If you’re squeamish about “The N-Word”, part of me wants to tell you to stop reading right now. But the larger part wants me to want you to read this and learn my thoughts on it. Hopefully it affects or influences your thoughts about the aforementioned word in a positive light…
I have no memory when I first said nigger. Being from the Northeast, there were two distinct versions of the word – nigger and nigga. As in, “Yo nigger, wassup?”; and “My nigga” or “Nigga please!”
I know my mother didn’t say it, so I’m sure I picked it up from “The Streets. Yes, the mean and dark streets of a suburban multicultural city just outside New York City. If anything, the influence of the city is where I would have got it from. The city that produced rap music, which would evolve into Hip Hop, gave a voice to the truest meaning of “The Streets” for my young impressionable mind.
I’m sure I listened to music before, but my memory only goes back as far as 1990, buying cassette singles like Bell Biv Devoe’s “Poison” and walking around town with my Walkman, listening to “Things That Make You Go Hmm”, the B-side to C&C Music Factory’s No. 1 hit “Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now)”
But my first true musical memory was the release of A Tribe Called Quest’s second album – The Low End Theory. I recall watching the video to “Bonita Applebum” and “I Left My Wallet In El Segundo” on Video Music Box. While I loved Big Daddy Kane, would rap along with LL Cool J on Momma Said Knock You Out and find ways to quote KRS-One whenever I can, Tribe and their Native Tounge brethren De La Soul really spoke to me.
I was with my mother on an errand somewhere in Manhattan. She went inside the building, leaving me in the car with freedom to the radio, so I popped my Tribe tape into the deck. While lyrically tame in comparison to…well, a lot of rap music at the time, there are a couple of curse words or explicit lyrics. My mom heard one used and told me to take it out and stop listening to “that filth”.
Anyone who knows children should know that saying no is akin to basically saying “Please do this behind my back and don’t get caught”. So I continued to listen, in private, to Tribe, De La, Pete Rock & CL Smooth, Gangstar and countless others. And when Midnight Marauders was released in 1993, it was a must have.
Track 5 is entitled “Sucka Nigga” and was the first time I heard someone talk about the word that I flung from my mouth with freedom for any and all situations. It would be years before I truly heard and understood the lyrics for what they were.
This wasn’t the first rapper using the word for music reaching a nationwide audience. The N in NWA didn’t stand for nice guys. But this song speaks to the history of the word:
See nigga first was used back in the Deep South,
falling out between the dome of the white man’s mouth.
It means that we will never grow. You know the word dummy.
Other niggers in the community think it’s crummy.
But I don’t. Neither does the youth cuz we em
Brace adversary. 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.
Yo I start to flinch as I try not to say it,
But my lips is like an oo-op as I start to spray it.
I was the embodiment of the ‘little shorties’ Q-Tip was talking about. I embraced it and said it all the time. When I matriculated to university and ended up next door to a DJ, I wrote bad lyrics and threw it in all the time. It was around that time that Tribe played north on Commonwealth Avenue in Chestnut Hill.
I hopped the Green Line and invaded our fictional rivals’ gym, watching as hundreds of kids, the majority being white, rapped along with Q-Tip when this song came on, similar to the crowd in the video above.
My biggest regret would take place a few years later when I was working at a radio station in Portland, Oregon. I can’t remember the entire concert lineup, but Mos Def was definitely going to be there. The music director said he could get tickets. He gave me and my roommate tickets to see Smashing Pumpkins, so I counted on him and didn’t buy the tickets.
Needless to say, he didn’t get the tickets; so I didn’t get to see if something similar would have happened with this song:
On the scale of proper use, educational value and gaining a better understanding of the word, these two examples are clearly on one side. The other side could be filled with numerous examples, but the best of anything always has personal relevance. So let me take you to just after midnight on Jan. 1, 2018.
Driving for Lyft, I picked up “Ashley” from a house party. She sat in the front seat and asked if she could put on some music as her male friend got in back. The first song that popped up was something by Georgia Florida Line, but she wanted something upbeat. Here are the three songs the blond-haired slightly intoxicated “Ashley” played before we reached the destination:
Cardi B – Bartier Cardi
Young Money – Steady Mobbin
Lil Jon & The East Side Boys – Throw It Up
“Ashley” was singing and dancing along to all three of these songs, even when Lil Wayne starts “Steady Mobbin” with:
Man, fuck these niggas. I, I’m a spare everything but these niggas.
Her male friend in the backseat started to sing along, then apologized to me. Didn’t say for what, but I guess it was for his friend’s freedom with a word I was supposed to take offense from coming from her lips? If anything, he should have apologized to the stereotypical parent who’s disappointed their daughter is listening to “that filth”.
But is that a necessary apology? While doing research for this, I found a great comedy bit from Lenny Bruce, the 1960s standup that helped paved the path for fellow comics like George Carlin and Richard Pryor to gain mainstream audiences with ‘offensive material’.
No. 8 from the HuffPost’s The Nigger Top 10 – Are There Any Niggers Here Tonight?:
After carpet-bombing the nightclub with “nigger,” “kike,” “spic” and “mick,” Lenny Bruce said this:
“The point? That the word’s suppression gives it the power, the violence, the viciousness. If President Kennedy got on television and said, ‘Tonight I’d like to introduce the niggers in my cabinet,’ and he yelled ‘niggerniggerniggerniggernigger’ at every nigger he saw… till nigger didn’t mean anything any more… you’d never make any four-year-old nigger cry when he came home from school.”
The actual construct of the letters moved in a specific way to create a sound is irrelevant. Like any word, it’s the context and emotion used with it that dictate whether one should be offended. And to be honest, a drunk 20-something white girl singing rap lyrics is about as far from offensive as the East is from the West. I actually would have been more offended if she left on Georgia Florida Line because I’m not a fan of country music and that’s the truth.
Martin Kester - My Digital World 