Our Love of the N-Word

It's hardly a secret. Black people use the N-Word enough. Enough in the earshot of non-Black folks for them to notice. I've been on enough mass transit trains, buses and college campuses to be privy to the indiscriminate use of the N-Word by numerous non-Black youth to other non-Black youth. I've heard the term applied to Jerry Sandusky, the disgraced Penn State defensive coach, by a Black female friend on Facebook. Didn't seem to matter to her that Sandusky is White.

The N-Word, most popularly "nigga," has captured the imagination of youth of all colors since Hip-Hop trickled up. The word is itself a rebellion. Replacing the -er in the last syllable of the original N-Word with an -a took the violence and hate out of the word and melded it with a spirit of irreverence toward authority and anyone else who doesn't like it.

V-Nasty, of The White Girl Mob she formed with fellow Oakland rapper Kreayshawn, has caught some heat for her use of the N-Word in rhymes. It is obviously a way to fit in and drop street credit. A lot of white girls that come from the hood want to prove themselves in the hood for good reason. They often are reminded on the daily of a White skin privilege that they don't yet see residing in the ghettos. Kreayshawn and V-Nasty's White Girl Mob exists as a reaction to their alienation growing up White and disenfranchised in the hood.

I grew up in a home where the N-Word was taboo and never used. My mom's folks are from Minnesota and have a history of being proud race people. The word was always looked down on as a term used by the so-called lower class. However, black culture has become a matter of fashion. Hip-hop has made the word ubiquitous. It can no longer be looked at as simply a word used by those with a "lack of class," as today's richest Blacks use it.

The word is like sex, it's provocative. It's illicit in that it breaks the rules of etiquette.  It's language noir.

In a recent Tale Tela online poll, 42 percent of folks thought that rappers in general should stop using the N-Word. The rest were equally divided by those who said no, it has a whole new meaning and those who did not care. I wanted to plant my flag in the "It's Complicated" camp, but the option was not given in the survey.

I wonder, can the success of a race lie on the back of a word, a word branded in the minds of so many and  functions as a vocabulary staple?

I personally don't use the word more than five times a year. Because of the way I was raised the word doesn't just roll out of my mouth. Only my closest friends have ever heard me use it and probably without them being able to ever recollect it. I slipped once in front of a white friend and I just didn't feel right saying in her presence. That never happened again. I use it like everyone else, for effect. To connote just the right emotion about a person.

As a possible upside to the use of nigger and nigga, we come across another important n-word  meaning we never use at all. A word new to us but rooted in antiquity, Negus, has been making its social media rounds recently. Negus is an East African word meaning King or member of royalty. So, David Duke, former KKK Grand Wizard turned mainstream politician, put that in your pipe and smoke it.

The N-Word tests the boundaries of free speech and good taste. The righteous seem to think that if the world is lanced from the English language we will enter through the pearly gates of the post-racial society many talk about but many know does not yet exist. The thing is that language is fluid. The word is not only a part of the American lexicon, it is woven in the fabric of it's history and cannot be easily unraveled, if ever at all.