Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word by Randall Kennedy

Author:Randall Kennedy
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780375713712
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 2002-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

Like every other significant feature of American life—including cigarettes, guns, pornography, drugs, stock trading, sex, religion, and money—nigger is thoroughly enmeshed in litigation. The disorderly diversity of the conflicts in which it figures is remarkable. The following three cases illustrate that variety.

Otis Ross successfully sued the Douglas County, Nebraska, correctional facility for violating federal antidiscrimination law. Ross, a black prison guard, complained of being subjected to a constant barrage of abuse by a supervisor who addressed him as “nigger” and “black boy” and referred to Ross's white wife as “whitey.” The abusive supervisor was also black. The county posited that as a matter of law, blacks could not subject other blacks to a racially hostile workplace. The judges, however, wisely rejected that argument, quoting Thurgood Marshall's observation that given the mysteries of human motivation, “it would be unwise to presume as a matter of law that human beings of one definable group will not discriminate against other members of their group.”106

In a second case, a white woman sued for and won a divorce after forty years of marriage and three children. She alleged that her husband had subjected her to cruel and inhuman treatment due to his rage at their daughter's decision to marry someone whom the court described as “a gentleman of Puerto Rican descent.” The husband had refused to attend the wedding and would not speak to his daughter or acknowledge his son-in-law. Infuriated by his wife's acceptance of the marriage, he told her that her presence made him feel like puking. For good measure, he repeatedly called her a nigger lover.107

A third memorable case arose from one man's efforts to effectuate Lenny Bruce's strategy to defang nigger through continuous use. Russell Lawrence Lee petitioned a court to change his name to “Mister Nigger.”108 His intention in doing this, he wrote, was to “steal the stinging degradation—the thunder, the wrath, the shame and racial slur—from the word nigger.”109 A trial court, affirmed by the California Court of Appeals, rejected his petition. The appellate court maintained that while the petitioner had a common-law right to use whatever name he chose, the judiciary did not have to assist him in his experiment and could, in this instance, properly refrain from doing so, since the “proposed surname is commonly considered to be a racial epithet and has the potential to be a ‘fighting word.’ ”110

These three cases, unusual though they all are, nonetheless represent a type of conflict that judges will continue to face. For nigger and its variants will keep showing up in court so long as they remain key words that tap into and reflect powerful emotions. For the forseeable future, at least, nigger will constitute a peculiar, resilient, ever-changing fixture in the American jurisprudence of epithets.

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