Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word

About this book

Randall Kennedy takes on not just a word but our laws attitudes and culture with bracing courage and intelligencewith a range of reference that extends from the Jim Crow south to Chris Rock routines and the O. J. Simpson trial. Its the nuclear bomb of racial epithets a word that whites have employed to wound and degrade African Americans for three centuries. Paradoxically among many Black people it has become a term of affection and even empowerment. The word of course is nigger and in this candid lucidly argued book the distinguished legal scholar Randall Kennedy traces its origins maps its multifarious connotations and explores the controversies that rage around it. Should Blacks be able to use nigger in ways forbidden to others? Should the law treat it as a provocation that reduces the culpability of those who respond to it violently? Should it cost a person his job or a book like Huckleberry Finn its place on library shelves?