Read Online Nigger: The Strange Career Of A Troublesome Word by Randall Kennedy - Free Book Online Page B

susceptible to hurts from such causes.” 33 On this point he was clearly wrong, for as we have seen, even in this new century
nigger
retains its capacity to anger, inflame, and distract.
    The white film director Quentin Tarantino has recently updated the racial politics triggered by Van Vechten's novel by writing film scripts in which
nigger
figures prominently. Tarantino's leading man in
Jackie Brown
, a black gun runner, casually uses the word throughout the film; in one sequence he hugs a black underling and, with apparent affection, calls him “my nigger,” only to murder him in cold blood a few minutes later. In
True Romance
, Tarantino orchestrates a confrontation between a white man and a Sicilian mobster. The man knows that the mobster is about to kill him, and in afinal gesture of defiance, he laughingly tells him that since North African moors—“niggers”—conquered Sicily and had sex with Sicilian women, his ancestors must have been niggers. Further, the condemned man speculates that the Sicilian's grandmother “fucked a nigger” and that therefore the mobster himself is “part eggplant.” And in Tarantino's
Pulp Fiction
, a scene featuring a black hit man, his white partner, and a white friend of the black hit man has the professional assassins showing up unexpectedly at the home of the friend to dispose of a bloody car with a corpse inside. Exasperated, the white friend complains to his black hit-man buddy that “storing dead niggers ain't my fucking business.” It isn't so much the fact that he will be breaking the law by helping to conceal a murder that worries him; rather, it's the fear that his wife will divorce him if she comes home while the hit men are still in the house. This white man who talks of “dead-nigger storage” loves his wife and is absolutely terrified by the prospect of losing her. It is important to note that she is black.
    Spike Lee, among others, has taken exception to Tarantino's playfulness with
nigger.
When it was noted in response that some of his own films also make extensive use of
nigger
, the director replied that as an African American, he had “more of a right to use [the N-word].” 34 Lee himself has not articulated the basis for that asserted “right,” but at least three theories are plausible. One is that the long and ugly history of white racist subordination of African Americans should in and of itself disqualify whites from using
nigger.
A second holds that equity earned through oppression grants cultural ownership rights: having been made to suffer by being called “nigger” all theseyears, this theory goes, blacks should now be able to monopolize the slur's peculiar cultural capital. 35 A third theory is that whites lack a sufficiently intimate knowledge of black culture to use the word
nigger
properly.
    All three of these theories are dramatized in Lee's film
Bamboozled
, a farce about a black scriptwriter who, in order to keep his job, creates a television-network variety show featuring all of the stereotypical characteristics through which blacks have been comically defamed: blackface, bugging eyes, extravagant buffoonery, the omnipresent grin. Lee takes care to make the worst of
Bamboozled's
many villains an obnoxious, presumptuous, ignorant white man—Dunwitty—who deems himself sufficiently “black” to boast to his African American subordinates that he knows more about “niggers” than they do. 36
    The great failing of these theories is that, taken seriously, they would cast a protectionist pall over popular culture that would likely benefit certain minority entrepreneurs only at the net expense of society overall. Excellence in culture thrives, like excellence elsewhere, in a setting open to competition—and that includes competition concerning how best to dramatize the N-word. Thus, instead of cordoning off racially defined areas of the culture and allowing them to be tilled only by persons of the “right” race, we should work