I also felt the resentment projected onto my light skin, a resentment of light privilege. It cuts both ways, for sure, but too many yellow Negroes deny light privilege the way many of you deny white privilege. We are as blind to our perks as you are to yours. Since I had a very dark father, I was forced to confront the ugly disputes over color that are often silently waged in our communities. But too many light folk just don’t admit what we all know to be the case. And I’m not speaking of light guilt, our color-struck version of white guilt. I mean owning up to the benefits and advantages of being light-skinned. We make up the same reasons why we should be spared reckoning with shade and tone as you give for not addressing whiteness and privilege.
Our being color-struck isn’t the only sign that we’ve imitated whiteness. We’ve also emulated and adopted your coarse reactions to class and sexual identity. Many of us have joined the unfortunate assault on gay folk. We see them as moral poison, or, more politely, we fault them for failing to cast aside a sinful lifestyle. Many black folk use the Bible to thunder down judgment on gay or lesbian folk. We trot out some of the same arguments that were used against black folk by white preachers: that God frowns on their sexual identity; that the Bible says their habits and desires lead right to hell; that their moral corruption is a blight on the community. We black folk have often said, just as you have, that we love the sinner but hate the sin. That questionable formulation proves to be even more ridiculous when applied to queer folk, whose sexual identity singles them out for judgment. For those of us who oppose gay marriage, our hypocrisy screams even more loudly. Although we deny it, the same kind of people who opposed interracial marriage oppose same-sex marriage too. And they are often armed with the same sorts of arguments. Black folk have blindly followed a path of prejudice that earlier ended with us as victims. Many of us find the abandonment of queer black folk a special breed of hypocrisy; failing, for the most part, to find a suitable social scapegoat for our distress, we realize there is no bottom rung that is not already occupied by another black person, and, therefore, we make new niggers of them. If, as Toni Morrison says, it is on the backs of blacks that America has been built, then surely blacks have built other forms of blackness, acceptable blackness, by offering nigger status to those we deem beneath us. As surely as fringe black figures like right-wing ideologue Rev. Jesse Peterson see the black poor as niggers, some religious blacks see queer folk the same way. We can’t seem to shake our hypocrisy, and thus end up mimicking the whiteness we claim to despise.
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The use of nigger has been eerily consistent in the culture, especially with the presidency of Barack Obama stoking resurgent white panic and the emergence of Donald Trump amplifying white paranoia and racial belligerence. But black folk haven’t stood by passively. A great many of us have tried to rob the word of its essential viciousness by reappropriating it, though, to many black folk, the effort smacks of internalized racist self-hate. They feel the effort is futile, and tips our caps too eagerly to a word that should be banished from the culture. A nigger is a nigger, or a nigga, they say.
Beloved, many of you don’t understand why black folk ambushed the word nigger and made something strangely beautiful of it. What’s more, you often appear upset that we appropriate this term while denying you the pleasure of helping us to reshape its use. We strictly forbid you the privilege of participating in our fierce disputes about the word. As for the attempt to make the word palatable in our arenas, you don’t have to know a lot of social theory to know that powerless people often fight power with their words.
Black people have been lying in wait to murder nigger from the start. (Except for those who seek to become the nigger you feared in their rebellious or wayward existence, but that is something to explore another time.) We quietly fumed at the way the word caricatures our humanity. For a long time we couldn’t make you stop using it so we gave it a go ourselves. Jay Z explains in one of his songs the mechanics of how the word went from nigger to nigga. Jay warned on the song “Ignorant Shit” that artists often use exaggeration to make their meaning clear. He boasts we “shoot niggas straight through the E.R.” That is, he lopped off the “er” at the end of nigger and replaced it with the “ga” to make it nigga. Thus an offensive word became to many black folk an affectionate one.
Nigger is the white man’s invention; the gender is deliberate here, since this was a white male creation even as white women shared the culture of derision too. Nigga is the black man’s response since black men were most easily seen as nigger. But black women bore an even greater burden with a double portion of slander when they were called “nigger bitch.” Nigger taps into how darkness is linked to hate. Nigga reflects self-love and a chosen identity. Nigga does far more than challenge the white imagination. Nigga also captures class and spatial tensions in black America. Nigga is grounded in the ghetto; it frowns on bourgeois ideals and spits in the face of respectability politics. That’s why an incident in the last year of Barack Obama’s presidency resonated so widely.
“Yo, Barry. You did it, my nigga.”
Larry Wilmore fired a rhetorical shot across the bow of blackness with these words at the 2016 White House Correspondents’ Dinner. The Nightly Show comic made an appearance before the group to tell jokes following President Obama’s final standup routine. Referring to the president by his youthful nickname was one thing. Referring to him with a vernacular offshoot of nigger was something altogether different. Letting that be his last word about Obama at a gathering the world paid attention to was beyond the pale.
The fallout in black America was swift and heated. Black social media was atwitter with Wilmore’s comments, supporting or lambasting him with equal passion. Black journalists and civil rights leaders chastised Wilmore for breaking black code and saying nigga in mixed company. They believed that Wilmore should have observed the informal rule that you don’t say that word around white folk. But that rule was from before rap albums gave the term currency far beyond the hood. Wilmore’s black critics reprimanded him for his poor choice of words and for insulting the most powerful man in the world. They also blasted him for disrespecting the black journalists in attendance. Others saw the debacle from both sides. Obama was unfazed by Wilmore’s utterance. The smile on the president’s face said that he enjoyed this spontaneous moment of racial intimacy. Obama returned Wilmore’s “peace out” double fist pump to the chest and embraced him after his performance.