Randall Kennedy takes on not just a word, but our laws, attitudes, and culture with bracing courage and intelligence—with a range of reference that extends from the Jim Crow south to Chris Rock routines and the O. J. Simpson trial. 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?

A renowned cultural critic untangles the twisted history and future of racism through its most volatile word. The N Word reveals how the term “nigger” has both reflected and spread the scourge of bigotry in America over the four hundred years since it was first spoken on our shores. Jabari Asim pinpoints Thomas Jefferson as the source of our enduring image of the “nigger.” In a seminal but now obscure essay, Jefferson marshaled a welter of pseudoscience to define the stereotype of a shiftless child-man with huge appetites and stunted self-control. Asim reveals how nineteenth-century “science” then colluded with popular culture to amplify this slander. What began as false generalizations became institutionalized in every corner of our society: the arts and sciences, sports, the law, and on the streets. Asim’s conclusion is as original as his premise. He argues that even when uttered with the opposite intent by hipsters and hip-hop icons, the slur helps keep blacks at the bottom of America’s socioeconomic ladder. But Asim also proves there is a place for the word in the mouths and on the pens of those who truly understand its twisted history—from Mark Twain to Dave Chappelle to Mos Def. Only when we know its legacy can we loosen this slur’s grip on our national psyche.

The story of Dick Greagory, welfare case, star athelete, hit comedian, and front-line participant in the battle for Civil Rights.

Ranging from the laudatory to the openly hostile, 15 essays by prominent African American scholars and critics examine the novel's racist elements and assess the degree to which Twain's ironies succeed or fail to turn those elements into a satirical attack on racism. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

The scathing second novel by the legendary poet, musician and Godfather of Rap is a work of “biting social satire” (Daily Express). Originally published in 1972, Gil Scott-Heron’s striking novel The Nigger Factory is a powerful parable of the way in which human beings are conditioned to think, drawing inspiration from Scott-Heron’s own experiences as a student in the late 1960’s and early 70’s. Earl Thomas, student body president at Sutton University, is in a difficult position: struggling with the fact that even a historically black college could be part of a system that still privileges whites, he’s also threatened by his fellow students, members of radical activist group MJUMBE. Claiming the time has come for revolution, not reform, the leaders of MJUMBE are poised not only to bring Earl down personally, but also to instigate larger scale acts of violence. An electrifying novel, The Nigger Factory is a penetrating examination of the different forms of resistance and the motivations behind them, and a major document of an era of black thought.

One of many regional reprints of Jerry Farber's 1967 Los Angeles Free Press essay comparing the relationship between universities and students to that of masters and slaves.