John McWhorter, writing in The New Republic, has a wonderfully insightful and provocative review of Randall Kennedy’s new book, Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word. He begins:

No white person calls me ‘nigger,’ at least not when I am around. The white people with whom I come into contact seem aware that the word is today ‘the filthiest, dirtiest, nastiest word in the English language,’ as Christopher Darden put it during the O.J. Simpson trial. I know ‘nigger’ mainly as an affectionate in-group term favored especially by black men. Beyond this, ‘nigger’ exists for me largely in euphemism, as what the media calls ‘the N word,’ discussed more than used, the discussion usually exploring the popularity of the word among blacks.

Here’s a bit of McWhorter’s wonderful candor:

The obsession among many people with the word ‘nigger’ boils down to this, roughly: ‘I am a strong and selfempowered person. Therefore the mere utterance of a racial slur referring to my race will reduce me to tears and helpless rage.’ This is a curious manifesto for a race on the rise, and I suspect that Kennedy would agree. In one of his best passages, he observes: ‘In stressing the “terror” of verbal abuse, proponents of hate-speech regulation have, ironically, empowered abusers while simultaneously weakening black students by counseling that they should feel grievously wounded by remarks that their predecessors would have ignored or shaken off.’ When a white person throws ‘nigger’ at a black person, what he or she is saying is: ‘You are inferior to me because of your race.’ The sad, simple fact is that if a black person can be reduced to sputtering despair by this word, then deep down he or she believes that the charge is true.

Our problem, then, is less linguistic than spiritual, less a word than a self-image.

Take twenty minutes and read the whole thing. ‘S Good stuff.

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