Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word

Nigger should have a place in any serious dictionary. The word is simply too important to ignore.

the suspicion that whatever the setting, whites derive racist pleasure out of hearing, saying, or even alluding to “nigger.”

Of all the things that have hurt the campaign against nigger-as-insult, unjustifiable lying and silly defenses have inflicted the most damage.

Many critics of the “HNIC” title proceeded as if their offended sensibilities alone should settle the matter—as if their sense of outrage necessarily made the act they objected to a bad act warranting an apology.

The great failing of these theories is that, taken seriously, they would cast a protectionist pall over popular culture that would likely benefit certain minority entrepreneurs only at the net expense of society overall. Excellence in culture thrives, like excellence elsewhere, in a setting open to competition—and that includes competition concerni

Subsequent actions taken by university officials were excessive. First, the sensitivity-training session ordered by the affirmative-action officer was just the sort of Orwellian overreaching that has, unfortunately, tarnished the reputation of multiculturalist reformism.

For this reason, we may count ourselves fortunate that the anti–hate-speech campaign of the regulationists fizzled and has largely subsided. This particular effort to do away with nigger-as-insult and its kindred symbols was simply not worth the various costs that success would have exacted.

Later, in his autobiography, Johnson would assert that “most of the Negroes who condemned Nigger Heaven did not read it; they were estopped by the title.”

In this case, however, the CMU authorities capitulated too quickly to the formulaic rage of affronted blacks, the ill-considered sentimentality of well-meaning whites, and their own crass, bureaucratic opportunism.