Nigger: The Strange Career Of A Troublesome Word (16 page)

Matsuda, however, minimizes the reality of cultural conflict within groups. As we have seen, for example, blacks differ
sharply over the use of
nigger.
Some condemn it absolutely, unequivocally, across the board, no matter who is voicing the hated N-word and no matter what the setting. This has long been so. Writing in
1940
, Langston Hughes remarked:

Hughes overgeneralized.
All
Negroes do not react to
nigger
in the way he described. Hughes himself did not; he applauded his friend Carl Van Vechten's novel
Nigger Heaven.
He was also certainly aware that blacks used “nigger” freely when outside the presence of whites.
⁷⁸
Hughes was correct, though, in suggesting that some blacks—then as now—detest
nigger
so thoroughly that they eschew efforts to distinguish between good and bad usages of the term and instead condemn it out of hand. “Everyone should refrain from [using the N-word] and provide negative sanctions on its use by others,” black-studies professor Halford H. Fairchild has argued. What about blacks’ using the term ironically, as a term of affection? “The persistent viability of the N-word in the black community,” Fairchild writes, “is a scar from centuries of cultural racism.”
⁷⁹
Voicing
the same message, Ron Nelson, an editor of the University of North Carolina newspaper, notes that while “most blacks… understand the implications and racist history of the word
nigger
, it has somehow dangerously and disturbingly found its way into everyday language.” Castigating blacks’ playful use of the N-word as “self-defeating,” “hypocritical,” and “absurd,” Nelson asserts that its usage “creates an atmosphere of acceptance [in which whites wonder,] After all, if blacks themselves do it, why can't others[?]”
⁸⁰
The Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist E. R. Shipp is of the same opinion. In an article revealingly entitled “N-Word Just as Vile When Uttered by Blacks,” Shipp declared that “there needs to be no confusion.…The N-word has no place in contemporary life or language.”
⁸¹

Bill Cosby is another who attacks blacks’ use of
nigger.
Addressing African American comedians, Cosby has argued that when
nigger
pops out of their mouths as entertainment, all blacks are hurt. He fears that white onlookers will have negative impressions of African Americans reinforced when blacks laughingly bandy about the N-word. He fears that many whites largely ignorant of black America will be all too literal-minded and will fail to understand the joke. Notwithstanding Cosby's criticisms and pleas, many black comedians have continued to give
nigger
a prominent place in their acts. Several of them were mainstays of
Def Comedy Jam
, a popular show that appeared on the Home Box Office cable-television network in the
1990
s. Taking aim at
Def Comedy Jam
, Cosby likened it to an updated
Amos 'n’ Andy:
“When you watch
[Def Comedy Jam]
, you hear a statement or a joke and it says ‘niggers.’ And sometimes they say ‘we niggers.’ And we are laughing [at it], just as we
laughed at
Amos 'n'Andy
in the fifties. But we don't realize that there are people watching who know nothing about us. This is the only picture they have of us other than our mothers going to work in their homes and pushing their children in the carriages and dusting their houses.… And they say, ‘Yeah, that's them. Just like we thought.’ ”
⁸²

Cosby's reference to
Amos 'n’ Andy
was intended to damn
Def Comedy Jam
by associating it with a program that some blacks regard as a terrible affront to African Americans.
⁸³
Amos 'n’ Andy
began as a radio show in
1928
. It was written and dramatized by two white men with roots in minstrelsy who animated the misadventures of a group of blacks living and working in Harlem. Episodes of the show focused on marital woes and infidelities, inept efforts to realize professional or entrepreneurial ambitions, and petty bickering within a semi-secret fraternal order named the Mystic Knights of the Sea. Among the show's personalities were Andy (an amiable dunce), the Kingfish (a schemer who constantly bilked stupid Andy), Amos (an earnest taxicab driver), Algonquin J. Calhoun (an inept and unethical attorney), Sapphire (Andy's angry, contemptuous, shrewish wife), and Lightnin’ (a slow, easily befuddled housepainter).

Amos 'n’ Andy
was one of the most successful programs in the history of radio. It inspired a comic strip, a candy bar, greeting cards, phonograph records, and a film. It coined phrases—for example, “holy mackerel”—that have become embedded in colloquial speech, and touched hundreds of thousands of Americans in all manner of surprising ways. Owners of restaurants, hotels, and movie theaters piped the
show into their establishments for fear that if they didn't, customers would leave in droves to hear the latest installment. Eleanor Roosevelt was a fan, as was Huey P. Long, the flamboyant, demagogic governor of Louisiana, who nicknamed himself Kingfish under the show's influence.

In
1951
, when
Amos 'n Andy
moved to television, an all-black cast (the first on network TV) superseded the white men who had previously supplied the voices of the black characters. Although the show lasted only two seasons, syndicated reruns would be aired on local television stations until the mid-
1960
s.

Amos 'n’ Andy's
harshest critics denounced it as “the ultimate metaphor of whites’ casual contempt for blacks.”
⁸⁴
W. J. Walls, a bishop in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, contended in
1929
that the radio program degraded blacks by presenting African American characters with “crude, repetitional, moronic mannerisms” who spoke “gibbberish.” Bishop Walls stated that there did exist “unlettered and mentally imbecilic” Negroes. But
Amos 'n Andy
, in his view, focused unduly on that “rapidly decreasing” portion of the African American population, thereby allowing “the crude deeds of unfortunates to be paraded as the order and pattern of a whole people.” Responding to defenders who pointed out that the word
nigger
was never heard on the show, the bishop suggested that blacks needed to cease being satisfied with merely the absence of the worst racial derogation.
⁸⁵

Robert L. Vann, the editor of the
Pittsburgh Courier
, also attacked
Amos 'n’ Andy.
In
1931
he launched a drive to obtain one million signatures on a petition demanding that the
Federal Radio Commission ban the program. The petition complained that “two white men… have been exploiting certain types of American Negro for purely commercial gain” and that their representations “are of such character as to prove detrimental to the self-respect and general advancement of the Negro.” More specifically, “Negro womanhood has been broadcast to the world as indulging in bigamy, lawyers as schemers and crooks and Negro Secret Orders as organizations where money is filched from… members by dishonest methods, thereby placing all these activities among Negroes in a most harmful and degrading light.”
⁸⁶
According to the
Courier
,
740
,
000
people eventually signed the petition.

A third important critic of
Amos 'nAndy
was the NAACP. When the program switched over to television in
1951
, the country's foremost guardian of black advancement vigorously objected. Until that point the organization had refrained from criticism, but according to the NAACP leadership, “The visual impact [of the television show makes it] infinitely worse than the radio version.” Anticipating Bill Cosby's annoyance with
Def Comedy Jam
, NAACP officials asserted that
Amos 'n Andy “say[s]
to millions of white Americans who know nothing about Negroes… that this is the way Negroes are.”
⁸⁷

A thorough assessment of such critiques requires an acknowledgment of the plurality of tastes, aspirations, interests, and perspectives within African American communities.
⁸⁸
While an appreciable number of blacks repudiated
Amos 'n’ Andy
, many others enjoyed it, a fact memorialized in letters, newspaper accounts, and the racial demographics of the show's audience. Black support, moreover, extended beyond
the ranks of ordinary folk, finding a foothold in institutions and among cadres of intellectuals and activists. Thus, even as the
Pittsburgh Courier
was railing against the white authors of
Amos 'n’ Andy
, the Chicago
Defender
, the nation's leading black weekly newspaper, was designating them honored guests at a parade and picnic on that city's South Side. In
1930
, a young black journalist who would eventually head the NAACP defended
Amos 'n Andy
and criticized its critics. According to Roy Wilkins, black opponents of the show should stop “sniffing about with [their] heads in the clouds,” put aside “false pride,” and start producing some humor of their own that would earn a share of the hundreds of thousands of dollars that the white producers of
Amos 'n Andy
were making. Wilkins saw nothing wrong with the portraiture generated by
Amos 'n Andy.
How would critics wish to have the show's characters presented? he asked. “In plug hats, with morning coat, striped trousers, glassined hair, spats, patent leather shoes, and an Oxford accent? Instead of having them struggling with the immediate and universal problem of how to get and keep a decent and usable spare tire for the taxicab, would [the critics] have them prating about mergers, mortgages, international loans and foreign trade balances?” Praising its “universal appeal,” Wilkins concluded that
Amos 'n'Andy
was “clean fun from beginning to end,” with “all the pathos, humor, vanity, glory, problems and solutions that beset ordinary mortals.”
⁸⁹

Wilkins's perspective was by no means idiosyncratic. A prominent black attorney in Worcester, Massachusetts, declared that he could discern no good objection to
Amos 'n
Andy;
he found the show truly funny and dismissed the racial critique of the series as nothing more than the whining of blacks who were “thin-skinned” and “supersensitive.”
⁹⁰
Interpreting the show completely differently than its detractors, a black fan in Chicago maintained that
Amos 'n’ Andy
showed that “the Negro race has and does… produce people who are worthwhile.”
⁹¹
Theophilus Lewis, an acerbic black columnist for the
Amsterdam News
, suggested that the
Courier's
petition campaign against the program would serve one good end: “When they complete their tally of signatures we will know precisely how many half-wits there are in the race.”
⁹²

In the
1950
s, when debate shifted to the fate of
Amos 'n Andy
on television, black opinion remained divided, though its opponents had gained considerable ground. As head of the NAACP, Roy Wilkins switched sides and called for the show to be taken off the air. In adopting that position he was supported by, among others, Thurgood Marshall (who would later, as we have seen, become the first black Supreme Court justice) and William Hastie (who would be the first black to sit on a federal court of appeals). Nevertheless, as Bill Cosby recognized, many blacks continued to support the show. In an ad hoc “man in the street” survey conducted by the black
Journal and Guide
newspaper in Norfolk, Virginia, a large majority of blacks voiced approval of
Amos 'n’ Andy.
A poll taken by an opinion-research firm hired by an advertiser found the same result: among
365
black adults contacted in New York and New Jersey,
70
percent expressed a favorable view of the program.
⁹³

Today's conflicts over
nigger
replicate yesterday's conflicts over
Amos 'nAndy.
Among the supporters of that show were black entertainers who stood to make money and gain visibility by participating in its production. Among the supporters of
Def Comedy Jam
and other, similar programs of our own day are black performers hungry for a break; to them, Bill Cosby's militant aversion to the N-word as entertainment is an indulgence that they themselves are hardly in a position to afford. Black critics of the campaign against
Amos 'n’ Andy
charged that the show's detractors were excessively concerned about white people's perceptions. Today a similar charge is leveled. Some entertainers who openly use
nigger
reject Cosby's politics of respectability, which counsels African Americans to mind their manners and mouths in the presence of whites. This group of performers doubts the efficacy of seeking to burnish the image of African Americans in the eyes of white folk. Some think that the racial perceptions of most whites are beyond changing; others believe that whatever marginal benefits a politics of respectability may yield are not worth the psychic cost of giving up or diluting cultural rituals that blacks enjoy. This latter attitude is effectively expressed by the remark “I don't give a fuck.” These entertainers don't care whether whites find
nigger
upsetting. They don't care whether whites are confused by blacks’ use of the term. And they don't care whether whites who hear blacks using the N-word think that African Americans lack self-respect. The black comedians and rappers who use and enjoy
nigger
care principally, perhaps exclusively, about what they
themselves
think, desire, and enjoy—which is part of their allure. Many people (including
me) are drawn to these performers despite their many faults because, among other things, they exhibit a bracing independence. They eschew boring conventions, including the one that maintains, despite massive evidence to the contrary, that
nigger
can mean only one thing.