“Negus (ንጉሥ) is an ancient Ethiopian title meaning ‘king’ or ‘ruler,’ rooted in the Ge'ez language. The word ‘nigger’ has a separate linguistic origin, tracing through European languages to the Latin niger, meaning ‘black,’ before becoming a racial slur. One was a title of sovereignty and authority; the other became a weapon of racial degradation. They are not the same word, nor do they share the same history.”
Who is stopping them, and who is stopping us?
It’s the first day of November and the mid-term elections are upon us and is quite unfortunate that I have to go back to the ugly word nigger. Nigga. Niggah. Nigger. Angela Rye recently hosted a conversation on Cite Your Source, the spinoff connected to the Native Land Pod, and she sat down with six or seven supposedly American Black intellectuals, among them Charlamagne tha fake god, Michael Eric Dyson, Delano Squires, Derrick Johnson, Elizabeth Pryor, Jordan Pierre, and the linguist Hiram Smith. Together they revisited the question this country has been chewing on for decades: should white people be able to use the word nigger? My first thought was simple. In this here old free United States of America, who exactly is stopping them?
I had to laugh out loud when I heard Elizabeth Pryor, the only woman on the panel besides Angela Rye, talk about the word. She walked through the history: how our people tried to assert ourselves through respectability, through moral persuasion, through the way we dressed, acted, and behaved, all to establish our citizenship, and how the word later became an instrument of subversion and satire. Then she said of the word itself, "I don't want to use it, I've never used it, it is dry in my mouth." Elizabeth Pryor is Richard Pryor's daughter. Her father put that word on the covers of his comedy albums and built a career saying it on stage. According to Elizabeth, he walked away from it after an eventful trip to Kenya. She has written a whole book this year, Something We Said, about the word and the father who made it his trademark, and by her own account she grew up surrounded by it. I do not know whether what she said on that panel is true or false. I honestly don't. But it did not resonate as truth to me, because somehow, some way, most of us have used that word at some point in our lives. To deny it completely, and to tell the world the word is dry in your mouth, is the most self-righteous form of denial I have ever had to contend with.
So let me be honest about myself. I have said this before. I don't believe I use the word on a daily basis, and I don't think I have ever used it a whole lot to refer to anything. But I have used it, and I have used it both ways. I don't know that I have ever sat down and said to anybody, "That's my nigger." But I know I have called somebody a nigger. When I think about the ignorance of some Democrats in our community, I know I have called them dumb niggers in my head, and maybe sometimes even out of my mouth. I am not going to sit here and pretend that I haven't.
Who Is Stopping Them?
When I hear a white man like Nick Fuentes, or any other white person, use that word, it lands differently. Yes, it is highly offensive to me. It is visceral, because their use of that word has always been aimed at disparaging our entire community. I hear the auction block in it. I hear the lynching postcard in it. I hear a whole people being told what they are worth.
And still, this is America. We have a First Amendment right to speak our minds and to speak about anything we want to speak about. A white person can say the word today, and white people have always been able to say it. Freedom of speech has never meant freedom from the response of the people who hear you. So when a panel of intellectuals sits down to debate whether white people should be "allowed," I want to know who they think hands out the permission slips. Nobody is stopping them. The only question that matters is what we do and say in return, and whether we are honest about our own mouths while we are doing it.
When I have used the word, I was never describing our entire community, because that is not how I see us. I was describing a specific sect of individuals within our community whose ignorance is so unmistakably severe that, in my mind, there was no other word to describe it. And I think that is the uncomfortable conversation we should be having. We keep debating who has permission to say a word when we should be asking why the word still lives so comfortably in our language, and what is happening in our communities that keeps it on the tip of our tongues.
Wasted Air
Think about who was sitting at that table. Derrick Johnson runs the NAACP. Charlamagne speaks to millions of listeners every morning. Michael Eric Dyson has spent a career in lecture halls and on national television. Angela Rye has worked the halls of Congress. Between them, they have the microphones, the money, and the phone numbers of members of Congress, governors, mayors, and corporate executives. They could have used that hour to talk about what actually matters to the American Black community: prison reform, education reform, resources for our small businesses, and the things that would improve our neighborhoods. They could have laid out what ideas are out there, which solutions should exist, and how our leaders can make tangible change. Instead, they came together to discuss the word nigger. The episode's own description even asks whether the fight over the word is taking up space that could go toward bigger issues. They asked the right question, and then they spent the hour on the word anyway, without a single concrete proposal for our schools, our men coming home, or our businesses.
Imagine that hour spent another way. How many American Black men are coming home from prison this year, and how many of them will have a job waiting? Which school districts have actually raised reading scores for our children, and what did they do differently? Where does an American Black small business owner go for capital, contracts, and training, and why is it still so hard to find? Who holds the authority in our cities, and what have they done with it? That conversation would have demanded plans, numbers, and accountability. A debate about a word demands nothing but opinions. It is easier. It sounds important. And when it ends, nothing has changed for one child in South Philly or one man walking out of a cell.
That is what is important to them: a word. Action never made the agenda. All that time and energy went into trying to gatekeep a word, and the wasted air was downright ignorant. When the people with the biggest platforms in our community spend them that way, they teach the rest of us that talking about our pain counts as doing something about it. It doesn't. Our children cannot read a debate into literacy, and our men cannot eat a conversation about who gets to say what.
The Cities We Came Out Of
Many of us in the older generation came out of the blue cities. New Brunswick, Philadelphia, Chicago, Detroit. Something happened in those places at the end of the 1960s, after Martin Luther King and the leaders of that era were gone. I believe the American Black community found itself without a leader to sustain us or to stand up for us, and in that vacuum we began to adopt and fall for certain policies and certain ideas. Our communities were packed tighter and tighter. Drugs infiltrated our neighborhoods in the 1970s and 1980s. And as we watched it happen, we learned to cry racism, cry oppression, cry degradation. Racism and oppression are real parts of this country's history. But somewhere along the way the crying became the whole response, and the demand for accountability got quieter.
Look at those cities today. Look at the educational systems where children still cannot read. Go to a doctor in one of those cities and then go to one just outside of it in the suburbs, and compare the conditions of the facilities. When I lived in Philadelphia, I would drive out of the city just to go to the doctor. I would rather drive to the suburbs than go to certain places in Philadelphia. In time I discovered that there are two hospitals in Philadelphia that are superior, three if you count Children's, and they can stand next to anything outside the city. I guarantee you that is because of the funding and resources those hospitals receive. But go out to their smaller satellite facilities in the neighborhoods, and the conditions are far inferior. That is what I lived. Nobody had to explain it to me.
So here is what I mean when I say dumb Democrat niggas. I mean people who continuously vote for a party that keeps them packed in these same neighborhoods, aligned and so far away from the reality of their own conditions, away from any improvement within our own communities, and who go right back and vote the same way again. They vote for things that do not align with their own needs and their own desires, with better school systems for their own children. In my humble opinion, that kind of loyalty speaks to an ignorance I struggle to put into polite words.
The Magnet and the Neighborhood
We should not have to go to a suburb to find a better school, especially when American Blacks have been leading the school systems in our own communities for decades. Philadelphia has had Black superintendents since Dr. Constance Clayton took that office in 1982. And Philadelphia is a perfect example of what I am talking about. No one wants to send their children to certain neighborhood schools, the South Philly schools among them. So families work to get their children out and into what the city calls magnet schools, because the magnet schools are better than the local schools. That was the way it was when my sons were growing up, and from what I can see, not much has changed.
I do not fault a single parent who fights to get a child into a better school. That parent is doing exactly what a parent is supposed to do. But look at what we have settled for as a community. Instead of demanding that the local schools improve, and instead of voting for policies and people who would make every neighborhood school a place we would want our children to attend, we settled for the magnet process. We learned to pursue individual escape instead of collective improvement. And in doing that, we left behind almost an entire generation of children: the child whose parents did not know how to work the application, the child who did not meet the admission criteria, the child who simply attended the school assigned to the block where he lives. Why should that child's education be inferior? And why aren't we demanding that the schools serving that child receive the same attention, the same resources, the same leadership, and the same accountability?
The Ghost in the White Robe
There is something else I find, both in this episode about the word and in left-leaning politics generally. There is an abstract figure that serves as the demon in every story. White nationalists. White prejudice. White supremacy. It is as if there is a boogeyman who wears a white robe at all times. And the thing about it is that in the minds of the people who conjure him, that white robe only ever drapes over white Republicans. They never see it draped over white Democrats. They have created a monster out of a false narrative, and they keep feeding it.
Now go back and look at the school systems in these Black-packed districts. Look at who sits on the boards, who runs the districts, who holds the city council seats and the mayor's office. Take Philadelphia. The mayor appoints the school board, and today both the mayor and the superintendent are Black, and the district has had Black superintendents for most of the last four decades. And yet the Black officials in office are never treated as the issue. The white ghost created by people who want to keep the status quo gets blamed for the conditions in our neighborhoods, our school systems, and our health care systems, while the people who actually hold the keys walk right past the questions. I am not erasing the fact that racism still exists. It does. But we keep building monsters and refusing to look at our own behavior, our own leaders, and our own votes. Even this whole debate about whether a white person can say nigger is a distraction. What is the point? What is the point?
Five Jobs, Not One
And I am not excusing white people either. I am talking specifically about white Democrats, and about the arrangements that serve them. I was listening recently to a discussion about corporations like Tyson that hire workers at around twenty-one dollars an hour in their chicken facilities. In the immigration debate, I heard Haitian workers say that Americans, meaning American Blacks, don't want to do that work. That is not true. On the Delmarva Peninsula, southern Delaware's poultry plants depended on local workers, especially American Black women, to do that disassembly work until the 1990s. Many of those workers eventually left the plants for better jobs in the growing tourism economy. When they did, the plants built a pipeline to replace them with immigrant labor. They paid bonuses to anyone who brought in a new worker who stayed, and they sent vans to bring people in. Delaware has a large American Black community. The work was never beneath us. Somebody decided to recruit somebody else.
Think about what that history tells us. Those plants were a first rung for our people, a place to earn a paycheck, build a work record, and climb to something better. That same rung could serve a man coming home from prison today. He gets hired, he proves himself, and in a few years he moves up and out, the way those women did before him. But someone has to build the ladder. Instead of representing our communities, networking with these companies, and negotiating that pipeline, too many of our politicians reach for the old explanation and blame racism and oppression for what is happening. The real failure is their inability to make an impactful political move.
So here is my question for every American Black leader who talks about prison reform. Instead of arguing over whether Haitians belong here or will be deported, why aren't you walking into Tyson, into Perdue, into Mountaire, and building that same pipeline for American Black men coming home from prison? Those men too often find it impossible to reintegrate into the community because they cannot find employment. Give them the opportunity to work at a plant in Delaware, with the same recruiting, the same vans, and the same bonuses, and they will do the work. Roofing does not have to be only for men coming out of prison, and neither does poultry. But it is a good start for a man who walked out of a cell with nothing but a bus ticket.
I have written about this before, and I will keep saying it until somebody answers me. Over the past few years I have had my roof replaced, my HVAC replaced, my fence put in, my trees cut down, and my windows replaced. Five jobs. On all five jobs, there was not one single American Black worker. Not one. Every one of those businesses was a small business, and every crew was made up of immigrant workers, many of whom did not speak English. Call it a coincidence if you want. I call it a pattern. And the owners of those businesses will tell you Black folks don't do this kind of work.
Now do the math the way the owner does it. He sells a job for fifteen thousand dollars. He sends in a crew of six day laborers for eight hours, and his labor for that team might run him about thirty-two hundred dollars. Before materials, he is sitting on nearly eleven thousand dollars from one job. One job. Keep the flow of labor high and the cost of labor low, and he has a continual source of workers. All he has to do is sell the deal. Many of those owners are Democrats, and they want those policies to continue, because those policies are a windfall for them. And when you tell a Democrat that jobs that could go to American Black workers are going to illegal immigrants, they will look you in the face and tell you that is not happening, while it is happening right in front of us. That is what I mean by the word. That is a level of ignorance that is unmistakably real.
Where the Black Man Is
I have been in corporate America all my life, and I can tell you what I have seen from the inside. There is a limited number of American Blacks sitting in any seat in American corporations, and American Black men are the rarest of all. American Black women have come in in larger numbers, and we have done our part. The problem in our communities is that the American Black man is missing from the table, and he is missing because he has been held back. He is held back by social structures that keep him in certain positions, and when he tries to get out of that box, he is blocked. Some of those walls are written down. A criminal record follows a man into every application, and many employers screen him out before anyone reads his name. Other walls are invisible. Small contractors hire through family, friends, and the crews they already know, and if our men are not in those networks, the jobs never reach them. I have seen what I have seen: five crews at my house without one American Black man, and a corporate hallway where I spent my working life counting how few of our men made it through the door. From the plant gate in Delaware to the roofing crew in South Jersey to that corporate hallway, I believe he is being blocked, and I believe the people who claim to represent him have stopped trying to open those doors.
So no, I am not going to spend another week arguing about who gets a pass to say nigger. The word is ugly. Its history is ugly. And I am not going to pretend that I have never said it. But I am also not going to pretend that a white man saying it is the greatest danger facing American Black communities while our children cannot read, our neighborhood schools are left behind, our men cannot get hired, and our people keep being told that the same politics that failed us yesterday will save us tomorrow. At what point does political loyalty become an excuse for abandoning accountability? We have spent fifty years chasing the ghost in the white robe. Maybe it is time we turned around and looked at the people who actually hold the keys, and at the hands that keep giving them back.
