TLS: Freelance by Michael Greenberg

by Michael Greenberg

When I asked for the book Nigger by Randall Kennedy at my local bookstore the other day, the white sales clerk, apparently unfamiliar with the title, was speechless. I had uttered the word that Christopher Darden, the prosecutor in the O. J. Simpson trial, called "the filthiest, dirtiest, nastiest slur in the English language". Overhearing my request, a black clerk cheerfully led me to the African American Studies section where several copies of the book subtitled The strange career of a troublesome word -were to be found.
Kennedy points out the "peculiar social capital" of the n-word, with its supple multiplicities of meaning. The writer Claude Brown called nigger "the most soulful word in the world". For the Rapper Tupac Shakur, nigga stood for "Never Ignorant, Gets Goals Accomplished". Kennedy writes that his father proudly declared himself "a 'stone nigger' -by which he meant a black man without pretensions... unafraid to enjoy himself loudly despite the objections of condescending whites or insecure blacks". Kennedy's mother, on the other hand, deployed the word to mean "discreditable Negroes, a group that, in her view, constituted a large sector of the African American population". The comedian Chris Rock, in one of his most popular routines, says: "I love black people, but I hate niggers". The cover story by John Ridley in this month's Esquire begins: "Let me tell you something about niggers. Always down. Always out.

Always complaining that they can't catch a break". Ridley exhorts "niggers and old-school shines" to get off the "Liberal Plantation" and side with "the most accomplished blacks", such as Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell. Jesse Jackson wants the word banned as "hate speech, no matter who uses it".
At a club in Los Angeles a couple of weeks ago, the comedian Michael Richards, known for his role on the TV show Seinfeld, exploded at a group of black men in the audience who were talking among themselves during his routine. He paced the stage shouting, "Nigger, nigger, oohh, I'm going to be arrested for saying nigger", in what appeared to be an entranced and self-immolating mantra. "Fifty years ago, we'd have you upside down with a fork up your ass!" Richards seemed to revel in the smashing of the taboo, even as he knew it had turned him into a pariah. A few days later, he was on Jesse Jackson's radio programme, Keep Hope Alive, pleading for forgiveness. "I'm shattered. It was anger, not bigotry. I was in a place of humiliation." In a fit of tortured grandiosity, he declared, "America must begin healing".
Jackson pronounced Richards in need of psychiatric help. A plea of temporary insanity may be his only hope for salvaging his career. After a diatribe against Jews, Mel Gibson claimed what the Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders calls "Alcohol-Induced Mood Disorder", and checked himself into rehab. Richards might find his diagnosis in an adult form of "Expressive Language Disorder", or if that fails, a problem with "Impulse-Control".
Psychiatry and racism have a long partnership. In 1851, Samuel Cartwright, who specialized in "diseases of the Negro", claimed that several forms of mental illness were peculiar to blacks, including an obsessive desire for freedom -a "flight from home madness" -for which Cartwright invented the term "drapeta- mania", from the Latin drapeta, meaning fugitive. In their book Madness in America, Lynn Gamwell and Nancy Tomes describe how Cartwright thought that any slave who attempted to run away more than twice was insane.
Many years ago, my friend Roy and I would sometimes spit racial putdowns at each other in a deranged, bitterly purgative, machine-gun style. We argued the relative power of the words "kike" and "nigger". To Roy, nigger was a magical word, with an inexplicable capacity to denigrate and elevate at the same time.
"It makes me crazy with rage, but it confers instant superiority on me too, since the speaker can only be the lowest kind of worm." For my part, I explained that "kike" had the added sting of betrayal, since it was invented by German-American Jews to differentiate themselves from Eastern European immigrants whose names often ended with "ki". The equivalent term for African Americans is "Uncle Tom", referring to the enslaved hero of Harriet Beecher Stowe's abolitionist novel. Its pejorative meaning dates at least to 1920, when Marcus Garvey used it at a rally: "The time for cowardice is past. The old-time Negro has gone-buried with Uncle Tom". Malcolm X called Martin Luther King "a modern-day Uncle Tom", which resulted in King being pelted with eggs in New York.
Henry Louis Gates was in New York recently to promote The Annotated Uncle Tom's Cabin which he co-edited with Hollis Robbins. "How did the hero of this seminal novel become the epithet among blacks for the worst thing a black man could be?" he asked. Gates says that the novel can now be read as "a story about the children of God, the Israelites coming out of Egypt. A story about a people with a future". At the panel discussion I attended, someone asked Gates whom he would call an Uncle Tom. "Martin Luther King", he said, "but not in the way that Malcolm X meant it. Tom was a Christ-like figure who turned the other cheek and died while trying to protect two black women from mortal harm." He called the moment in the 1960s, when blacks turned on blacks in the Civil Rights movement, "our very own version of the Inquisition".
Leaving the event, I met Shelby, an elderly African American woman who used to own a bar she sarcastically called the Mayflower. She was eager to talk about Richards's outburst. "Don't you love it when people show their true colours? All the menace just drips away. It's a relief." She seemed to be excusing Richards when she compared him to the comedian Red Foxx, who frequented her bar. "Red was mean. He had to be. The audience is the enemy. He won them over so he could cut off their noses." The friend accompanying Shelby hadn't heard the Richards story and Shelby asked me to tell it. As soon as I began, she interrupted. "I'll take over. You won't be able to get yourself to say 'nigger' in front of me."