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| At the White House Correspondents' Association dinner |
THE HISTORICAL & CULTURAL DIVIDE BETWEEN NIGGER/NIGGA
Long before the White
House Correspondents’ Association Dinner on Saturday, April 30 in which the
host, Larry Wilmore was said to have broken a taboo, many hypocrites and
polemicists were, and remain, fascinated with the controversy over the use of
the N-word. That fascination, interestingly, stems from, and thrives on
ignorance. No matter, it was not surprising that Wilmore’s n-word quip stoked
concerns about possible implications of such usage, particularly in reference
to the first black president of the United States.
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| Piers Morgan |
Not one to pass up a
chance to wade into a controversy so tempting and so contemporary, especially
when baited by a tweet that said, “Piers Morgan’s next troll piece just wrote
itself,” the British polemicist came out swinging in a Daily Mail opinion piece.
“By calling the first black president of the United States a ‘n***er’ on
national TV, Larry Wilmore let down Barack Obama, and himself, and only
guaranteed one thing: its longevity,” he wrote.
To make the point, Piers
Morgan quoted Wilmore’s quip (or what he believed was Wilmore’s quip): “Yo,
Barry, you did it my n***er!”
He was wrong and this is
why. Aside from the hypocrisy of hiding behind three asterisks, it is important
to understand that when black people, specifically black Americans, use the so-called
n-word, they do not say “nigger” even if it sounds that way, they say “nigga”
and there is a huge difference between the two.
Wilmore explained the
usage and context of the word on his show, The
Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore, as follows:
“[Morgan] quoted me as
saying ‘Yo, Barry, you did it my n***er.’ Now hold on, are you saying that I
called the president a n***er? Ok, that’s horrible. I would never do that.
‘N***er’ is what white people use to denigrate, demean and dehumanize black
people and ‘n***a’ is a term of endearment some black people use between each
other to take back that power.”
In his Daily Mail piece,
Morgan alluded to the fact that Wilmore’s quip was a publicity stunt.
“Wilmore’s a smart guy who knew exactly what he was doing,” he wrote. “He was
center stage on national TV at an event attended by many of the most powerful
people in America, and watched by millions around the world. He planned that
N-word quip to Obama very precisely because he knew it would spark an instant
twitter firestorm and get him global media attention.”
Piers Morgan, of course,
knows a thing or two about courting controversy for relevance—from Susan
Sarandon’s cleavage to Kim Kardashian’s nude selfie to netting a petition for deportation
(signed by over 100,000 people) for expressing his opinion on American gun issues
louder than Americans.
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| Richard Pryor |
To buttress his argument
against the use of the N-word, he quoted the late black comedian, Richard Pryor,
who dramatically changed his view of the N-word after a visit to Africa. Morgan
wrote, “He
[Pryor] explained to Ebony magazine: ‘While I was there [Africa], something
inside of me said, “Look around you Richard. What do you see?” I saw people.
African people. I didn’t see any ‘n***ers.’ I didn’t see any there because
there are no ‘n***ers’ in Africa. Can you imagine going out into the bush and
walking up to a Masai and saying, ‘Hey n***er. Come here!’ You couldn’t do
that. There are no ‘n***ers’ here in America either. We black people are not ‘n***ers’,
and I will forever refuse to be one. I’m free of that, it’s out of my head. I realized
that terms like ‘n***er’ and the word ‘bitch’ that so many black men call our
women, are tricks, like genocide on the brain.’”
Great quote, except that Piers Morgan
missed one interesting point - until he went to Africa, Pryor always saw black people with the eyes of whites. In Africa, and for the first time, he saw black people for who they really
are: humans, short and simple, not the way many whites see them: black first, then humans, maybe.
With that sudden awareness, Pryor
decided that he'd start seeing blacks with his own eyes, not with the eyes of those who
see them from a position of superiority; so, in the statement Morgan quoted
above, Pryor was liberating himself of the demeaning slur ‘nigger,’ not the black term of endearment ‘nigga.’
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| Larry Wilmore |
Now, Larry Wilmore, in an interview with Fresh Air, a radio show distributed by
NPR, told Terry Gross that while acknowledging that using the
N-word might upset some people, his intention was to recognize and honor Obama’s
significance as the first black president. “What
Obama means to me as a black person, and to many black [people], really is hard
to quantify,” he said. “...I wanted to take the opportunity to turn that [word]
upside down and to use it in the way that we’ve used it inside
the community...as that show of affection that only we can understand.”
Though President Obama
said through press secretary Josh Earnest that “he appreciated the spirit of the sentiments that Mr.
Wilmore expressed,” some people still make a big deal of it. Gregory
Clay, in an opinion piece in the Dallas Morning News, said that Larry Wilmore’s n-word
liberation was Richard Pryor’s imprisonment. He then wondered what would happen
if Paul Ryan uttered the n-word as a speaker at the annual spring dinner. That,
in the first place, is an ignorant argument because Paul Ryan, being white, does
not understand the difference between ‘nigger’ and ‘nigga’ and even if he does,
he possesses not the cultural experience and/or sentiment that impels one black
man to refer endearingly to another as ‘my nigga.’
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| President Obama & Larry Wilmore |
It seems that many critics, in
pontificating on the inappropriateness of the n-word, lack an insight into the
cultural significance of the word as used by those who understand that the
context in which ‘nigga’ is used cannot, and should not, be confused with the
hurtful context in which the word ‘nigger’ is used.
Every race, after-all, deals with its history
its own way. And should be free to do so on its terms.
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