Teachers keep getting fired for assigning Randall Kennedy's book

Fridman opens by naming the book whose title spells the slur with a hard R. Kennedy answers with the word itself — nigger — and a long lineage: the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, basically Latin, basically Spanish, built on forms of *niger*, black. Early English spellings wandered, *nigguh* and *niggur* among them, and sometimes looked purely descriptive, as if they only marked dark skin. That descriptive life did not last.

What linguists cannot show is the conversion. "We don't know actually how the term became a slur," Kennedy says. Close variants were used in mixed ways; by the early nineteenth century the word was already derogatory, something people complained about. The drop happened in ordinary speech, without a decree anyone can point to and call the turning point.

Twenty years after publication, the controversy is larger and stranger than he expected. He has been asked to serve as an expert witness in murder and assault trials, in tort suits for intentional infliction of emotional distress, and in employment cases. He had not seen that coming. He also had not seen how often other people would be punished for assigning his book.

The surprise that still angers him is the classroom. Every year, Kennedy says, teachers are suspended or fired because they excerpt a chapter of *Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word*. A typical case is earnest, not reckless: someone teaching Mark Twain's *Huckleberry Finn*, where the word appears more than two hundred times, hands out a few pages of his history so students can understand the controversy around the novel.

Students go home upset. Parents storm the school and accuse the teacher of using the slur offensively. Administrators often abandon the teacher. When a case reaches Kennedy, he writes the superintendent, the principal, sometimes an op-ed for the local paper. In twenty years, he says, there has not been one case that came to his attention in which the discipline was even remotely sensible.

Those letters are almost a synopsis of the book. The word is explosive because it has typically been used terribly. It is part of the soundtrack of racial terrorism in the United States. If you want the real history — lynching, the terrorizing of Black people — you need the word, and you need to know why people are upset. That knowledge should make a speaker careful. It should not make the word undiscussable.

Young people nod at the lynching history, then put on headphones. Dr. Dre, the Geto Boys, Snoop, N.W.A., Dave Chappelle, Katt Williams — they hear nigger or nigga used in many keys. Teachers who stop at "this is forbidden" leave students to reconcile the classroom taboo with the charts. Kennedy thinks they will usually guess wrong about what the artists are doing.

He stacks the people who refused euphemism. Dick Gregory, comedian, activist, and friend of Martin Luther King Jr., abandoned a flourishing entertainment career to fight for racial justice, including in the Deep South. His first memoir is titled *Nigger*. Richard Pryor's best album, Kennedy says, is *That Nigger's Crazy*. Were they putting Black people down? The only way to answer, he argues, is to go deeper into the word.

They held it up like a mirror: look at this, look at how it has been used, no asterisks, no "n-word." A highly lauded documentary titled James Baldwin *I Am Not Your Negro*. That is not what Baldwin said. Anyone can go to YouTube right now, Kennedy says: Baldwin said, "I am not your nigger," then talked about it. Baldwin was not covering anything up. He wanted people to face American life, and a teacher who wants the same has to grapple with the word.

He is not arguing for kindergarten. Kindergartners are not ready for his book; third graders probably are not. Tenth graders, he thinks, can read it, and eleventh graders, twelfth graders, college students, and law students still more so. And yet law professors have been disciplined because the word came out of a teacher's mouth while reading a court opinion. Students walk out, report the teacher, and in some cases the teacher is punished.

In his view that is bad pedagogy, and in many instances "it's stupid." He does not mind saying so. It would be another matter if a teacher looked at a student and used the slur as a weapon — *get out of here*. None of the cases he is talking about are that. They are classes in which the word emerges as a subject of conversation for understandable reasons. Under those circumstances, he said twenty years ago and says more emphatically now, it is not wrong for a teacher to utter it.

Fridman presses the other side. It is still one of the most powerful words in English, and used without skill — even when read from a legal transcript — it can do more harm than good. Kennedy agrees that words matter. He is not suggesting people be lax or irresponsible. Precisely because words matter, he says, people need to face them, talk about them, and learn that they do not mean the same thing in every context.

His working example is *discriminate*. Said with disapproval, it means someone distinguishes on an unjustifiable basis, and that is a bad thing. "Discriminating taste" means the opposite: the person can tell excellent from good from poor, and we admire that. Same letters, two fates, assigned by context and tone of voice.

Fridman suggests that once a word crosses into slur territory, the number of acceptable contexts collapses. Kennedy resists. Slurs change. *Yankee* was a slur in the eighteenth-century United States; today he is a Yankees fan. *Queer*, in his lifetime, was something people ran from. Then, he says, the gay liberation movement grabbed it, affixed it, and repurposed it. Can it still be a slur? Yes. It does not have to be.

Fridman still ranks the hard-R version as number one on any minute-by-minute list of intense slurs, and says it has kept that rank even since Kennedy's book. Kennedy more or less agrees — that uniqueness is why he wrote the little book. The point he will not give up is that "what is a slur" is itself a complicated idea, settled between speaker and listener, not engraved in the alphabet.

The book began in his office, hunting for a lecture topic, when the word popped into his mind. It had never been absent from his conscious life. His parents are Black people, refugees from the Jim Crow South; he was born in South Carolina. In that household he heard the word used in every possible way, as a slur and as praise.

He still hears his father, a man he reveres: "That's the smartest nigger in the world." The bravest. The baddest he knew. He was not putting people down. That was how he talked. A group stripped of almost every public dignity had taken the sharpest word aimed at them and, inside the house, honed it into honor. Kennedy does not claim that move is easy to explain to outsiders. He insists it is part of the record.

He jumped up, went to the *Oxford English Dictionary*, and asked when the word first appeared in English. Then he queried the federal-court database for every case that contained it. Thousands of cases. About a month in, he compared those counts with other slurs. *Kike*, a longtime derogatory word for Jews, appeared, but nothing like this. *Wetback*, aimed at Mexicans, the same. He ran through the others. "Nothing came close, not even remotely close."

He reads that uniqueness as a reflection of the unique stigma imposed on African Americans, and of the color line's place in American life. The word also spawned secondary insults: Arabs as "sand niggers," the Irish as "the niggers of Europe," women as "the niggers of the world." John Lennon recorded a song with that last phrase; Kennedy thinks Yoko Ono had something to do with it. A slur had become a measuring stick other subordinated groups used to name how low they had been pushed.

Fridman says he has heard the hard-R version more in this conversation than in the rest of his life, and he is uncomfortable in a way he is trying to understand. Is Kennedy being deliberate? Yes. He could have called the book "the n-word," or "a book about a word that causes pain to many people." He wanted a title that would be provocative and would grab people. He is a writer; he wants to be read. If that is sensationalistic, he is not embarrassed.

He respects people who, as a matter of principle, never utter the word. On the first book tour, minutes before a seven o'clock call-in, a host told him the station never used it and would not pronounce the title. He went on, followed the house rule, and had a fine conversation. Euphemism has a place; English is a supple language. He does not get angry at principled refusal, and he often defers. He only asks that people understand he is not using the word willy-nilly: there is a pedagogical reason.

At the first bookstore event, the last speaker was an elderly Black man. He had listened, he was grateful, and he remained unconvinced. Growing up, the word had put him at the back of the bus, kept him from voting, and justified never calling him as a juror. To him it had one terrible meaning. He would never use it, and he thought Kennedy's well-intended book would be seen by some as permission. Kennedy felt the power of that comment and thinks it is probably correct that some readers — including some listening now — will hear a license. He has said he is not giving one. "If this word comes out of your mouth, you are taking on real responsibility."

For about the first five years after the book, he got an email at least once a week. "Dear Professor Kennedy, I read your book..." He knew the rest. A white rap fan, Black friends, the car, the chorus. When the word comes up they sing; he does not know what to do. Is it wrong to sing along? Around the tenth letter he wrote a form reply.

First, talk with your friend. Second, even if the friend says it does not bother him, that does not end the matter. Imagine a theater before the film starts. Friends are talking or singing. The white kid says the word. The next thing he feels is a fist from someone he did not see, sitting right behind him. All that person saw was a white person saying it. That, Kennedy says, is not an overheated scenario from a law professor's mind. It is a very plausible one.

His advice is prudence. Stay clear of the word unless you are very certain, and unless, if you are called on it, you can defend what you are doing. Fridman wants to talk about the violence and the law around that punch. Kennedy's letter is not a theory of justified assault. It is a warning about mistake, about what a stranger can reasonably think they saw, and about how little a later linguistic distinction may matter in that second.

Fridman disagrees with what he takes to be Kennedy's view that the variants are not significantly different. He puts the hard-R form at number one in power. The form ending in -a, he thinks, has slid far down the list because rap and comedy stripped much of its charge — the way *queer* slid. Kennedy does not deny the distinction. People make it, and as a sociological fact the two forms are different.

He adds a colder observation. If a white person is criticized and answers that they said *nigga*, not *nigger*, most of the people who are already mad will stay mad. Linguists can argue phonology and pragmatics. The street does not hold a seminar. The effectiveness of a defense depends less on whether it is correct than on whether the hearer will accept it.

*Negro* is another controversy, Kennedy says, but it has never been viewed by a substantial number of people as a derogatory term with the same animus. Martin Luther King Jr.'s great oratory used it. So did W.E.B. Du Bois. Kennedy uses African American, Black, Afro-American, and also Negro. Students have gotten exercised: is he quoting a period, or speaking in his own voice? Often he is speaking in his own voice, and they are offended. He paused, looked into it, and wrote an essay on the long list of names Black people have used for themselves — Black, colored, Afro-American, African American, Negro.

He can date his professional use: the summer of 1983, because his boss demanded capital-N Negro. The boss was Associate Justice Thurgood Marshall, known as Mr. Civil Rights. Students tell him the word is out of bounds and derogatory. "Does the fact that Thurgood Marshall demanded that I use this word," he asks, "complicate things a little bit?" He has met students who know little but want to lecture him from three sentences of current fashion.

He sometimes says *colored* too, because the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People has not changed its name, and because that is what his grandmother said, naturally. As far as he is concerned the NAACP is a wonderful organization, and his grandmother's diction was perfectly fine. Preferences differ. He wants people at least to know where he is coming from before they try to police his vocabulary.

Fridman asks whether social networks should censor the word — on Twitter, on campuses, in op-eds. Kennedy's answer depends on use. If it is used to intimidate or terrorize, then no, along with lots of other words. Would he be happy with a technology that always blanked those six letters? He would be against it. For one thing it would erase the title of his book. Play it out, he says: what would it do to novels by James Baldwin and Toni Morrison, to speeches of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr., to comedy albums of Richard Pryor, Katt Williams, and Dave Chappelle? He does not want those blanks. He wants the word there, and people who know how to deal with it.

Hurt feelings, he argues, are not self-certifying. If feelings are justifiably hurt, the speaker has acted wrongly. If a Klansman is hurt by a talk on King's greatness, Kennedy will not apologize; the Klansman needs to reevaluate. Fridman reframes the goal as maximizing love, including the long-term love that freedom of speech can serve. Kennedy associates himself with that vision and doubts that the way to it is to erase a painful symbol. Better to educate people until they can look at a Ku Klux Klan uniform — or a swastika — and know what it is without sinking to their knees. Poise and knowledge, he thinks, make a more loving world than suppression.

He does not want the word removed from *Huckleberry Finn* or from Baldwin or Morrison; bowdlerizing those works is, as far as he is concerned, highly objectionable. Is it ever okay for a white man to say the hard-R form? No one — Black, white, anyone — should use it to put down, terrorize, or intimidate. He has seen Black people use it that way against other Black people, and that is bad too. A white historian quoting a 1948 presidential candidate who used the word is not bad; it shows how recently open usage sat in national politics.

A white comedian satirizing a rapper who invites a white fan onstage and then gets angry does not make Kennedy angry, even if the joke fails. Unfunny is unfunny; it is not automatically a cover for hate. He would not purge Lenny Bruce. He would prefer a YouTube title spelled in full, would not be offended by asterisks, and holds onto openness, transparency, and freedom. Trying to make himself understood, and listening carefully, he feels at ease — that the conversation will "eventuate in something positive."