Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word
by Randall Kennedy
List Price:
Our Price: $7.23
You Save: $5.72 (44%)
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Buy Used: from $4.12 (click here)
Category: Book
See more book details and other editions
Book Summary Information
Author: Randall KennedyEdition: Paperback
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: not just another word
Summary: 5 Stars
As an immigrant from England who survived perennial verbal assaults upon my supposed ethnic & religious roots with words I probably shouldn't type in here, this one I hadn't heard until I landed in Chicago in the '60s & got involved in the Civil Rights Movement. I gathered by the tone used by white Americans that it was a "bad" word. By the reactions to it, I saw it was also a "dangerous" one.
Then I listened as my boyfriend & his friends lobbed it between themselves all the time & I saw a whole 'nother use for it. Once, I forgot my station in life & used it too. All hell broke loose. Oops, sorry, wrong race, how 'bout that! So what about all those words you use for people of my gender?
40 years later, as a dumpy dowager, I asked a librarian in our little Northwest burg to see if they carried a copy of this book. Boy, was he stressed when I uttered the title word!
Professor Randall has illuminated the history & social meaning of this singular word in an engrossing, brief read. Should be on every high school reading list together with obligatory debates in which there's no censoring of the use of said word, along with all the others people throw at each other about their origins & worth!
Summary of Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word
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'BillovitchIt’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.
Cultural Books
Book Subjects
- Arts & Photography
- Audiobooks on Cassette
- Audiobooks on CD
- Biographies & Memoirs
- Business & Investing
- Children's Books
- Comics & Graphic Novels
- Computers & Internet
- Cooking, Food & Wine
- e-Books
- Engineering
- Entertainment
- Gay & Lesbian
- Health, Mind & Body
- History
- Home & Garden
- Horror
- Law
- Literature & Fiction
- Medicine
- Mystery & Thrillers
- Nonfiction
- Outdoors & Nature
- Parenting & Families
- Professional & Technical
- Reference
- Religion & Spirituality
- Romance
- Science
- Science Fiction & Fantasy
- Sports
- Teens
- Travel
Most talked about in For solving African-American issues
Blood in My Eyeby George L. Jackson
Black Classic Press; Published: 1996-12-19; Paperback; Book
Best price: $8.40
Price in other shops:
Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jacksonby George Jackson
Bantam Books; Published: 1972; Mass Market Paperback; Book
Die Nigger Die!: A Political Autobiographyby Jamil Al-Amin, H. Rap Brown
Lawrence Hill Books; Published: 2002-04; Paperback; Book
Best price: $8.93
Price in other shops:
Nigger : An Autobiographyby Dick Gregory
Pocket; Published: 1990-11-15; Mass Market Paperback; Book
Best price: $2.78
Price in other shops:
Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Wordby Randall Kennedy
Vintage; Published: 2003-01-14; Paperback; Book
Best price: $7.00
Price in other shops:
American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclassby Douglas Massey, Nancy Denton
Harvard University Press; Published: 1998-07-15; Paperback; Book
Best price: $17.99
Price in other shops:
Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Presentby Harriet A. Washington
Harlem Moon; Published: 2008-01-08; Paperback; Book
Best price: $9.30
Price in other shops:
Dirty Little Secrets About Black History : Its Heroes & Other Troublemakersby Claud Anderson
Powernomics Corporation of America; Published: 1997-12-01; Paperback; Book
Best price: $9.72
Price in other shops:
Black Labor, White Wealth : The Search for Power and Economic Justiceby Claud Anderson
Powernomics Corporation of America; Published: 1994-08-01; Paperback; Book
Best price: $13.00
Price in other shops:
PowerNomics : The National Plan to Empower Black Americaby Claud Anderson
Powernomics Corporation of America; Published: 2001-02; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $17.82
Price in other shops:
Similar Books and other products
The Color of Justice: Race, Ethnicity, and Crime in Americaby Samuel Walker, Cassia Spohn, Miriam DeLone
Wadsworth Publishing; Published: 2006-08-07; Paperback; Book
Best price: $46.72
Price in other shops:
White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Sonby Tim Wise
Soft Skull Press; Published: 2007-12-28; Paperback; Book
Best price: $8.04
Price in other shops:
Interracial Intimacies: Sex, Marriage, Identity, and Adoptionby Randall Kennedy
Published: 2003-01-07; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $16.69
Price in other shops:
Why Do African Americans Call Themselves the N...Word?: Myths You Believe and Questions You Want to Know About Blacks but Are Afraid to Mentionby Samuel Taylor
Jameir Productions; Published: 2000-06-21; Paperback; Book
Best price: $12.99
Price in other shops:
Counseling the Culturally Diverse: Theory and Practiceby Derald Wing Sue, David Sue
Wiley; Published: 2007-08-10; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $67.00
Nigger : An Autobiographyby Dick Gregory
Pocket; Published: 1990-11-15; Mass Market Paperback; Book
Best price: $3.25
Price in other shops:
The N Word - Divided We StandRelease date: 2006-01-16; DVD
Best price: $3.37
Price in other shops:
Race, Crime, and the Lawby Randall Kennedy
Vintage; Published: 1998-03-31; Paperback; Book
Best price: $10.71
Price in other shops:
Sellout: The Politics of Racial Betrayalby Randall Kennedy
Pantheon; Published: 2008-01-08; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $11.00
Price in other shops:
The N Word: Who Can Say It, Who Shouldn't, and Whyby Jabari Asim
Houghton Mifflin; Published: 2007-03-26; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $8.70
Price in other shops: