Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word

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.

Walter White, himself a novelist as well as a leading official with the NAACP, expressed both admiration and regret that he had not thought of the title first.

Adherents to this view can take inspiration from Ralph Ellison. There is an American Negro tradition, he wrote, “which teaches one to deflect racial provocation and to master and contain pain. It is a tradition which abhors as obscene any trading on one's own anguish for gain or sympathy; which springs not from a desire to deny the harshness of exi

colloquy:

Among poor black youth who… carry a burning resentment of white society. To growl that one is a nigga is a seductive gesture… that can feel bitterly empowering.”

Lee's racial critique of his fellow director is off the mark. It is almost wholly ad hominem. It focuses on the character of Tarantino's race rather than the character of his work—brilliant work that allows the word nigger to be heard in a rich panoply of contexts and intonations.

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.”

For some questioners, my book is more authentic and acceptable insofar as I have been called a nigger and have otherwise been forced to encounter it in my own life. I make no such claim on my own behalf. I do not believe that my experiences entitle me to any more deference than that which is due on the strength of my writing alone. Experience is on

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.