Abstract
Despite the general societal ban on use of forms of nigger, a variant finds continued acceptance among some members of the African American community for intragroup self-reference. The present research employs quantitative and qualitative analysis of data from narratives by African American comedians to show that a variant of nigger that developed in the early African American community persists in the lexicon of African American English because it conveys a social meaning that is foundational in the identity of many African Americans. Use of this form allows a speaker to construct an identity representing awareness of the history of African Americans and practical knowledge of the nature and implications of the diaspora experience. The form has been productive in its capacity to convey a range of attitudinal stances related to its basic meaning, including solidarity, censure, and a proactive stance that seeks to bring about positive change.
The Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary describes the term nigger as “perhaps the most offensive and inflammatory racial slur in English.” 1 The term has been in use as a racist insult since the mid-1800s, but with increased sensitivity to the sensibilities of former targets of racial and other types of dysphemisms (Allan & Burridge 2006), it has fallen into extreme disfavor in the broader society (Henderson 2003; Allan & Burridge 2006). This is so to the extent that Henderson (2003:65) states that in the broader society, nigger is “unspeakable and has now acquired a taboo associated with the most obscene word of the English language.”
The racist form nigger is one of two contemporary forms that developed from the early use of nigger, which was at one time relatively neutral as a referential term employed by whites. The racist contemporary form consists of the same phonetic sequence as the original neutral use of nigger; since the early form nigger and the contemporary racist form are homographic, this article distinguishes between the original form and the contemporary racist form by placing the contemporary form into contexts that reveal its pejorative meaning, as in the phrase “dysphemistic use of nigger.”
The second variant of the form nigger occurs in the African American community; this variant is phonologically distinct in its ending from the form historically implemented in usages outside the African American community. Rather than taking word-final -er, the African American form ends in a schwa, without /r/, as in nigga. This ending grows out of the phonological system of African American English (AAE), which has a rule that can produce a schwa in lieu of post vocalic /r/ in an unstressed final syllable. This results in forms such as eva versus ever and teacha versus teacher (Rickford 1998; Green 2002). There are regional variations in general frequency of /r/ absence in AAE (Labov et al. 1968; Edwards 1990, 1996; Morgan 2009), but the /r/-less form nigga seems constant across regions.
Comments show that African Americans are consciously aware of the significance of the schwa ending in the AAE form nigga. A thirty-two-year-old interviewee in the present research described the -er form as “the slave form.” The comedian Eddie Griffin (2003) makes this observation: “The media tells us, ‘Why you keep sayin’ that word? ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger, nigger, nigger.’. . . You got it mixed up. We don’t say ‘nig-ger.’ We say ‘nig-ga.’ That’s two different words.” The musician and composer Quincy Jones describes the variable nigger as “a very dangerous animal. . . . All you gotta do is change the ‘a-z’ or the ‘g-a’ to a ‘g-e-r’ and we’re still right back where we started” (Jones 2006, qtd. in Echegoyen 2006).
There is an ongoing movement within the African American community to ban use of nigga. But despite efforts to erase the term from the active lexicon of African Americans, it continues to find considerable acceptance and use as a term of self-reference among African Americans. For example, the Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr. states that he is not at all offended when nigga is used among African Americans (Gates 2009:9).
This article employs data from performances by socially conscious African American narrative comedians, as well as interviews with members of the African American community, to explore issues related to the use of nigga by African Americans. The primary question is why, since the term carries such negative historical associations, there are African Americans who accept its continued existence in the active linguistic repertoires of members of the African American community. This is a compelling question since the lexicon of AAE gives speakers access to a wide range of terms with ethnic connotations for intragroup self-reference. Terms such as brother and sister (Allen 1983; Baugh 1983, 1999; Smitherman 2000; Major 1994; Rickford & Rickford 2000) convey ethnic identity and solidarity, but without the epithetic quality historically associated with forms of nigger.
From several perspectives, this project fills a gap in research on a topic that has generated considerable public discourse. For example, the most dramatic expression of the movement to ban use of nigger occurred in July 2007, when a group of African Americans conducted a symbolic funeral for nigger, as used both in and out of the African American community (Williams 2007; Hill 2008). In another instance, a 2010 incident involving the popular psychologist Laura Schlessinger illustrates the status of nigger in the broader community: intense criticism caused Schlessinger to resign from her radio talk show after uttering “nigger” eleven times in a short segment of her show (Holden 2010).
Language in the African American community has been widely studied over the years, but the lion’s share of attention has traditionally gone to examining phonological and grammatical features (Labov et al. 1968; Wolfram 1969; Baugh 1983, 1999; Rickford 1998; Green 2002; Rickford et al. 1991). This article enters the relatively understudied area of lexicon in AAE by examining nigga and its role as a semiotically potent lexical feature that is a tool for the construction of African American identity. While there have been brief discussions of nigga in larger works (Major 1994; Spears 1998; Smitherman 2000), there have been no formal studies like this one devoted to the subject.
Exploring the traditional and emerging meanings and sociocultural associations conveyed by African American uses of the term contributes to an understanding of social identity among African Americans while adding to the store of knowledge about AAE. Since nigga is a self-selected term for naming members of the group, it is an apt subject for yielding insight into the way that at least some African Americans see themselves and their community. As well, the article contributes to the study of intraspeaker variation by showing how use of a single lexical item can contribute to the construction of personae in various attitudinal stances and illocutionary modes.
In exploring issues related to the role that nigga plays in the African American community, the article may provide insight into the ways in which other marginalized communities develop linguistic strategies to deal with labels and dysphemisms imposed on them that target characteristics such as gender, region, sexual orientation, disability, and ethnicity. The article also provides insight into responses to taboo and into issues related to appropriation and resignification.
At this point, it will be useful to discuss several terms and issues in sociolinguistics that are relevant to the development of this article. Following Coupland (2001:201), solidarity here is understood to be “analyzable as a complex of inferential processes whereby listeners reconstruct social and personal images, of and ‘through’ a speaker.” The images evoked “carry familiar or inclusive cultural echoes” and are set “against a specific backdrop of cultural experiences and assumptions” (Coupland 2001:201). This study asks whether nigga conveys unique images and social meanings that are not generally retrievable from other ethnic terms, so that if a speaker shifts from brother to nigga in a conversation, for example, it signals a shift to projection of a new aspect of African American identity. Can speakers use nigga interchangeably with other ethnic terms in similar contexts, without change of meaning? Or is the term imbued with social meaning that facilitates solidarity and construction of a specific aspect of identity? If so, how did the term acquire this social meaning?
Constructionist work on identity acknowledges that, rather than being static, social identity is dynamic, multidimensional, and multilayered (Rickford & McNair-Knox 1994; Schilling-Estes 1998; Coupland 2001, 2007). As Coupland (2007) describes, our personal identities are in many respects collages of different social category characteristics. In a given interaction, many facets of identity lie dormant, becoming active only if a specific topic or situation makes them relevant and appropriate. In these instances, speakers may deploy salient features to construct or reveal relevant aspects of identity.
Ethnic identity is a facet of social identity, but ethnic identity is itself multifaceted; not all aspects are active in a given interaction. For most African Americans, a part of ethnic identity is “transportable,” consisting of ever-present observable and distinctive characteristics (Zimmerman 1998). The salience of ethnic identity for African Americans stems from its general transportability; obstacles stemming from the visibility of African American features have led to the development and continuation of a strong group identity and solidarity.
But while a part of their identity is transportable, African Americans have agency in giving expression to other aspects of African American identity that they may choose to make a part of their presentation of self. To do this, they marshal salient resources from the array of ethnic linguistic features available to them. With varying degrees of conscious awareness and control of features, African Americans frequently employ elements of the grammatical, phonological, and lexical systems of AAE in their interactions within the African American community (Baugh 1983, 1999; Rickford & Rickford 2000; Rahman 2008). The semiotic value of features eliciting feelings of familiarity and shared cultural experiences and knowledge works to build solidarity and makes the features amenable to use in constructing identity as an African American aligned with and participating in the African American community. For some speakers, using ethnically colored terms of address and reference, including nigga, contributes to their presentation of self within the community.
Within a community, linguistic norms do not necessarily license all members to employ every linguistic feature that is current in the community. Bauman and Briggs (1990) explain that successful execution of a linguistic form requires that the speaker possess authority to use the form. Facets of identity such as age, gender, and social class may affect the legitimacy or credibility of uses by speakers who are not accorded authority by community norms to use particular features. Thus, a question regarding use of nigga is whether there are norms among the sector of the community that accepts the term that impose restrictions on who can use the term and who they may address or reference.
Beyond that, the fact that speakers select nigga from a field containing a broad array of ethnic terms raises the question of why such a plethora of ethnically tinged terms of self-reference exist in the African American lexicon in the first place. By contrast, Frankenberg (1997) notes that whites, for example, have few terms of self-reference; Allen (1983) states that whites may refer to themselves as “anglos,” “gringos,” and the like, but most ethnically rooted terms for groups of whites find use outside the named community.
The article shows that use of the form nigga continues because the term has shown that it is a linguistic resource with the capacity to convey social meaning not retrievable from other ethnically colored terms; considered alone and without regard for pejorative meanings that have historically come from outside the community, the meanings that have evolved for nigga within the African American community actually enrich the lexicon of AAE. Use of nigga is generally restricted to African American males, who typically use the term to address and refer exclusively to other males (Spears 1998; Smitherman 2000).
This article maintains that a core social meaning of nigga related to survival was part of the counterlanguage (discussed below) that early Africans in America developed. The core meaning signaled Africans in their role as survivors and participants in the diaspora experience. Members of the African slave community shared in knowledge of this core meaning, which endures in present-day uses of the term.
The fundamental survival meaning of the term nigga allows speakers to place it into contexts that give expression to a number of attitudinal stances that highlight affective aspects of identity. Stance taking, according to Du Bois (2007), involves evaluating a person, situation, or other entity and then positioning oneself in relation to that entity. The stance that a speaker takes in using nigga may result in types of negative or positive orientation that interact with the more or less salient core factor of survival meaning that remains present in uses of the term. Nigga may, for example, serve illocutionary functions related to showing approval or a proactive self-empowerment.
Word Meaning and Taboo
Allan and Burridge (2006) observe that taboos on language may arise as a device to forbid behaviors that are perceived as potentially harmful to a community or a segment of a community. While the seeming purpose of a slur is to insult and injure, at an unconscious level it is an effort to control the behavior of the disparaged group by imposing a negative identity on them (Allen 1983). Scholars agree that words carry with them a social history (Bauman & Briggs 1990; Ochs 1992; Coupland 2001, 2007). African Americans who reject use of nigga within the African American community are concerned that its use is symptomatic of an internalization of white racism; eradicationists see use of the term as contributing to the construction of an identity founded on self-hate (Kennedy 2002; Asim 2007).
Because nigger has historically wreaked symbolic violence (Butler 1997; Coupland 2007; Zizek 2007), often accompanied by physical violence, the negative meaning of nigger, which for some African Americans includes nigga, remains an active part of consciousness. For them, the racist meaning obliterates and disallows the legitimacy of any positive meanings that African Americans may claim for the term (Kennedy 2002; Asim 2007; Larkins 2006, qtd. in Echegoyen 2006).
But while social history endows linguistic resources with social meanings, the potential for extending or even transforming those meanings can also lie within these resources (Allen 1983; Ochs 1992; Butler 1997; Bauman & Briggs 1990; Coupland 2007; Kecskes 2008). Licensed speakers have agency to create new social meanings from existing linguistic resources. According to Allen (1983), African Americans have not accepted the stereotyping associated with the slur. Rather, they have subverted it in creative ways. And Kennedy (2002:37) asserts that “self-hatred is an implausible explanation for why many . . . progressive African Americans” continue to use the term “openly and frequently in conversations with one another.”
Because present-day uses of the form in the African American community are linked to past uses, it is useful to begin by examining the history of the term. The next section briefly outlines major points in the history of forms of nigger. After that, the discussion turns to ethnic identity labels, followed by discussion of methods involved in selecting and analyzing the data. The article then presents qualitative and quantitative analysis of use of nigga, followed by concluding remarks.
A Brief History of the Term
The original term nigger has undergone various processes of change over time; these are tied in with the social, economic, and cultural factors that have contributed to the development of the African American community. The historical development of the term has resulted in variants representing two major strands of meaning, consistent with oppositional meanings regarding African American identity.
Nigger appears to have entered English through borrowing of negro “black,” a word common to both Spanish and Portuguese slave traders that referenced the dark skin of Africans. The online Oxford English Dictionary (OED) cites uses of the English form as early as 1574. The dictionary describes this early usage as relatively neutral, despite the fact that the term found use within the context of the slave trade. The earliest examples provided suggest a benignly patronizing attitude that whites held toward the Africans that assumed an inferiority including less social, intellectual, and cultural development. As the online OED states, usage by whites reflected “underlying attitudes rather than a hostile use of the word itself.” For example, a 1608 entry in the OED describes the king and people of Sierra Leone as “Niggers, simple and harmless.” The mildly disparaging social meanings conveyed in early use by whites ultimately degenerated into an overt slur.
Scholars find a relationship between the societal status of a group and the likelihood that meanings of terms used to refer to members of that group will derogate (Schultz 1975; Curzan 2003). The derogation begins with shared stereotypes that allow negative social meanings to attach to a previously neutral term (McConnell-Ginet 1989; Curzan 2003). Where gender is concerned, for example, Curzan (2003:139) notes that it is widely agreed among feminist scholars that because of the lower societal position of women, “female-referential terms undergo pejoration more often that male-referential terms.”
As social, economic, and political events unfolded, nigger moved from its relatively neutral usage among whites to gain usage as an overtly hostile and abusive word meant to intimidate Africans in America and highlight their ascribed moral and intellectual inferiority. In 1837, Hosea Easton, a free African American, 2 wrote of the contempt and disrespect that inhered in the negative use of the word. He described nigger as “an opprobrious term, employed to impose contempt upon blacks as an inferior race” (2007:41-42). By the mid-1800s, this overtly dysphemistic use of nigger had become “a familiar and influential insult” (Kennedy 2002:4). Allen (1990:3-4) provides an insight that helps to explain the degeneration of the term into a straightforward insult:
Ethnic slurs appear in response to social and economic conflict during historical periods of rapid social change. The coinage of most slurs may be associated with great events in our social history, particularly waves of immigration, urbanization, war and its aftermath, depressions, and massive migrations of labor.
The pejoration of nigger into a racist dysphemism coincided with an increase in the number of free African Americans in the early nineteenth century, as well as the movement for the abolition of slavery. Writers note that both of these factors carried the potential for greater competition with whites for jobs (Milroy & Milroy 1991; Kennedy 2002; Asim 2007). An ideology developed that highlighted and intensified existing racist views; as a means of blocking African Americans from competing economically, nigger became a convenient term for indexing the subhuman characteristics being ascribed to African Americans through this ideology. Frederickson (1987:41) describes this as “an articulate and aggressive racism which excluded the Negro from the society of competing equals without deporting him, by the simple and brutal mechanism of formally defining him as subhuman.” The stereotypes and untruths related to the anti–African American ideology supported pejoration of nigger into an epithet.
The second major form, nigga, developed within the slave community. The online OED shows the nineteenth century as providing the earliest instance of use of nigga. The OED is a generally useful resource for finding the origins of English words, but assessing its value as a source showing when nigga came into use by African Americans requires consideration of the social climate that existed in America through the years leading up to the first recorded use that would have affected the availability and even accuracy of records containing speech by slaves.
Before the nineteenth century, Africans did not count as humans; without acknowledgment of the humanity of the slaves, there was little interest in recording or publishing their speech, so that the first use cited by OED does not necessarily reflect the beginning of use in the African American community. The OED’s earliest record may reflect the fact that the abolitionist movement, the Civil War, and other events of the nineteenth century created a climate where there was a greater interest in exploring the lives of African Americans.
Beyond that, if there were records containing the writing or speech of slaves before the first instance of nigga reported by OED, it is not certain that writers would have accurately captured its phonological characteristics. With the extensive media discourse that currently surrounds nigga, contemporary writers are aware of its salience, but without the knowledge and sensitivities of contemporary writers, transcribers in the past may have produced an eye dialect that targeted certain features perceived as characteristic of African American speech, while neglecting others, including the schwa ending in nigga. Ex-slave narratives, for example, record the perceptions of a transcriber, but do not necessarily convey accurate representations of the features of African American language. In the present research, Richard Pryor produces nigga to the exclusion of nigger, yet a concert title drawn from one of his concert lines appears as “That Nigger’s Crazy.”
Scholars believe that a nonpejorative variant of nigger entered the lexicon of African Americans early on (Dillard 1977; Spears 1998); according to Spears (1998:240), the term was probably in use among Africans in America in “the earliest days of Anglophone America.” It is impossible to know exactly when a form of nigger entered the lexicon of African Americans, but certain known circumstances surrounding the experiences of the slaves from their arrival in America in the seventeenth century lend themselves to a likely explanation.
Based on documented conditions of their existence, it is reasonable to believe that the slaves began to use a variant of nigger shortly after their arrival, as they learned English. Records from at least 1715 show that immediately on arrival in the western hemisphere, slaves generally began a one- to three-year period of “seasoning,” where they adjusted to their new environment and status in life (Gaspar 1992; Gomez 1998). The historian Michael Gomez (1998:14) offers that “learning the rudiments of a European language was part of the (seasoning) process.” For slaves here in America, this meant learning some English “as a necessary prerequisite to performing tasks” and “allowing for communication between slaveholder (or overseer) and slave” (Gomez 1998:173).
Scholars generally agree that slaves were usually separated from their countrymen on arrival in America (Higgins 1976). The Africans were second language learners with fluent command of their native languages, but who, because of the commonality of their plight, felt a compelling “need to communicate with Africans of dissimilar background” (Gomez 1998:172). In that vein, they were in need of a commonly understood term of self-reference for members of the group of slaves.
Gomez asserts that slaveholders and overseers consistently described slaves with modifiers indicating their relative degree of seasoning. These included, for example, “salt-water” for newly imported slaves and “country-born” for slaves born in America. According to Gomez, nigger was the one term the slaves heard used with these modifiers (Gomez 1998). Because it was a commonly heard term in the language they were learning, nigger was a convenient and logical label for the slaves to employ to refer to themselves. Early uses of variants of nigger in the slave and dominant communities carried similar referential meanings; the term referred to an African. But as Coupland (2007:20) points out, “forms can express what is referentially the same meaning while different social nuances are present.” The social meanings for nigger that developed among members of the African diaspora in America were distinctive to that group. The pronunciation, as well, differed for the slaves.
The variant that developed among the slaves took an open syllable ending, as is common in West African languages (Bhambose 1969; Dakubu 1988). As mentioned above, the Africans who came to America had the task of learning English as a second language; in second language learning, features of a native language may carry over into pronunciation of words in the new language (Skehan 1998). Where a learner’s native language lacks a feature that occurs in the target language, the learner may make adjustments based on the phonological system of her or his native language. This happens, for example, when native speakers of German retain devoicing of final voiced consonants when learning English; a German speaking English as a second language may produce blk for big.
West African languages such as Fula, Wolof, and Yoruba are, in many ways, structurally similar to each other (Bhambose 1969; Dakubu 1988). They rarely have word-final unstressed syllables consisting of a midcentral vowel and /r/, as in nigger. Frequently, though, West African words end with open syllables (Bhambose 1969; Dakubu 1988; Abibatu Bah personal communication January 7, 2001; Kumba Fall personal communication January 21, 2011). Since it does not occur in their language, for speakers of West African languages, a final syllable consisting of an unstressed midcentral vowel followed by /r/ can lead to interference in producing English; speakers of Yoruba, for example, lose /r/ in a word such as doctor, to produce a form having a final open syllable (Bangbose 1969). Under this view, the open syllable ending in present day forms such as eva “ever,” fatha “father,” and nigga has roots in West African languages.
Linguists have written of the association between West African languages and contemporary AAE (Singler 1993; Rickford 1998; Winford 1998), but the question of retention of African features in AAE is a complex one, complicated by factors related to issues such as the operation of the slavery system and to pidginization and creolization. And there does not appear to be in existence a model for probable consonant, vowel, and syllable systems for West African languages or a proto–West African language of two to four centuries ago. Still, the similarity in phonological endings for contemporary West African languages suggests a historic commonality (Bynon 1977; Crowley 1997), so that West African languages of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that the slaves spoke had similar phonologies. There is need for further research in this area, but where a form of nigger is concerned, it is reasonable that English served as a lexifier, providing a commonly understood term of self-reference, and that the slaves produced a variant ending in an open syllable.
A continued desire to “maintain distance, distinctiveness, and some sense of ownership” (Gomez 1998:177) is among the social factors that contributed to the retention of the open syllable ending and other African features in the language of the slaves. Linguistic features become resources imbued with social meaning through repeated use in contexts that community members are aware of and understand (Bauman & Briggs 1990; Coupland 2001). This article posits that in the counterlanguage, discussed below, social meanings developed among the Africans that reflected a view in which they saw themselves as survivors and as humans whose freedom and dignity had been assaulted. Historic records of mutinies such as those involving the slaveships Henry and Amistad show that while Africans saw themselves as what Zizek (2007) refers to as “inferiorized,” or placed into a subordinate position, they did not develop an identity as inferior beings. Insurrections such as the New York City Slave Revolt in 1712 and those of Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner show this as well. Autobiographical narratives such as that of Olaudah Equiano (Pine 1999) also display dignity and a will to survive.
As in determining exactly when nigga entered the lexicon of the slaves, it is impossible to locate the moment when nigga developed social meanings related to survival. Still, there is evidence that this meaning existed during the time of slavery. Works show that African Americans were using the term with survival meaning since at least the early 1800s (Stuckey 1994; Jacobs 2001; Wilson 2002). The following excerpt from a field holler that slave children sang, for example, emphasizes slaves as survivors. The song warns runaway slaves that patrollers are nearby (Stuckey 1994:10). The transcription targets certain perceived features of the language of African Americans, while overlooking others, including the -a ending in nigga.
(1) As I was goin cross de field
A black snake bit me on my heel
Run nigger run, de Patrol catch you
Run nigger run, tis almos day.
In a Harriet Jacobs memoir relating her experiences as a slave, an African American woman who outwitted whites by hiding Jacobs for seven years points to her own survival skills.
(2) “Dis nigger’s too cute for ’em dis time”
Historically, Africans in America employed their survival strategies within the context of an antisociety. Goffman (1961) and Halliday (1978) maintain that antisocieties often form in situations where subjugated people covertly resist domination. Morgan (2002:23) presents the view that antisocieties “typically emerge when those who dominate individuals require that the subjugated display an attitude that reaffirms the dominator/dominated relationship—in the presence of others—by verbal or physical confirmation (e.g. bowing heads . . .).” An antisociety can give rise to a system of communication, a counterlanguage, that serves the functions of everyday speech. With constant awareness that their words could reach the ears of enemies, the slaves fashioned their counterlanguage with English words and phrases that could have complex, multilayered, and often seemingly contradictory meanings that were decipherable only to insiders (Morgan 2002:23). The inaccessibility that slaveholders had to the survival meaning made nigga a useful tool in the counterlanguage that developed within the context of the slave antisociety.
Use of a code that highlights indirectness to avoid detection is not unique to early African Americans. The gay community, for example, has developed ways to privately signal gay identity in the presence of outsiders. Since gay identity is not necessarily transportable, the coded messages that members of the community send may allow their gay identity to remain unnoticed so they can avoid potential harm and harassment from biased outsiders who may be listening (Leap 1996; Liang 1999). Queen (1998:209) states, for instance, that the question “Are you family?” is often used to covertly ask, “Are you gay?”
Among slaves, the counterlanguage served two primary functions. While purposeful linguistic ambiguity could not necessarily shield intragroup communication from spies who might be among them, it did serve the pragmatic function of providing some protection for their conversations and plans from the slave masters. The counterlanguage also provided a means for slaves to project a social face (Goffman 1961; Morgan 2002) that challenged and resisted the unjust domination that required them to “have the ‘attitude’ of someone who should be oppressed” (Morgan 2002:25). For example, through the counterlanguage, slaves were known to have covertly mimicked and ridiculed the slave master in his presence (Cowan 2001).
Within the antisociety, Africans developed an identity as pragmatic and resourceful survivors who had been displaced into an unjust situation where, as Kolchin (1993:154) asserts, “surviving in a heartless world assumes overriding importance.” During the period of slavery, nigga became a term that Africans used to refer to themselves and companions in the struggle to survive. Using the term highlighted the identity of a speaker as participating in the culture of survival.
“Speakers are linked by a historical chain of discourse to those whom they hear and those to whom they speak” (Hill 2008:57). Roots of present-day uses of the term in the African American community lie in the counterlanguage, where the term served as a symbol representing the most salient aspect of slaves’ identity. This meaning exists to this day for African Americans who are not focused on the racist use of the term, but use nigga as a tool to project a facet of identity as a culturally aware survivor in the diaspora. Nigga conveys meanings related to this facet of identity in a way that other, more recent ethnic terms of self-reference cannot.
Ethnic Identity Labels and Identity
In the lexicon of AAE, nigga exists in a field containing a number of terms that allow African Americans to address or refer specifically to other African Americans. Since these terms generally provide ways of expressing African American identity and solidarity with the community, the comedians in this research have access to a range of options for using ethnonyms and other ethnically colored terms to aid in establishing solidarity and rapport with their audiences. While all these terms refer to African Americans, each term carries defining connotations and collocation rules that distinguish it from other entries in the field of ethnically laden terms of address and reference. The words interrelate and contribute to defining each other, so that selecting nigga from the field entails highlighting particular characteristics that this term carries in ways that others cannot. Table 1 shows terms conveying ethnic meaning that appear in the comedic data, along with the number of their occurrences. Terms such as playa, baby, and dog appear infrequently and are included in the “Other” category.
Terms of Address and Reference That Convey Ethnic Meaning in Comedic Data
While all of the terms in the table highlight ethnic identity and solidarity, nigga is far and away the most frequently used term, constituting 70 percent of total occurrences of terms. There are several related reasons why this might be so. Restrictions related to factors such as grammar, gender, collocation, and nuanced social meanings may proscribe the use of other terms in situations where the comedians use nigga. Terms that speakers use for addressing and referencing are selected from similar repertoires (Coupland 2007:55). But the present research shows that unlike some ethnic terms in the data, nigga can serve functions of both addressing and referencing.
The term boy has strict grammatical and collocational restrictions that nigga does not have. It is generally insulting to address an African American adult male as “boy” (Burton 1995; Hughes 1998; Smitherman 2000). Boy used in third person referring to a man is insulting, but preceded by a possessive it conveys a meaning of camaraderie and solidarity.
An illustration of boundaries for use of boy is in the reaction of interviewees to a comment by A. J. Johnson. Establishing a close bond with the hip-hop artist Master P had been very helpful to Johnson in advancing his career. Expressing an attitudinal stance of gratitude, respect, and close friendship, Johnson says, “I hooked up with Master P. That’s my nigga.” Interviewees agree that “nigga” here suggests a close relationship where Master P is “something like a brother” who has helped Johnson to survive through difficult times. When asked whether using “boy” rather than “nigga” would have affected the meaning of Johnson’s utterance, one interviewee said that using “boy” would have yielded a similar meaning, but “without the closeness” implied by use of “nigga.” As the thirty-two-year-old said,
(3) “There’s some space between them. . . . You could be watching a game on TV and point to a player and say, ‘That’s my boy.’ But you couldn’t say, ‘That’s my nigga.’”
Method
The first goal of the research was to collect tokens of the term for analysis to determine the types of linguistic environments and contexts in which it might occur and the role it might play in identity work in the African American community. I turn to the work of nine African American comedians for data because, as Coupland (2007:15) states, as a genre, stand-up comedy is characterized by “culturally recognized, patterned ways of speaking.” The work of African American comedians who are successful in their social commentary performances before primarily African American audiences is generally a useful gauge of beliefs and ideologies that have currency in the African American community. Since nigga is a lexical feature that African American comedians sometimes use conspicuously in their intraethnic performances, narratives from comedians seemed a practical and reliable source of data for this research.
Audiences expect that from the outset of a performance, a comedian will work to establish a stage identity that conveys solidarity with the audience, along with a “comic authority” that derives from cultural knowledge and verbal acuity (Greenbaum 1999; Rahman 2004, 2007). Research shows that without these elements, an audience will not respond favorably to a comedian. But the nature of the craft of stand-up is such that comedians have only short stretches of time in which to establish an audience relationship and convey their comedically incisive messages.
Rahman (2007) observes that in performances that display a high level of metapragmatic awareness, astute comedians rely heavily on linguistic resources with social meanings that audiences immediately recognize and properly interpret. They establish solidarity, in part, by emphasizing linguistic features in contexts that evoke cultural memories, familiar images, and the perception of a shared ethnic experience for their audiences. Successful African American comedians almost universally employ a vernacular AAE (Rickford & Rickford 2000; Rahman 2004, 2007). Using recognizable ethnic terms of reference and address is part of a strategy meant to establish solidarity and authoritative credibility with audiences.
I collected data for the project by listening to rented and purchased comedy concerts by female and male African American comedians. From these concerts, I selected and transcribed for use in the project narratives in which comedians employed ethnic terms of reference and address. These were narratives in which preliminary observation suggested the comedians displayed different attitudinal stances and roles for characters they portrayed. Data from eight hours of performance yielded 362 instances of use of terms of address and reference that carry ethnic connotations within the African American community. Of these, 254 instances (70 percent) were tokens of nigga, confirming my perception that there are African American comedians who use the term frequently. With the exception of Pryor, which I explain below, comedians providing primary data for this research perform before largely African American audiences.
To add depth to the study, I conducted interviews with four African Americans who had knowledge of the vernacular and who were familiar with the work of a range of African American comedians. Interviewees agree that the African American community relates to the comedians in this research and that their work is generally not controversial among African Americans who like comedy. Interviewees offered their views on the general attitudes of African Americans toward use of the term nigga and the extent to which the comedians’ usages correlate with those common in real life. In several instances, I asked interviewees whether another term could have been substituted for nigga in the data, without a change in meaning. Table 2 shows the ages, genders, and levels of education of the women and men involved in the interviews.
Description of Interviewees
Interviewees agree that although African Americans of all ages can enjoy the work of the comedians in this research, the comedians have special appeal to different age groups. Based on chronological associations with different stages of the African American movement for social equality, the project divides the comedians into three categories of socially conscious performers. This is to determine whether use of nigga is more closely associated with comedians appealing to a particular group.
Category A consists of D. L. Hughley, Adele Givens, Cedric the Entertainer, and Mo’Nique. The comedians in this group have special appeal for audiences in their late thirties through mid-fifties. This group includes the post–civil rights generation that, according to Kitwana (2002), often holds to traditional values regarding such institutions as the family, church, and school. The work of these comedians frequently attacks the pretentiousness, hypocrisy, and background assumptions that underlie ideologies informing the social, cultural, and political structures that have existed in the society.
Yet their work shows a determination to survive and move ahead within the system, despite inequities; their performances often address issues related to family and to strategizing in their attempts to advance within the existing socioeconomic system. For example, Mo’Nique describes the effort of her twelve-year-old son to avoid punishment by feigning possession by demons. In portraying a hardworking member of the working class, Hughley describes his pragmatic reaction to getting fired:
(4) “How come you didn’t call me at home, mothafucka? You knew I was fired yesterday! Making me burn up all my goddamn gas!”
Category B consists of four performers who self-identify as “hip-hop comedians.” According to interviewees, the primary appeal of the hip-hop comedians is to a younger audience, from their teens through their thirties. Members of this audience include the first generation of African Americans to grow up in postsegregation America (Kitwana 2002). Members of the hip-hop generation share values that differ from those of their elders; rather than looking to traditional African American institutions such as family and church for direction, they often reject the establishment and these institutions, relying on themselves and their peers (Kitwana 2002; Alim 2006). While hip-hop eventually became commercialized, originally there were emcees “who employed the medium as a means to elevate, uplift and inspire collective consciousness” (Asante 2008:6). The humor of the hip-hop comedians expresses the counterculture view reflected in the origins of the hip-hop movement. Comedians in this category are A. J. Johnson, Sheryl Underwood, Eddie Griffin, and Freeze Love.
Category C consists entirely of data drawn from the work of Richard Pryor, who performed primarily in the seventies and eighties, at the beginning of an era of overt ethnic consciousness. Pryor stands alone in a category because of the uniqueness of his style, the era in which he worked, and the worldview he expressed in the many recorded concerts that are available. He is regarded by many as the most creative and influential comedian of all time, and the genre of contemporary socially conscious African American narrative comedy evolved from his work (Watkins 1994). Rather than consisting of series of setups and punch lines, the humor is characterized by the telling of stories punctuated by occasional “jab lines” (Attardo 2001; Rahman 2007).
Pryor’s work is grounded in his knowledge of African American culture and language; he was brutally honest in his portrayal of aspects of African American life that comedians had previously overlooked, bringing to life characters that, as Watkins (1994:560) comments, gave “substance and external validation to the attitudes and perceptions of ghetto types.” While financial considerations often led Pryor to perform before primarily white audiences, African Americans served as absent referees (Bell 2001). Watkins (1994:545) states that Pryor “insisted that black crowds were tougher to please. . . . [H]e understood that to enhance or even maintain his authentic edge, it was necessary to direct his act at an African American sensibility.” Regarding interpretation of work by Pryor, Limon (2000:85) comments, “At no moment are whites and blacks laughing for exactly the same reason.” Table 3 provides the categories for Pryor and the other comedians, along with their gender and the names and dates of the comedy concerts that provide the data.
Sources of Comedic Data
Data for comedians in categories A and B consist of approximately 40 minutes of performance from each comedian, so that there are about 160 minutes for each group. Since Pryor constitutes a group, data for category C consist of approximately 160 minutes of performance from Pryor. Commercially available recordings of early concerts by Pryor are replete with occurrences of nigga. For the narratives I selected, preliminary observation suggested different attitudinal stances for characters he portrayed. Thus, the overall body of comedic data contain approximately eight hours of recorded performance.
To determine social meanings that could attach to the term nigga, I used methods of thematic analysis to examine the term as it occurred in various contexts. Thematic analysis shows the relationship between the occurrence of specific data and patterns and themes that exist in particular contexts. Co-occurrence of nigga with themes related to particular attitudinal stances suggests various social meanings for the term. Querying interviewees regarding social meanings that attach to the term provided further support. Examining occurrence of the term in contexts provided by additional narratives that presented similar attitudinal stances lent further support to the assignment of social meanings to the term. An example is where Richard Pryor criticizes the court:
(5) “They give niggas time like it’s lunch down there.”
Given background knowledge about community views and shared experiences with the legal system, Pryor’s use of nigga shows solidarity with other African Americans who perceive the legal system to be unjust. Comments such as the ones below, from an early concert where Dave Chappelle (2000) performs before a primarily African American audience, point to the salience of the view that the African American community sees the legal system as unfair to African Americans.
Black people are very afraid of the police. That’s a big part of our culture. It don’t matter how rich you are, how old you are. [applause] We’re just afraid of ’em. We got every reason to be afraid of ’em. [addresses white woman in audience] You a white lady. You ever been pulled over by the police before?
Yeah.
And what did they say?
Let me see your driver’s license and registration.
Right? Now, how’d I guess that? That’s not what they say to us. You wouldn’t believe what they say to us. Scared of ’em. Seriously, man.
To determine whether there was a relationship between categories of comedians and use of the term, I subjected occurrences of nigga to statistical analysis using VARBRUL. VARBRUL is a computer program that can perform logistical regression to calculate factor weights showing the extent to which a combination of factors independently and simultaneously constrain the use of a particular feature. These factors are usually social and linguistic. Using a scale of 0–1.0, VARBRUL measures factors favoring or disfavoring application of a feature. Weights over .500 favor application, while weights under .500 disfavor it (Paolillo 2002; Rahman 2004). A second goal in using VARBRUL was to gain insight into whether the African American community imposes gender restrictions on use of the term.
Results
The Core Meaning
Kreckel (1981) and Lee (2001) note that a set of beliefs that a community shares derives from commonality in background and experience. For example, various writings show that African Americans live with an awareness of their shared history and experience. As Smitherman (2000:2) observes, “There is an underlying uniformity among Blacks, owing to the fact that race, meaning not just skin color, but also culture, history, and experience, continues to define African America.” In the words of a Baugh (1999:5) interviewee, “You just can never forget that slavery was a bitch from the get-go.” And Ralph Ellison observed that the consciousness of African Americans is imbued with the memory of their history in this country (Callahan 2003). Beliefs stemming from the common background and experience of African Americans have resulted in an aspect of identity in which they see themselves as survivors.
As a lexical feature of AAE, nigga has a core of indexical value that has been established through generations of use in contexts that grow out of the counterlanguage and are known and understood in the community. While additional but related attitudinal aspects of meanings may layer over this meaning, traits indexed in the core meaning are an underlying factor in all uses. Imbued in this basic use of the term are understandings related to survival identity.
The survival aspect of African American identity is characterized by traits such as resilience, common sense and resourcefulness, tenacity, and an everyday cautiousness and sense of potential danger that inform the African American experience. Being a survivor requires a degree of “coolness,” which Morgan (2002:40) describes as “the ability to act on symbolic incidents and subtle varieties of cultural practice with eloquence, skill, wit, patience and precise timing.”
In the segment below, Richard Pryor gives a hyperbolic and humorous expression of survival identity in the workplace. Where workers have low-paying jobs, they often feel marginalized, voiceless, and excluded from company culture (Kantor 1993). When the workers are African Americans or members of other minorities, the situation may be exacerbated by perceptions of racism and a belief that rigid white supervisors are dismissive and insensitive to the concerns of the workers. The segment below begins with an exchange where a white supervisor character greets Pryor, who portrays a frustrated worker.
How you feel, Fred?
Fuck you!
I beg your pardon, Fred? Why don’t you just—ah—take the day off. You must be overexerting yourself.
You know, they think you crazy. Niggas is in trouble.
[talking to other whites who are present] Well, that’s the way they talk all the time. Just disturb them.
Niggas got to talk that way when y’all don’t understand—“Please get off my back.” Y’all don’t understand that.
Using nigga to address and refer can contribute to the construction of a speaker’s identity, but as in the segment above, it can also ascribe identity (Coupland 2007) to a referent or addressee as a coparticipant in the diaspora. 3 The excerpt contains two instances of nigga, both of which ascribe identity as survivors to African Americans. The first instance, “Niggas is in trouble,” expresses caution and also suggests solidarity with other African Americans. It alludes to a belief that whites in power in the workplace cannot or will not take seriously the discontent that African American subordinates may be experiencing. This calls for strategizing by African Americans to survive. The second use of nigga is in the context of a comically exaggerated strategy for survival in the workplace.
In another instance, showing survival identity, Eddie Griffin expresses concern about taking a trip to Alaska. Because of difficulties that have arisen due to the salience and transportability of African American identity, Griffin wonders how many African Americans go to Alaska and even whether it is safe for African Americans to be there. He asks rhetorically,
(8) You know how many niggas go to Alaska?
On another occasion, after describing some challenging aspects of the African American experience, Pryor marvels at the tenacity and resilience that have allowed African Americans to survive.
(9) You wonder why a nigga don’t go completely mad.
In the segment below, the comedian Katt Williams (2008) speaks explicitly about nigga and its relationship to survivorship as a salient aspect of African American identity:
(10) Niggas is an American success story. They can’t talk me out of my love for niggas. Niggas is the shit. Niggas went from being treated like dogs til now. That’s why I keep sayin the word nigga. Cause I want him to remember what the fuck he came from. . . . I’m proud of niggas. Niggas don’t never quit. Niggas always come through the motherfuckin trouble—and looking better at the same time. They can’t make me feel bad about niggas.
Solidarity Meaning
The solidarity meaning for nigga emerges through common understandings and shared experiences related to survival. While projecting identity as an African American who is conscious of survival in the diaspora, nigga may add a dimension to that identity by projecting an attitudinal stance that shows solidarity with another African American or with the African American community. This solidarity is generally based on perceptions of racial injustice. As noted, the range of events that have affected the community over time has led to a strong community solidarity; specific images and events may evoke memories of unfair treatment that are perceived to be common community experiences and that also lead to empathy with fellow African Americans who share in these perceptions and experiences. In the segments below, the first of which was discussed earlier, the term occurs in a context that casts the comedians as having personal knowledge and empathy for the unfair treatment of African Americans, particularly by the legal system.
(11) Richard Pryor, commenting on the frequency with which African American men are unjustly imprisoned: They give niggas time like it’s lunch down there. They gave one nigga forty years.
(12) Eddie Griffin, comparing treatment of African Americans and whites by the legal system: Let a nigga do a motherfucking thing. Nigga, they got us in the courtroom.
(13) Richard Pryor, describing the extreme job discrimination of the past: In those days, that’s all niggas could do. They wouldn’t hire no niggas.
As noted, nigga may also be used to show solidarity stemming from a particular bond with a reliable friend, as when A. J. Johnson describes help he has received from Master P in surviving through difficult times: “That’s my nigga.” Describing the type of close, supportive friendship where use of “my nigga” is appropriate, Eddie Griffin says, “We rise together, we fall together.” Yet the data suggest nuanced boundaries for use of nigga that lead the comedians to use other terms for conveying solidarity in certain contexts; other terms may convey shades of solidarity related to pragmatic and social features not covered by nigga. Where solidarity is concerned, the comedians often employ other terms, using nigga at a frequency of only 37 percent (compared to 70 percent overall). Table 4 shows relative frequencies for occurrence of ethnic terms to convey solidarity or endearment.
Relative Frequencies of Ethnic Terms to Convey Solidarity
As this article shows, gender restrictions disfavor use of nigga to address or reference women. Girl is a term that both men and women can use in relation to women. As Troutman (2001) points out, used among African Americans, the term conveys solidarity and does not have negative connotations. Consistent with their forward-looking emphasis on advancing in the society, comedians in category A generally use phrases such as black folks or black people to refer to African Americans.
The language of A. J. Johnson and Eddie Griffin, who use nigga intensively, suggests that there are facets of solidarity that nigga does not cover. The way they handle the term brother gives indication of boundaries for use of nigga to convey solidarity. Johnson uses nigga in twenty-two out of thirty-two occurrences of ethnically colored terms (79 percent). On seven of the ten occasions where he uses an ethnically colored term other than nigga, he uses brother or its clipped form bro. Brother inherently suggests a background of shared experience resulting from a literal or metaphoric kinship. Below are the instances in which Johnson uses brother or bro, categorized by function.
(14) To audience member:
Come on, bro. We let you in free.
As salaam alaikum, brother.
(15) Introducing comedian:
Next brother comin’ up—the newest . . .
This brother comin’ up.
Y’all seen this brother in House Party.
This next brother comin’ up . . .
Y’all seen this brother on Def Jam.
A characteristic of the constructions above in which brother occurs is that all involve contexts where Johnson shows not only solidarity but also deference and respect. In the first instance, Johnson is trying to respectfully quiet an audience member who is distracting the audience by making bird-like calls. Comedians are sometimes tough with hecklers (Watkins 1994; Greenbaum 1999), but Johnson politely entreats him to stop. Johnson suggests, perhaps jokingly, that his was a pro bono ticket. When I described this situation to the thirty-seven-year-old interviewee, she said that using nigga would not have worked in this case:
(16) That wouldn’t have been good. He [Johnson] was trying to calm him down peacefully. If he had used nigga it would have sounded like he was trying to start a fight. You can’t just put nigga anywhere. It has to be the right situation. Sometimes with black people—if you use the word inappropriately, they’ll get mad at you. Just like when a white person uses it.
In the second instance, Johnson uses brother to greet an audience member that he perceives as Muslim. Brother, in this case, is a term that shows solidarity and respect for a member of a religious community. The interviewee cited above said, “You can’t put ‘as salaam alaikum’ and ‘nigga’ together. Out of respect. It’s like saying to a deacon, ‘Amen, nigga.’” Johnson also uses brother in every instance where he introduces a male comedian. In these cases, the term seems to be a way of showing solidarity and a professional respect for the work of a colleague.
Eddie Griffin uses nigga on fifty-four out of fifty-nine occasions where he uses ethnically related terms (92 percent). In the two instances where he uses brother, he is addressing women in the audience. He speaks to women with the following.
(17) “Could y’all give brothers a break for a minute?”
(18) “As a brother, we got the roughest motherfuckin’ role of any of ’em.”
As noted below, nigga is generally used by men to address and refer to other men. In that vein, it is possible that Griffin departs from use of nigga in these two instances because he is speaking directly to women. Use of brother here is also consistent with the view that the comedians use brother to show a deference and respect, in this instance for women.
It would take far more data to develop a hypothesis along these lines, but uses by Griffin and Johnson do suggest the existence of constraints on the use of nigga to show solidarity. The association between survival and solidarity conveyed in uses of nigga may preclude its use to convey solidarity in instances that highlight facets of identity other than survival. Brother, for example, points to solidarity, but rather than foregrounding survival, may display an attitude that shows a more respectful distance and formality. Part of the reason for the nuanced differences in meaning and use of nigga and brother may be related to the sociohistorical contexts in which the terms gained prominence within the African American community.
Brother originally found use primarily in the African American church (Smitherman 2000), where it signaled a religiously grounded respect and metaphoric kinship among congregation members who are united in their faith in a brighter future. Its use became widespread during the post–civil rights era and awakening of ethnic pride (Major 1994; Smitherman 2000). The newer, forward-looking self-perception of African Americans may have resulted in development of meanings for brother that emphasized acknowledgment of the dignity and sovereignty of African Americans as they looked to their collective future.
Opprobrious Use of Nigga
The core social meaning of nigga may also be overlaid with an attitude of disapproval or censure, where a speaker assumes the attitudinal stance of judge. Using the term in this way performs the illocutionary function of serving notice that another African American, as writers observe (Kennedy 2002; Asim 2007), has behaved in a way that does not conform to the norms or expectations of the African American community.
Historicity may support the emergence of new meanings, but it may also be a force that constrains by restricting or impeding the shedding of old meanings and associations. Because of the negative semiotic power stemming from the racist strand of the social history that the original word carries, current-day uses of nigga may be accompanied and subtly colored by an unspoken subtext derived from uses of the term as a racist dysphemism. This opprobrious use of the term appears related to a coloring of the core social meaning associated with nigga by a weakening of the racially insulting meaning that developed in the nineteenth century.
While the racist use of nigger criticizes a presumed innate moral and intellectual inferiority of African Americans, the meaning under discussion is a biting criticism from within the African American community that suggests that a behavior of the referent lends support to racist claims of inferiority. The expression that someone is “acting like a nigga” is similar to “acting a fool” (Morgan 2002:41-42), with the added dimension that it appears to sarcastically reference the racially insulting form nigger, that is, someone is behaving in an “uncool” manner that gives credence to the racist concept of nigger.
Below are some instances where comedians take the stance of judge, using nigga to censure or express disapproval.
(19) Sheryl Underwood, referring to the African American ancestry of Tiger Woods, who labels himself “Cablanasian”: We know that nigga black cause we done seen your daddy.
(20) Pryor, speaking to the corpse of a thug, as it lies in a coffin: Didn’t think you was ever gon die, did you, nigga?
(21) Eddie Griffin, criticizing hypocrites who attend church only on Easter: You know they ain’t been there, ’cause they the niggas be extra nice.
(22) A. J. Johnson, criticizing the perceived mismanagement of the career of the former rapper MC Hammer: He was so broke, the nigga’s name was hmm.
It is not uncommon for members of a group to jokingly hurl slurs at one another, as when one Italian calls another “ginny” (Allen 1983). But outside the comedic venue that naturally frames the utterances above, the censuring use of nigga is a serious criticism of the hardheadedness and lack of good judgment of the referent.
Hip-Hop Meaning
The core meaning of nigga can provide a foundation for the expression of a proactive and independent attitude founded in hip-hop identity. Hip-hop identity itself grows out of the culture of survival of the diaspora experience. Here, the core social meaning underlies projection of an identity that directly and overtly rejects racist uses of nigger while declaring self-pride and independence. As this article shows, positive uses of nigga within the African American community do not constitute a new phenomenon. But in a pragmatic instance of appropriation and reanalysis of racist meanings, young African Americans took ownership of the racist form of nigger, turning it to their own use as the nigga form. The online OED describes a resurgence of use of nigga at the end of the twentieth century. African Americans were using the term before this time, but as the sixty-four-year-old interviewee points out, its use intensified among young people in the last decades of the twentieth century.
The hip-hop comedians have been involved in a movement to erase negative associations of the word, turning it on its head by presenting an enhanced version of the African American meaning that emphasizes a self-empowered and self-determined African American identity. Context and familiarity with hip-hop music allow younger audiences to recognize the new meanings that the comedians are conveying. In a statement that connects the term nigga with hip-hop comedians, the thirty-two-year-old male interviewee offers the following.
(23) The hip-hop use of nigga represents a growing consciousness of African Americans as subjects rather than objects. “I’m my own person.” In the past, African Americans have seen themselves in relation to Master Reynolds.
The identity that the hip-hop comedians project through use of nigga is an effect of exercising agency in exploiting the meaning potential that inheres in the tradition where African Americans see themselves as resourceful, pragmatic survivors (Rahman 2004, 2007). But going beyond the coolness that is a factor in survival identity, the identity that the comedians project emphasizes “having game” or possessing “a style of carrying and expressing oneself that enables one to achieve a desired end” (Smitherman 2000:141). Having game involves possessing knowledge and skills that can be pragmatically and assertively applied to create favorable conditions and to bring any adverse situation to a positive and advantageous conclusion. Freeze Love, who describes himself as a “no limit nigga,” states,
(24) When I say ‘nigga,’ I’m talkin’ about having game.
To illustrate the survivorship that characterizes “having game,” he describes a hypothetical case where lights go out in the auditorium where he is performing. Love alludes to the resourcefulness of niggas, who have game:
(25) All of us niggas will make it out of here safe and sound. We niggas.
Distribution by Speaker
As noted, interviewees agree that African Americans of all ages may enjoy the work of the comedians in this research, but the categories of comedians overall have special appeal to particular age groups. One of the goals in the research was to determine whether there is a relationship between categories of comedians and use of the term. Table 5 shows results of a VARBRUL regression analysis, where factor group 1 shows the relationship between categories of comedians and use of the term.
Results of VARBRUL Analysis of Use of Nigga in Comedic Data
N = 362; input probability = .823.
The VARBRUL analysis gives hip-hop comedians a weight of .623, second to that of Pryor. The hip-hop comedians have been aligned with hip-hop artists in their appropriation and resignification of the racist strand of meaning that has had use among whites. This bears similarity to a strategy that scholars such as Butler (1997) advocate for gays and other groups that are targets of slurs. Butler (1997:38) argues that “there is no purifying language of its traumatic residue and no way to work through trauma except through the arduous effort it takes to direct the course of its repetition.” She claims further that “insurrectionary speech becomes the necessary response to injurious language” (Butler 1997:163).
Groups victimized by slurs seeking to enhance group identity may employ satiation strategies (Kounios, Kotz, & Holcomb 2000; Lewis & Ellis 2000), using a term intensively in an attempt to desensitize members to the sting of the term. The hip-hop artist Ice Cube (2006, qtd. in Hilburn 2004) states, “The more you use a word, the more it takes the sting out of what the word really means to the rest of the world. It defuses it.”
Despite opposition from sectors of the African American community, hip-hop comedians have used the term prodigiously, employing a number of heuristic strategies meant to enhance group self-esteem. For example, Eddie Griffin tells his audience,
(26) Be proud to be a nigga. Don’t forget. Be a nigga to the heart.
The hip-hop artist Talib Kweli (qtd. in Echegoyen 2006) makes this statement: “Our community has been using the word and trying to redefine the context of it for a long time. And a lot of people make the argument that it’s destructive. And it is—in a lot of ways. But the fact of the matter is that there’s a large segment of black people who grew up hearing the word intended as nothing but love.”
A statement by the thirty-seven-year-old interviewee supports the belief that at least some younger people see the term differently from older people. They are aware of the historic use of the term as a racist insult but are not focused on it:
(27) “You see, the people who say they’re offended are the older adults. Young kids don’t understand what the big deal is about the word. They know it’s about black people and slavery, but they’re like ‘that’s over.’”
With a weight of .835, Pryor constitutes the category with the greatest probability of using the term. As noted, Pryor used nigga extensively in the earlier years of his career, which came at the end of the Black Power movement. Aside from using the term in its core sense, he also employed it to express solidarity and disapproval. The proactive, in-your-face meaning of hip-hop represents a new mode that parallels social developments in the African American community; it was not available when Pryor created his work. Other group terms were available, but Pryor apparently considered nigga to be the term most appropriate for giving an authentic portrayal of survival among underprivileged African Americans.
With a weight of .129, VARBRUL analysis shows that comedians of category A are unlikely to use the term. While these comedians are actively involved in exposing the injustices and ideological incongruities of the establishment, they also present a pragmatic approach that attempts to achieve socioeconomic success within the society they find. Favoring ethnic terms with less connection with the past than nigga is consistent with their focus on portraying African Americans as accepting the challenge of forging ahead and negotiating the mainstream.
Factor group 2 shows the likelihood that men, women, or mixed-gender groups will be addressees or referents, where nigga is concerned. With a weight of .633, the one factor favoring implementation of the feature is addressing or referencing a single male, though the data show that addressing or referencing a group of men or a mixed-gender group is possible. Significant here is the absence of female as a category. Women were included in first runs of VARBRUL but were excluded because of knockouts. The comedians never use nigga to address or refer to women, except as members of a mixed-gender group. This is consistent with real practices in the African American community (Spears 1998; Smitherman 2000).
The data include the work of female comedians who, like the men, often use ethnically colored terms as a solidarity-building strategy. But the numbers reveal the women use nigga at a lower frequency than do male comedians; women use the term at a relative frequency of 57 percent, while men employ it at a frequency of 73 percent. In the real world, African American men use the term far more frequently than women (Spears 1998; Smitherman 2000).
As an expression of survival identity, the term is associated with males. A male interviewee refers to nigga as a “guy thing.” A female interviewee says that it “sounds tough.” Edwards (1990, 1996), in his Detroit research that finds absence of final /r/ frequent among working-class African American men, proposes that /r/ absence or vocalization is a symbol of working-class male identity in the African American community. If this is so, then the indexical value of the phonological variant contributes to the meaning of the lexical form as a symbol of male survival in the African American diaspora.
Conclusion
Linguists have described AAE as a primary symbol of African American social identity (Baugh 1983, 1999; Rickford 1998; Rickford & Rickford 2000; Smitherman 2000; Rahman 2007). But despite understanding of the significance of AAE to the identity of African Americans, it is not clear what that identity consists of or how AAE gives expression to facets of it.
Preachers and writers have frequently commented on the resilience, spirit, and pragmatic awareness that have allowed African Americans to survive (Rahman 2007). The present discussion points to the term “soul” as representing a key aspect of African American identity that is related to survival. Smitherman (2000:266) describes soul as “derived from struggle, suffering, and having participated in the Black Experience. Having risen above the suffering, the person gains soul.” Many African Americans see soul as an African American attribute (Rickford & Rickford 2000; Smitherman 2000; Rahman 2007). According to Rickford and Rickford (2000:76) most African Americans “will acknowledge their own conventionally soulful characteristics” and “most would bristle if anyone dared to dismiss as primitive the notional attribute of soul itself or suggest that it didn’t even actually exist.”
The term nigga stands as representative of possessing traits associated with an identity that has evolved from participation in the struggle that has produced soul. Because of its continuity in the African American community, nigga points to the historic experience of African Americans. In the words of Major (1994:84), use of nigga represents a “tragicomic sensibility that is aware, on some level, of the emotional history of the race.” Knowledge of the struggle that they have experienced has given African Americans a belief in their ability and will to overcome adversity. This belief is at the center of an African America identity where, as Rahman (2007:65) observes, African Americans see themselves as “humanly and culturally rich survivors.” Nigga is a feature of AAE that, for some African Americans, is particularly salient for foregrounding an aspect of identity that casts the speaker, addressee, or referent as a pragmatic and resourceful survivor in the diaspora. For some African Americans, this meaning overall counters the negative meanings that have historically existed outside the community. Observing this connection is what led the white comedian George Carlin to comment that “slavery is what makes that word electric” (qtd. in Echegoyen 2006).
The ethnonyms and other ethnic terms that appear in this work are just a few selections from the field of such terms available in AAE. While terms of self-reference among African Americans have gone in and out of fashion, nigga has endured in the community for centuries. This is despite objections of community members who see the term as an expression of an identity grounded in self-hate (Kennedy 2002; Asim 2007). Nigga stands out because it points to an aspect of identity that is not foregrounded in societally sanctioned ethnonyms such as African American and black, or even community terms such as brother, sister, or dog. These terms are fairly recent additions to the lexicon of AAE and do not have the historicity of nigga. Thus, more than any other ethnic term, nigga represents an aspect of identity in which African Americans see themselves as survivors.
Another reason for the continued use of nigga is its genuine versatility as a linguistic resource. The multifaceted indexical power of the term allows comedians and others to use it to represent several attitudinal stances beyond those represented in the current data. For example, according to the thirty-seven-year-old female interviewee, despite the fact that males generally use the term, there is a romantic meaning where a woman may refer to a boyfriend or spouse as “my nigga.” This is consistent with observations of writers (Kennedy 2002; Smitherman 2000).
Comedians in the three categories are highly successful performers who use nigga in various ways that help to project an identity that connects them with audiences of different age groups. Pryor and the hip-hop comedians employ the term profusely, suggesting that their audiences accept this usage. Comedians in category A use the term rarely, selecting instead terms such as black people and brother. Their choice of relatively neutral and uncontroversial contemporary ethnonyms is consistent with the viewpoint of the comedians in this group; while attacking hypocrisies of the system, the comedians still express a view that looks to a future within the establishment.
Strategies comedians employ may acknowledge general attitudes among age groups, but African Americans of different ages are not monolithic in their stated views regarding nigga. For example, while Pryor ultimately rejected nigga, there are older African Americans who are untroubled by the term. The sixty-six-year-old interviewee, who listened to Pryor when he was young, approves of its appropriation and resignification by young people.
(28) The young people did a good thing. They’ve flipped the word. So now, you can’t hurt them with that. And if a white person called someone a nigga, I think other white people would look at him. . . . I’ve been using it more. But it’s usually in jest. I’ll say, “What’s happening, my nigga?” It still has shock value cause I’m not a charter member of the hip-hop generation. I’m a square. I come from the generation where it was considered ignorant. Me using the word is almost like me coming to rehearsal with my pants sagging.
On the other hand, John Sally, a thirtyish professional athlete said, “I learned a long time ago, the word didn’t give me any strength. One, they can say it’s a word of endearment, but I’m not endeared by that word. Call me ‘brother.’ Call me ‘John.’ If you don’t want to call me ‘John,’ call me ‘Mister’” (Sally 2006, qtd. in Echegoyen 2006).
Metapragmatic awareness of the social meanings that attach to linguistic resources that are available to them allows members of a social group to exercise a degree of agency in evaluating these resources and making determinations as to when and whether to use or accept them (Preston 1996; Niedzielski & Preston 2003; Coupland 2001, 2007). The different attitudes that African Americans express toward nigga stem from the conflicted messages that the term is capable of conveying because of the negative aspect of its history. A focus on this negative part of history is what fuels the movement to ban use of variants of nigger.
But as writers point out, efforts to formally ban words are rarely, if ever, successful (Butler 1997; Kennedy 2002; Allan & Burridge 2006). Allan and Burridge (2006:238) express the view that “[c]ensorship is futile . . . it is probably only ever effective when it coincides with what individuals would choose to censor for themselves.” Speakers continue to use nigga because, as this article has shown, it represents a concept that is foundational in the identity of African Americans. Findings in this research suggest that rather than being negative, the core meaning represented by nigga has the capacity to enhance the self-concept of African Americans.
The value of nigga as an expression of survivor identity is sometimes covert: scholars have noted that even where speakers state disapproval of the term, they are likely to use it in private conversations, foregrounding an aspect of identity that may lie latent in their more public representations of self. According to Spears (1998:239), “[T]he great majority of African Americans, male and female, use N when among other African Americans, and do so regardless of their attitudes about N-use. In other words, some may be against N-use, but use it nevertheless.”
Words disappear from a lexicon when they have outlived their usefulness. But over time, nigga has proven productive in its capacity to yield new meanings. It has not disappeared from the lexicon of AAE because at least some African Americans have believed it serves a useful purpose in expressing a primary aspect of their consciousness and identity as African Americans.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the American Association of University Women for providing the dissertation fellowship that led to early work in this area. As well, I would like to thank Ray Jones and the two anonymous reviewers for their insightful and constructive comments that led to completion of this article.
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.