Racial slurs in the public square

In the late 1980s I was a college undergraduate in the San Francisco Bay Area. I was sitting in the cafeteria next to two white friends of mine — we'll call them Scott and Jeff — who were having their own conversation when Jeff asked Scott a question. Scott's response was "Naw, nigga!"

I have to admit that my (black) peers and I used this term freely, but this was the first time I had ever heard that word used between two people who weren't black.

I remember feeling a lot of things, but mostly I felt confused. Should I be upset? I mean, he wasn't talking to me, and who am I to tell one white person what he can or cannot call his white friend?

Hearing this aspect of black culture appropriated in the way it was by non-black people should be taken within the context of the times. The N-word as a tool of African-American self-definition has been part of the mainstream public discourse in the United States since the 1970s, when it began making appearances in places like the title of Richard Pryor's comedy album, "That Nigger's Crazy," and the television show "Sanford and Son." Fred Sanford would occasionally use the term, which generated uproarious laughter and loud shouts of approval from the studio audience.

In the next decade, the hip-hop generation itself did some appropriating, taking what had started as a racial slur used by whites against black people and renaming it by replacing the "er" at the end with an "a."

Consider, too, that by the late '80s, hip-hop legends N.W.A, also known as "the world's most dangerous group," were helping expand hip-hop's primary audience beyond inner-city black youth. Kids of all colors, from different geographic areas and socioeconomic backgrounds, were resonating with the message of the music and the corresponding oppositional stance. It is important to remember that the actual name of the group, Niggaz Wit Attitude, represented the first time the term was presented from a position of power in the larger public sphere.

As for the appeal of a word many in the mainstream found highly offensive, the rapper Q-Tip, of A Tribe Called Quest, explained it this way in the 1993 song "Sucka Nigga":

"See, nigga first was used back in the Deep South

fallin out between the dome of the white man's mouth

it means that we will never grow, you know the word dummy

other niggas in the community think it's crummy

but I don't, neither does the youth cause we

em-brace adversity it goes right with the race

and being that we use it as a term of endearment

niggas start to bug to the dome is where the fear went

now the little shorties say it all of the time

and a whole bunch of niggas throw the word in they rhyme"

The notion of taking something that symbolized such historic oppression and pain, changing it slightly and turning it into, as Q-Tip put it, a term of endearment, represented power and meaning to members of the first post-civil-rights/hip-hop generation.

Although I have heard, both anecdotally and with my own ears, kids of every race refer to each other with the N-word, it is still a loaded term that must be handled by non-blacks as carefully as nitroglycerin, if at all.

Social scientists refer to a phenomenon known as the "in-group/out-group" dynamic, which states that certain behaviors are acceptable within the in-group but not so for out-group members. The example in this discussion is that the N-word "belongs" to the in-group, African Americans, and members of the out-group, anyone not black, had better be sure of their surroundings if they plan on using it. This would be similar to women whom I've heard refer to each other as "bitch" (in-group) but have a problem if a man (out-group member) calls them the same.

Last year, some in the black community, including various chapters of the NAACP around the country, staged a mock funeral for the N-word. Renewed national debate about the term was sparked by the comments of Don Imus toward the Rutgers women's basketball team. While he didn't use the N-word in that instance, his insistence that the vocabulary of mainstream rappers influenced him to speak this way inevitably brought the discussion back to that term.

The heated debate around the N-word, as well as its spreading use among multicultural youth, is further evidence of hip-hop's continued deconstruction of the artificial social barriers put up by previous generations. Like it or not, this dynamic around the term "nigga" represents not just a part of the legacy of race in America, but also hip-hop's response to it.