The Worst Racial Slur, In Context

I was 23 the first time I heard the word spoken with real malice in my physical presence. This was, unmistakably, not the fraternal version—the one ending in the soft “-a” that edgy black comics employ in their bonding moments with outgoing black presidents. No, this was intended effrontery, sharp and menacing, ending in the unambiguous “-er.”

At the time, I was selling custom wall mirrors in Harlem for a grand apiece, often to sweet, elderly matrons who lived in grim tenements without functioning front doors. It’s a long and tragicomic story that, some years later, formed the substance of the memoir that kickstarted my writing career. Driving between appointments that afternoon, I happened upon a fresh crime scene. Lights flashed hypnotically in the right lane ahead of me, where a pair of police cruisers sat parked at an odd angle to the curb. I heard the keening sirens of more responding cars behind me. (These lights-ahead/sirens-behind events were a common sensory spectacle in Harlem during the ’70s.) So, I pulled into an available space, got out, and stepped up on the curb as a third police vehicle arrived and double-parked alongside the others.

Thirty-odd yards ahead of me, a body lay on the sidewalk in a large puddle of blood. I joined a loose throng of locals, mostly adolescent males, walking towards the mishap. A burly black sergeant with a commanding air stood over the corpse of an Asian shopkeeper while several subordinates established a perimeter. It looked like the shopkeeper had been robbed, chased the felon outside, and was shot dead for his efforts. The big cop slowly scanned the young black males who had gathered to watch the unfolding drama. He seemed to pause here and there as if to memorise faces. Then he shook his head and snarled, “If I get my hands on the nigger who did this...”

He left the sentence unfinished, but the way he glowered at the youths in the crowd left no doubt about his intended meaning. We now live in an era when every instance of police brutality fast becomes a cause célèbre on TikTok. But back then, it was understood that cops would mete out street justice to those who committed heinous crimes like the one I’d stumbled upon. In a scene from the contemporaneous Joe Wambaugh series Police Story, a plainclothes detective at a crime scene gets on the police radio and calls for an ambulance. The uncooperative perp he has been questioning asks what the ambulance is for, to which the cop replies, “Because of the leg you broke getting into the squad car.”

Having no appointment to rush to, I studied the arriving auditors of unnatural death as they went about their business, photographing, measuring, dusting, and collecting evidence. The scene was, in its way, as hypnotic as the flashing lights—but it was not what I found unforgettable about that day (I’d seen dead bodies on sidewalks before, and would see them again). Rather, what stays with me even a half-century later is this: I grew up in the Brooklyn of Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing vintage, yet the first time I heard someone call someone else a nigger and really mean it, the word came out of the mouth of a black cop, who spat it at dozens of other young black men.

The n-word (as it must now be euphemistically rendered) has become, with no contenders, the rhetorical landmine in American life. Its perceived incitement is such that it has joined the list of “fighting words,” the utterance of which may justify (socially if not legally) a violent response. Some maintain that the word can never be used innocuously, even when rapped by black artists.

Its use by white people is, of course, a scarlet-letter offence. Reprisals are swift and unforgiving, even in realms of inquiry like academia. In 2023, a Missouri teacher was fired after uttering the word during a classroom discussion about whether or not blacks enjoy a proprietary licence to use it. In an almost comically meta incident the year before, a white Kansas City teacher of African American Studies was dismissed for using it to defend his free-speech rights. Academics have been punished for reading passages from a timely essay on race or classic works by Twain and Baldwin.

Even quoting from MLK’s historic “Letter from Birmingham Jail” isn’t safe. Classroom screenings of civil-rights documentaries are fraught thanks to the prospect of sudden instances of the word, and a teacher may even be accused of racism for sponsoring the event. Chinese expressions that merely sound like the word can put an unwary professor’s livelihood at risk. The sensitivities here are such that just writing the word down may be as incendiary as shouting it at the campus food court, at least for whites. For all I know, I may have to answer for this essay at the college where I teach.

Away from campus, award-winning science writers have been forced out of their jobs for speaking the word in the course of a discussion about whether or not someone else’s use was egregious. Beloved American comedies like Blazing Saddles and The Jerk and acclaimed period pieces like In the Heat of the Night or Django Unchained must be bowdlerised for television and even streaming services.

Many decades ago, my father set a similar tone of censorship in our house: all slurs were strictly verboten. He had grown up in an age of virulent prejudice against Italians, and he’d had to drop out of college to get a job to support his new bride (secretly pregnant with my older sister). He would recall encountering signs in store windows that read: “Help wanted, NO WOPS!” No such intolerance, he vowed, would be tolerated under his own roof.

Like most white men of his day, my father was admittedly somewhat wary of black men, but no more so than anyone who watched the local news—a nightly perp-walk of one handcuffed black suspect after another, accompanied by a news anchor’s play-by-play of the grisly crimes they had allegedly committed. In the background were the race riots, the looting, and the blazing inner cities. Nevertheless, my father kept a sense of perspective, insisting that we draw no general conclusions from the parade of black faces we saw on TV each night. “Everyone deserves the benefit of the doubt until they prove themselves unworthy,” he instructed.

The mood around my Italian neighbourhood was less ecumenical, though hearing the n-word was still a rarity. And not once in all my childhood years did I ever hear someone direct the word at any specific individual or individuals in anger. (This remained true even after I went to Samuel J. Tilden High School, a highly integrated yet balkanised place of learning.) I did hear substitutes, notably moulie or moulinyan, a corruption of the Sicilian word for eggplant. The epithet was popular among my neighbourhood’s would-be goodfellas and made its way into popular culture via films like Martin Scorsese’s 1973 movie Mean Streets and Eddie Murphy’s crudely hilarious 1987 stand-up special, Raw. But the kids who called black kids moulies weren’t my crowd.

Then, when I was fourteen, my sister married, and she and her groom, Tommy, moved into our finished basement while they saved up for a down payment on a place of their own. With this new presence under our roof came a new attitude towards black people. A service employee of a major public utility, my brother-in-law worked in and around the dwellings of many low-income black residents, and he was blunt in his appraisals. Bitterly sceptical of the welfare system and its supposed abusers, Tommy offered unsparing tales of what he’d seen during each day’s foray into “the ghetto.”

My father would implore Tommy to “tone it down, please,” and still forbade any use of the n-word—but he loved my sister and wanted to help get her marriage off on the right foot, so he said a lot less than he might have otherwise. Now and then, Tommy would come home after his shift with a colleague from the gas company. I met four or five of them in the few years that he and my sister lived in our basement, and most of them were black. They’d sit around the upstairs dining-room table drinking my father’s beer and lamenting New York’s multifarious problems. Like my brother-in-law, Tommy’s hard-working black co-workers resented their tax dollars going to people they regarded as lowlifes. 

These dining-room dialogues could be jarring. Arguably the most uncomfortable fifteen minutes of my childhood were spent overhearing Tommy and a very dark coworker named Thaddeus amuse themselves by agreeing to the proposition that “there are black people and there are niggers.” (I laughed too, inwardly, and wondered what my father, who was still at work, would make of this anthropological doctrine.) Thaddeus said he disliked the idea that white people might presumptively consign him to the less desirable category upon first making his acquaintance. But the two men were wholly simpatico, and I detected not a trace of squeamishness. It was as if they were discussing something as banal as the direction from which the sun rose each morning.

Racial Slurs and Deferential Condescension

We are effectively being told that, at this truth-seeking institution, it is inappropriate for us to utter certain indisputably true statements, because the value of truth is trumped by the emotional states of one or another demographic.

QuilletteMatthew Small

I later came of age in two realms, football and jazz, dominated by black men. In addition to my regular jazz quartet, which mostly played weddings, I assayed my passable Coltrane imitation in pick-up bands on the hot Manhattan circuit, working lesser non-union supper clubs. More often than not, I was the only white player, and my bandmates never let me forget it, especially when we played to black crowds. “Now you get a taste of what it’s like for us everywhere else,” our drummer gibed. 

My college football team was a loose crew when it came to race. This was despite the ambient civil unrest of the late ’60s. One day, one of our running backs, a fellow we called Blue (because his skin was blue-black) strolled into the locker room carrying a brick he was using for impromptu bicep exercises. “Hey Blue,” our star wide receiver yelled, “going shopping?” Blue scowled, held the brick up and replied, “I’ll fuck you up, nigga.” That playful use of the word, wrote Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy, bespeaks “a sense of irony that is predicated upon an understanding of the term’s racist origins and a close relationship with the person to whom the term is uttered.” While Kennedy seems to contemplate intra-race usage only, the climate on our team better epitomised Larry Wilmore’s less scholarly take in a piece for Time. “Nigga,” wrote Wilmore, simply means “buddy.”

In our gridiron culture, “nigga” with the soft ending became the urban equivalent of paisan or goomba in the Italian circles in which I grew up. A black player might even use the “-er” pejorative on rare occasions when dressing down a black teammate who’d botched a play (though white players knew better than to do so). One day, in the huddle after a substitute lineman forgot his blocking assignment, Blue scowled at him and said, “Man, you gotta be the dumbest nigger on the planet.” But it was still an affectionate chide, not a malicious attempt to wound. 

On another occasion, I pulled off a block that sprang a different black running back for a long touchdown, and he sought me out on the bench. He led me through our ritualised team handshake (a chaotic medley of forearms and elbows), then leaned in so that our face-masks touched, broke into a huge grin, and said, “You my nigga, 75.” A few days later, he and I were standing on a corner near the college, waiting for our respective city buses home. The part of Brooklyn to which his bus would take him was very different from the neighbourhood to which my family had just moved. I invited him back to my house for dinner, but he shook his head. “You know I can’t do that, man. Don’t be naive.”

I reproved him gently, but I understood. New York was hardly our locker room writ large. Various sections of the city were downright dangerous for blacks to drive through—let alone for a large black male like my teammate to jog through alone on his way back to the bus stop at night. My family’s new home was on the fringe of such a neighbourhood. “I know you mean well, Steve,” he said, “but there’s not much love for a brother out your way.” I told him I’d wait with him later until his home-bound bus arrived, but it was no use. “Those Italian boys don’t like people of my complexion,” he said, “and they ain’t playin’. You don’t need to bring that spotlight on yourself, either, my nigger-lovin’ friend.” And with that, he smiled and boarded his bus home.

I sold mirrors in Harlem for a decade post-college, and on a normal day, I was the only white person I saw working the projects after dark besides cops and firemen. Harlem in the ’70s was not yet the gentrified hipster haven where a cool ex-president might maintain his offices. Beyond the more mundane perils, a group called the Black Liberation Army was ambushing cops and shaking down white salesmen by threatening to throw them off roofs. I’d pass the time between stops bantering with the boys in blue outside police precincts, where I’d hear cops of all shades refer to some local ne’er-do-well as the n-word with the hard ending.

In 1982, I traded my sample case for an IBM Selectric typewriter. Before long, I found myself in rural Baytown, Texas, researching a true-crime book about a woman who shot her husband (which pretty much every woman in Texas will do if the marriage lasts long enough). In the interests of packing efficiency, I’d taken just one pair of all-purpose shoes, and per Murphy’s Law, the right-hand sole began to detach itself on my first day there. I needed a cobbler. I made my predicament known to an ageing red-headed clerk at a gas station, who thought for a moment and then said, “You need to go see the old nigger around the corner. Tell him I sent you and he’ll fit you in fast.”

When I found the wizened artisan and explained myself, I was hoping he would make a complementary reference to “the old cracker at the gas station” who sent me, but no such luck. Nevertheless, I detected something like affection in the clerk’s voice. In such contexts, the n-word sounds almost like a courtly descriptor, wholly detached from the unpleasantness of its origins: a kind of shrugging homage to a cultural tradition once performed in deadly earnest. The clerk’s words may sound obnoxious to the ear or look obnoxious on the page, but can we be sure of the mens rea?

Looking back, I am reminded of Clint Eastwood’s 2008 film Gran Torino, and the sublimely bigoted repartee that Eastwood’s curmudgeon enjoys with his equally curmudgeonly barber as they relentlessly pick at each other’s heritages for comic effect. There is no animus in their relationship, they are simply performing their roles in a parody of what once was. In the same way, people like the white clerk and his black cobbler friend may be compared to the former combatants who encounter one another at Normandy as old men and share an impulse embrace: We made it through.

Even so, I have the sense that a shocking percentage of black America believes the hard-edged n-word is all of white America’s default way of referring to black people. I have visited large cities in Texas as well as the Bible Belt, and I have lived in metropolitan areas and their suburbs across the land—New York, San Diego, Phoenix, Indiana, Philadelphia, and Vegas. With precisely one exception, I have not known a white neighbour, co-worker, or acquaintance of any kind who used the n-word as a routine smear, ever. That’s in a half-century since I left my parents’ house.

That lone exception was our star outfielder on the over-forty baseball team on which I played for a few seasons. And even this isolated breach requires a caveat. Nick belonged to a special-ops squad for the state police and would use the word to refer to violent criminals he’d been called upon to apprehend—in other words, he was using it much the same way the Harlem sergeant used it. It’s true that none of us listening to Nick’s lurid tales of shootouts with barricaded suspects stepped up as my father might have and reproved him, “Enough now.” But the dugout was an awkward place to be during these stories. And not a single player followed Nick’s lead. 

Rare is the word that has antithetical meanings depending on the speaker and listener, the intent and reception. The n-word is one such rarity. It conveys inclusion or exclusion, endearment or opprobrium. It ingratiates or infuriates—sometimes, no doubt, when it issues from the same mouth in different settings on the same day. I can imagine that angry Harlem sergeant or my brother-in-law’s friend Thaddeus draping an arm across a co-worker’s shoulders and affectionately addressing him as “my nigga.”

While the venomous version is used as a term of exclusion by both races—“I am not like them”—the scope of the exclusion obviously cleaves along racial lines. White racists paint with a broad brush—“I am not like any of them.” Blacks will use the word to distinguish themselves from other blacks whom they regard as inferior and stigmatising, just as whites use the terms white trash and redneck.

The black embrace of a dehumanising slur that took root in the slave-holding South always struck me as bizarre. But those who investigate the phenomenon say it conveys the disdain that people of colour who prize their hard-won social status feel for others of their race who drag down their reputations. Evidence of this tendency can be found in Chris Rock’s 1996 routine about the difference between “black people and niggers,” and in Academy Award-winning screenwriter John Ridley’s antagonistic 2006 essay for Esquire, “The Manifesto of Ascendancy for the Modern American Nigger.”

Ridley’s salvo against American blacks who tarnish the reputation of their peers is so vituperative that at first it seems like an elaborate piece of misdirection. But when Ridley writes, several paragraphs in, that “It’s time for ascended blacks to wish niggers good luck,” it becomes obvious that he means every word. He takes black dysfunction as a kind of personal betrayal. That is the very sentiment I detected in the Harlem cop. It was palpable in his voice, his set jaw, his balled fists, the contempt in his eyes as he glared at the bystanders. We have worked so hard—I have worked so hard—for acceptance, and one of you motherfuckers goes and does something like this...?

It is even possible that when whites use the word with malevolence, the episode may amount to less than meets the ear. We can infer this from a common dynamic in marriages and other intimate relationships. In the course of every such relationship, there comes a moment when the couple have an argument that devolves into abject, rancorous invective—a flashpoint at which genuinely terrible things are said by both parties. In the heat of a raging altercation, a man may call his wife a cunt in an attempt to be as hurtful as possible, even though he and she both know that this word does not remotely reflect what he actually thinks of her. But he uses it because he also knows that his wife will detest being referred to in this way. What he really means—and all he really means—is, I am angry with you and I know this language will scald you.

Racial slurs may be used in the same way. In 1979, British singer-songwriter Elvis Costello found himself in the same Ohio bar as the Stephen Stills Band after a gig, and a bad-tempered slanging match ensued. As Ultimate Classic Rock reported in a 2015 retrospective, “Costello was already drunk when Stills and friends walked in. As he got drunker, his words got nastier in a desperate attempt to inflame the sensibilities of his elders.” A brawl erupted after Costello described James Brown as a “jived-arsed nigger” and Ray Charles as a “blind, ignorant nigger.” The Stills camp went public. 

Costello was roundly denounced by media and US fans alike and even began receiving death threats. He called a presser of his own and told journalists that he was simply drunk, tired, and feisty that night. He explained that, as things heated up, “it became necessary for me to outrage these people with the most offensive and obnoxious remarks I could muster to bring the argument to a swift conclusion and rid myself of their presence.” When asked about the controversy, Ray Charles simply replied, “Drunken talk isn’t meant to be printed in the paper.”

Costello obliquely addressed the controversy in “Riot Act,” a track on his next album, Get Happy!! In the liner notes to the CD reissue, he later reflected:

[A] ridiculous drunken argument would culminate in me speaking the exact opposite of my true beliefs in an attempt to provoke a fight that inevitably arrived. That I was speaking in some absurd, exaggerated, supposedly ironic humour, in which everything is expressed in the reverse of that which one knows to be true, is no excuse. There was nothing sparkling or glorious about this wordplay, just the seed of madness. It was the product of crazed indulgence.

[...]

The people I had supposedly slandered, Ray Charles and James Brown, had a much more generous view of these remarks, rightly putting them down to drunken idiocy. ... I could never properly explain how such words came out of my mouth. The humour of outrage never did sit that well with people and is particularly useless if the intent is garbled drunkenly.

We are all, in our human imperfection, afflicted with what one might call rage-induced Tourette’s. Something perverse bubbles up from inside and escapes our mouths in a purely symbolic expression of fury. Such is the case, I would argue, with most (though admittedly not all) spontaneous uses of even the hard version of the n-word. Yes, every racist is apt to say it, but not everyone who says it is a racist.

From time to time, I recall that long-ago day in Harlem, the day of the murdered Asian shopkeeper and the merciless black sergeant. Seldom have I seen such anger in a man that stopped short of physical violence. And yet I think more often of a day a little further back, when I made one hell of a play on a football field and a black teammate who knew me well leaned in, mask to mask, and paid me the highest compliment he could think of. You my nigga.