Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word
by Randall Kennedy
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Book Summary Information
Author: Randall KennedyEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2003-01-14
ISBN: 0375713719
Number of pages: 208
Publisher: Vintage
Book Reviews of Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word
Book Review: why would you NOT want to read this..
Summary: 5 Stars
I picked this book up based on the title. I saw it sitting on the shelf and thought it would be a very honest book and worth reading.
The book offers a lot of information in forms of name, places, dates and events but it's not in such a dry manner that you feel like you're back in some boring high school class that you hated.
There is a lot of personality to the book, and being white, there were several times when I was expecting to turn the page and read something that was going to be really insulting to me based on my skin color. I was completely wrong, this book holds people accountable for the words they use.... no matter what color their skin. It's not written from the perspective of "you are to blame". It's written from the stand point of how,why, when, and it's the first book in a long time that's prompted me to sit the book and take a few moments to think about what I just read.
The best part about it is that the book looks at the word in all the contexts that it is used. Which made for a very interesting read.
I think, although they probably wouldn't be allowed, this would be the perfect book for kids to read in school. Mainly because it's an important topic, and the book isn't written in the "I'm right, you're wrong" manner.. so it allows a great deal of room for thought on the points brought up in the book.
I did feel however, that something was missing from the end.
I didn't expect this book to "fix" anything or be a solution to any problems concerning the topic but the ending seemed really open in a bad way.
I would highly suggest this book to anyone interested in this topic, similar topics, and for young people especially.
I think a lot of people might be turned off by the title, but they are really missing out.
Summary of Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word
It?s ?the nuclear bomb of racial epithets,? a word that whites have employed to wound and degrade African Americans for three centuries. Paradoxically, among many black people it has become a term of affection and even empowerment. The word, of course, is nigger, and in this candid, lucidly argued book the distinguished legal scholar Randall Kennedy traces its origins, maps its multifarious connotations, and explores the controversies that rage around it.Should blacks be able to use nigger in ways forbidden to others? Should the law treat it as a provocation that reduces the culpability of those who respond to it violently? Should it cost a person his job, or a book like Huckleberry Finn its place on library shelves? With a range of reference that extends from the Jim Crow south to Chris Rock routines and the O. J. Simpson trial, Kennedy takes on not just a word, but our laws, attitudes, and culture with bracing courage and intelligence.
Nigger is Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy's ornate, lively monograph on what he calls the "paradigmatic" racial slur in the English language. A neutral noun in the 17th century, nigger had, by 1830, become an "influential" insult. Kennedy traces the word's history in literature, song, film, politics, sports, everyday speech, and the courtroom. He also discusses its plastic, contradictory, and volatile place in contemporary American society. Should it be eradicated from dictionaries and the language? Should it be, somehow, regulated? What is the significance of its emergence among some blacks as a term with "undertones of warmth and good will"? Do blacks have a historical right to its use or does that place the term under a "protectionist pall"? With courage and grave measure Kennedy has, in effect, created a forum for discussion of the word he calls a "reminder of the ironies and dilemmas, the tragedies and glories, of the American experience." --H. O'Billovitch
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