The Nuance of the N-Word

Nathan Connolly: When Elizabeth Pryor was a first year History Professor at Smith College, an incident occurred in her classroom that shaped the course of her career. While she was teaching about The Civil War, a well meaning White student interrupted her lecture to recite a quote from Blazing Saddles, a movie that was co-written by Elizabeth’s father, famed comedian, Richard Pryor.

Elizabeth Pryor: I was making a point in the lecture about citizenship, and she repeated a line from the film that used a disparaging word for people of Chinese descent and the N word. And she said, “We don’t want the CH’s and the N words, but we will take the Irish,” but she said all the words. And I tried to stop her. I was like, “Wait, wait, wait, wait.” And she said, “Oh, no, it’s a joke from Blazing Saddles.” And then she repeated it.

Elizabeth Pryor: And it was the end of class and I went home and I came back to class the next session and I told everybody, “We’re not gonna use the N word. We’re not gonna say the N word. The actual N word. We’re not gonna talk about it.” And I just felt totally empty because I’d basically censored the word in my class and I hadn’t taken the opportunity to really teach the students why that moment was so significant. Why was it important that somebody said the N word in the class? And I didn’t give them anything. I just stopped it.

Nathan Connolly: After the incident, Pryor set out to develop a strategy for navigating racist language in her classroom. She began by asking herself, “What does the N word even mean?” And while her research centered on this simple question, she ultimately found something far more complicated.

Elizabeth Pryor: I love doing these digital newspaper searches online. And so, the first thing that struck me was that every time I saw the N word in print, the actual N word, it was in quotation marks. I thought it was gonna come across like just White people using it in common parlance. But in fact, the only time they really used it up until the 1820’s in the newspapers, was when they were quoting fictional Black people.

Elizabeth Pryor: So, they’d write these faux letters to the editor, like, “Dear Massa Printer,” like these kind of anti-Black kind of diatribes, where they’d imagine the Black person writing these letters to the newspaper. And in all of those, they had figures who called themselves a poor N word, using of course the actual word.

Elizabeth Pryor: And then increasingly, like at the rise of the Minstrel Show in the 1820’s and 30’s, it was in the title of the shows, it was imagined as the words of Black people speaking, in anti-Black art. It was coming out of the mouths of Black people. That really struck me. I felt like there was some kind of meaning in that, and I wanted to find out more.

Nathan Connolly: So, to your reading, you found it being used by White imagining how Black people were speaking or speaking to each other?

Elizabeth Pryor: That’s right, but I also started thinking about when Whites were quoting Black dialect, whether to not Black people actually spoke that way or not, right?

Nathan Connolly: Right.

Elizabeth Pryor: So, I started to wonder, “Could this have been a Black word?” And I started to look into Black sources, to try to … And there aren’t a ton. But to try to find if there was evidence. My greatest example of this comes from the 1930’s WPA ex-slave interviews, with formerly enslaved people. And these are people who are 60 years, 70 years away from enslavement.

Elizabeth Pryor: And they are still using the N word in incredibly nuanced ways to describe themselves and other people. It does not always mean the same thing. Sometimes it’s obsequious in the way that you would expect, perhaps, it to be. But other times, it speaks to pride, lament, spirit. The best example of this comes from a gentleman in the Virginia Narratives, and he’s telling this horrible story about what he witnessed as a child, the violence against another enslaved grown up. And the guy was trying to protect his wife and the overseer was coming after his wife. And the whole time he’s telling the story, he’s calling the guy a colored man, right? He’s like, “The colored man was doing this, the colored man was doing this,” and then finally the colored man stood up to the overseer and the overseer shot him dead. And at this moment, the storyteller says, “N words don’t get no breaks.” And it seemed like a real pointed turn there of using the word.

Elizabeth Pryor: And so, I kind of … And I felt like I could really hear that nuance and that history throughout my reading of people speaking and saying the N word.

Nathan Connolly: So, this is a case of they’re not just being a kind of appropriation from White stereotypes of Black speakers, but that African Americans have a long oral tradition that recognizes multiple meanings and uses of a term that might appear the same way in print on its face?

Elizabeth Pryor: Exactly. And I think the reason why it’s important to make that distinction is because in one version, basically you’re saying that Black people in the late 20th and early 21st Century are defining themselves against White racism. And in another version, if you look, you can say there’s a long, long history of kind of this linguistic, this discursive subversion that Black people employed way back to the 1770’s and 1780’s, to use this word, to start identifying themselves as sort of an ingroup that it had … They imbued it with meaning.

Elizabeth Pryor: So, if anybody did the re-appropriating, I think it’s the White people who saw that this was a word that had meaning and texture for Black people, right? And that threatened, that became a big source of the threat. And that’s when the word kind of turns into something violent against them.

Elizabeth Pryor: And in fact, a lot of times my students will say, “Yes, I know what the N word means. It comes from slavery.” And part of the argument that I make is yes, this is a word that was probably Latin roots, it was applied to people who were involuntary laborers, they were in service in perpetuity, they were Black. But it was a real labor category. People occupied that labor category. It wasn’t something you would want to be, but it wasn’t a slur.

Elizabeth Pryor: The word really emerges as a slur as Black people start to become free. This is when the word is used against people who are no longer occupying that actual existing labor category. And that’s when the word takes on the meaning that we start to recognize and know it as today.

Nathan Connolly: So, give us an example of how Black laborers, in these earlier uses, would draw out the N word as a way to convey a shared social identity.

Elizabeth Pryor: So, there is some of this work that’s speculative, but I still believe it. And part of the sources I use, my favorite sources come from Black authors writing during the period. And they’re still writing in a type of dialect.

Elizabeth Pryor: But one of my favorite examples comes from Harriet Wilson, who was a free woman, sensibly a free woman. She was really an indentured servant in the North and wrote a book called Our N Word. She wrote this book about being an indentured servant to a White family in the North. But at the beginning of it, she’s a biracial person, and her father was Black and her mother was a White woman who had hit really hard times. And she imagines a conversation that her father, who was a craftsman, was having in his shop to himself, when his buddy, also Black, walks in on him.

Elizabeth Pryor: And so, she imagines her father, who’s sitting here hopping a barrel, and he’s talking about wanting to marry Mag Smith. So, he’s mumbling to himself about this. And his friend Pete walks in and he says, “Who you gonna marry? Mag Smith?” And the father says back, “What’s up, N word? Why you walking up on me like that?” And then the friend said something back and he said, “Next time you walk in without permission, let an N word know it.”

Elizabeth Pryor: So, in that case, she’s imagining Black people in the North. One is Black people in the South, one is Black people in the North, talking to each other, workers, communicating to each other in this casual way. It’s not offensive. In one instance it’s playful, in one instance it’s chastising, but using it among each other freely. So, that’s where the evidence comes from.

Nathan Connolly: Right. And I’m guessing you also have moments where you see then a spike in negative uses, largely from White intellectuals or groups. I mean, how would you track when you have a struggle over the meaning of this word when Whites are involved?

Elizabeth Pryor: Right. Well, I mean, basically as soon as Black people start becoming free, the word changes in tone and tenor. And what’s interesting about it is that this becomes a really tricky moment for Black abolitionists, Black people who are rising out of this working class. They don’t want to be associated with the word.

Elizabeth Pryor: The first run of Freedom’s Journal, which is the first African American newspaper from 1827 to 1829, does not use the word. They complain about racism a ton, right? And they talk about being called terrible things, but they don’t use the word to say it.

Elizabeth Pryor: It does appear in Colored American, which is the next Black newspaper, which runs from like 1837 to 1839 or so. And they talk about being called and accused and kind of blamed through this language. But it really becomes the international Black abolitionists, like Frederick Douglass, who really start to give the White use gravitas. And I think just like it’s Whites in blackface, who are the first to use the N word against Black people. It’s Black people in a kind of white face. And I didn’t come up with this term, but a kind of white face, that they are also only quoting these abolitionists, or only quoting the N word as White speech.

Elizabeth Pryor: So, they’re saying, “Here’s these examples. This is how White people talk to us.” And Frederick Douglass writes a letter to William Lloyd Garrison, the abolitionist editor of The Liberator, from Ireland when he’s abroad. And he uses the phrase, “We don’t allow N words in here,” nine times to describe the kinds of experiences he had trying to cross the thresholds of public space and public transportation in the Antebellum North. We don’t allow N words in here. And from all kinds of White people he’s hearing that.

Elizabeth Pryor: So, I think in some ways, it’s the Black abolitionists who make everybody aware that the N word is being used in this violent kind of way. And they also, for the most part, pushed down the Black use.

Nathan Connolly: So, I have this notion that I’ve certainly seen in crowded conversations about the N word or thinking about history, there’s a certain kind of unease. Or when again, you’re reading in a class primary documents where the word kind of jumps of the page and how students respond to it, right? And my sense at least is that the N word is the only word in American English that can so violently and dramatically collapse the past and the present.

Nathan Connolly: And that’s really the principle reason why it is so destabilizing to the ear for so many people, right? That there’s a way in which we’ve comforted ourselves with a certain distance from the 19th Century or the Jim Crow period, and yet that word immediately causes us to conjure images of the water hose and the lynching tree and the dogs. And so, therefore, it best not be uttered, because we can’t handle that kind of violent return the the past. And I’m curious to get your sense of that and of it’s power in that way.

Elizabeth Pryor: Well, you’re 100% right. I mean, it is in the dusty pages of books. It’s in this past space that you’re talking about, but when it finds its way in full, into the classroom, it is in real space, in real time, doing work, real work. Any teacher who thinks that’s not true, any teacher who’s teaching Huck Finn this week to their students, and thinks it is not true that by that word entering their classroom that the tenor of the classroom is changed, is absolutely mistaken.

Elizabeth Pryor: I have a student who wrote a blog post for me. I taught a course last semester, History of the N Word. And one of my students wrote this beautiful, beautiful story about how they had a teacher who taught To Kill A Mockingbird and they did the read aloud. And the teacher insisted that everybody in the class say the word in full. This was a teacher who believed it was part of the fight against its violence, to repeat it in the classroom space, that Harper Lee had wanted it that way and that it was powerful to do it.

Elizabeth Pryor: And the way that the student would respond was that they would count the paragraphs. Everybody read a paragraph, so they would count the number of paragraphs in the book and they would count when it was their turn. And if their turn coincided with a paragraph with the N word, they would get up and go to the bathroom, just walk out of the room.

Elizabeth Pryor: I mean, so and I have heard from students over and over and over again, I mean, this is really why the work became exciting for me, because I thought that what I was gonna do when I started having these conversations with students, that were gonna kind of have this very intellectual freedom of speech debate with me about whether or not you say it or don’t say it or whatever. And some have. But most of them immediately started confessing, “That happened to me. I was in a class when that happened. I didn’t know what to do when it was said in this way. People tell me to shh, but nobody told me what it meant,” on and on and on.

Elizabeth Pryor: And I was like, “There’s really a story here.” And it’s like the N word is sort of like a map into each of our individual racial histories. So, I often say that it signposts a national trauma, but it’s also signpost to personal trauma for a lot of people. A lot of people remember their first interactions with this word, and not just Black people.

Nathan Connolly: Well, keeping with the personal, I mean, your father was one who tried to again, bring to the public conversation all the ranges in which Black folks were using this word in private spaces, on street corners, and the like. And yet, quite famously, Richard Pryor also had a conversion experience on this very term, after taking a trip to Kenya. Tell me about that.

Elizabeth Pryor: Yeah, I love this. So, in 1974 my dad releases the album That N Word’s Crazy. Okay? It is such a beautiful kind of description of what an N word is. Nothing like what White people were saying N words were. And then four or five years later, my father goes on this trip. And he has really an incredible epiphany. He tells it beautifully on stage in Live On The Sunset Strip, and he also does an interview in Ebony in ’80, with Lerone Bennett, Jr.

Elizabeth Pryor: And he also pulled me aside when I was 11 or 12, when he came back from this trip, and he told me he was never gonna say the word again. But I love what he says. He says all of a sudden he was sitting in the lobby of the Nairobi Hilton and he looks around and a little voice says to him, “Look around. What do you see?” And he says, “I see all kinds of Black people doing all kinds of things.” And the voice says, “Do you see any N words?” And then my dad says, “No.” And he said, “That’s because there aren’t any.”

Elizabeth Pryor: And when he talks about this, he says, “I was wrong, I was wrong.” And I think that’s so beautiful. I love a couple of things my dad does in this. One is, unlike a lot of people who get into this polemical debate about who should or shouldn’t say the N word, my dad’s like, “Do what you wanna do, but this my truth. I don’t wanna do this anymore. This is what’s true for me.”

Elizabeth Pryor: And he also says, “And a note to the hip White people who want to come up and use this word with me, please don’t because I don’t like it.” That’s what he said. And I think those are really two very important points. I mean, this is really this kind of homecoming experience from this perspective, this kind of diasporic experience. He’s standing in Africa when he has this epiphany. It’s very powerful.

Nathan Connolly: Elizabeth Pryor is a Professor of History at Smith College. She’s the author of The Etymology Of The N Word: Resistance, Language, And The Politics Of Freedom In The Antebellum North.