For `My Niggaz'

Recently an old friend and I were discussing the Oscar prospects for Quentin Tarentino's most recent film, "Jackie Brown," when the subject of the "n"-word came up.

"Have you ever been called a nigger?" he asked me.

"Yeah, once," I said.

I proceeded to tell him about the 13-year-old girl I met this past summer while working at the city pool as a life-guard. One day, after repeated requests that she and a group of boys refrain from making out in the pool, I threatened to have her sent home and banned from coming back for the rest of the summer. She blew up, shouting that she was "tired of niggers telling her what to do," and that she didn't have to listen to a mix-blooded person like me because, "you look like a mutt anyway."

My gut instinct was to jump down from my guard chair and pop her across the face, but I knew that doing so would just get me fired. Besides that, and more importantly, it would have gone against what I believe is right. Instead, I had her removed from the pool and sent home. My boss wouldn't let me put her on the "do not allow back in" list, but asked me to write up a report on her, to add to the several others that were already on file.

"What I don't understand is why something like that would bother you, why that would make you upset. She was just a 13-year-old white girl whose life is probably going nowhere." "I mean," he elaborated, "it's like if I went up to Michael Jordan and told him he was an asshole who couldn't play ball. He'd just laugh in my face. If you know you aren't a nigger, why would you care if some little punk called you one."

"It's not that simple." I told him, "The word 'nigger', coming from a white person, just has more power that that...."

"It has whatever power you give it," he said cutting me off.

At first, I was stumped. How could I explain the intense anger and frustration I felt the moment that word slipped from that child's mouth? It isn't just like any other insult. It is not something that can be ignored or brushed off, no matter how much of a "better" person you are than the person using it. But as I thought about it, I realized that it isn't the word itself that inflamed me, it was the history behind it and the social context within which it was used.

Despite the fact that she was much younger than I am and that she was much less educated than I am, when that girl called me a nigger, she assumed a role much larger than herself. She wasn't a person insulting me, but a body in white skin, whose lack of pigment represented the domination of one race over my own.

I remember the thought that began to run through my mind when as I wrestled with the impulse to physically hurt her: it was the shock that all the people who were crowded into that city pool heard this young, white girl call me a nigger. It was a feeling I can only liken to shame. In as much as I can't control the legacy of the white supremacy that girl's skin color allowed her to claim, I couldn't control my initial reaction to her slur. As Toni Morrison writes in Beloved, "The definitions belong to the definers and not the defined."

That's one of the reasons why Tarentino could get away with using the "n"-word 80-plus times in "Jackie Brown," because it was always uttered by a black man. Is this some kind of a double standard? Not really. Black people can "get away" with calling each other niggers because no matter how high up on the social ladder a black person can get, he can never be high enough to be white. In a very real sense, he will never be any better than the person he calls a nigger.

Within the circle of the black community, then, the word inherently changes meaning. It is a word which actually puts everyone on a level playing field: a "niggah" becomes a man, or a person, just like any other. In fact, the expression of exasperation, "Niggah, please," can be translated as, "Man, please." The word can even have positive connotations, reference to friends as, "my niggaz," for example, is often reserved for those whom you are closest to, the people who are loyal to you and to whom you are loyal in return.

I take this as a sign of resistance against white supremacy at least as much as it is a sign of the internalization of it. It is proof after all, that even if it's only for themselves, the defined can take charge of the definitions. And this may very well be a step in changing the definitions for everyone.

Carine M. Williams '00 is an Afro-American studies and social anthropology concentrator in Leverett House. Her column appears on alternate Wednesdays.