old image, only now blacks themselves dress it up. According to some statistics, over sixty percent of those who purchase this brand of rap music are whites. Further, rap is not an exclusively black enterprise as music moguls, most of those who successfully marketing rap music happen to be white.
Yvonne Bynoe, lawyer and former entertainment industry executive, expressed her shock and dismay at the image of blackness conveyed through nigger in rap and exported to South Africa. She recalled, “nothing prepared me for the distorted viewpoint that most Black South Africans had about Black Americans based on the narrow range of rap songs, music videos and American *192 television shows that they voraciously consume.” As most South African youth lack context about the legal history and social struggle of blacks in America, they have little awareness about what “nigger” conveys; it is out of context. Bynoe offers a unique perspective about globalization and culture. She describes her shock at a young scholar in her travel group being greeted with “What's up, my nigger?” Although their trip to South Africa provided the unexpected opportunity to discuss the everlasting sting of “nigger,” most disappointing was the prevalence of an image of “nigger,” the rap entertainment industry exports globally. This marks, according to Bynoe, an additional form of exploitation.
3. The B-Word Comes Next: Misogynation in Rap Music
Not all rap music is misogynistic. However, that which boldly uses “nigger” or “nigga” or “niggaz” as its mode of referencing other blacks, often uses “bitch” and “ho” as well to represent women. Cole and Guy-Sheftall suggest that “the frequent characterization of Black women as “ho's” and “bitches” along with the sexual posturing of Black men, seems to have become generic and all too acceptable in rap music, especially California-based “gangsta rap” and Miami-based “booty rap.” Blacks have demonstrated a complicity in the perpetuation of stereotypes about black women, including “woman-as-whore stereotype.” The rapper Too Short introduces a song explaining, “this here song is dedicated to any nigger who ever in his life got his [penis] sucked.” He further advertises in the song that such a performer is what he is looking for, a woman that will have “a nigger jumping up.” He concludes that he tells the “bitch” to turn away from him. Presumably this is so that he no longer has to look at her.
Again, perhaps devaluation of black women in connection to rap and nigger would be meaningless if in fact, black women were valued within the greater society and if the music itself did not further contribute to the “nigger image” developed centuries before. The promiscuous black woman of the slave plantation has been replaced by an image equally violent and harmful, cast by black men and supported through a global entertainment industry. To be sure, Too Short is not alone in his vulgar, but normalized representation of black women. Ice T, Ice Cube, Dr. Dre., Snoop Dogg, N.W.A. (Niggas With Attitude), Slick Rick, Jason Lewis, UGK, and many more contribute to the denigration of women. Should African American women ignore the “nigger woman” stereotypes and violent imagery represented in black males' music and videos simply because they are black? Of course not, “but a critical discussion of the gender politics of the music that in profound ways defines the hip-hop *193 generation . . . opens up the possibility of a long overdue cross generational dialogue.”
