Just started reading the book "Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word" by Randall Kennedy which has me chewing on the provocative relationship between words, identity and society.
Any way you look at it, the "N" word is ugly, racist and inflammatory. But Kennedy poses some jarring questions: how is it different when Ice Cube uses the word in a song as opposed to when, during the O.J. Simpson trial, Mark Fuhrman was accused of saying it? What about when Lenny Bruce or Richard Pryor used it in an attempt to "defang" it by sheer repetition? Or when Mark Twain used it in Huck Finn in order to make an antiracist statement?
Kennedy, to his credit, has the chops to take a swing at a difficult issue. A professor at Harvard Law School and noted legal scholar, he's put together a highly provocative book that raises vital questions about how words and their meanings, intention and even substance change depending on the context in which they are used.
Juicy fucking stuff.
Any way you look at it, the "N" word is ugly, racist and inflammatory. But Kennedy poses some jarring questions: how is it different when Ice Cube uses the word in a song as opposed to when, during the O.J. Simpson trial, Mark Fuhrman was accused of saying it? What about when Lenny Bruce or Richard Pryor used it in an attempt to "defang" it by sheer repetition? Or when Mark Twain used it in Huck Finn in order to make an antiracist statement?
Kennedy, to his credit, has the chops to take a swing at a difficult issue. A professor at Harvard Law School and noted legal scholar, he's put together a highly provocative book that raises vital questions about how words and their meanings, intention and even substance change depending on the context in which they are used.
Juicy fucking stuff.
Randall Kennedy is great...