Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word. (nonfiction reviews).

Nigger: The Strange Career
of a Troublesome Word
by Randall Kennedy
Pantheon Books, February 2002
$22.00, ISBN 0-375-42172-6

Lenny Bruce, the bad boy of white comedians in the 1960s, once suggested in his routine that "if President Kennedy got on television and said, `Tonight, I'd like to introduce the niggers in my cabinet,' and he yelled `Niggerniggerniggernigger niggerniggernigger' at every nigger he saw ... till nigger didn't mean anything anymore, till nigger lost its meaning ... you'd never hear any four-year-old nigger cry when he came home from school."

Randall Kennedy, a professor at Harvard Law School, recounts the well-intended joke to explain how the very taboo nature of "nigger" gives rise to its use. Bruce reasoned that taking away the "seductive power" of the forbidden by total immersion might weaken its sting.

However, Kennedy notes that Bruce's notion did not catch on, even among the most daring black comedians of the day. Maybe this book, with hundreds if not thousands of repetitions of the word in its 175 pages, can accomplish what the controversial humorist could not.

As the title suggests, Kennedy takes on the complete history of the word, not merely from the standpoint of derivation and usage, but for its social, cultural and most important, legal implications.

Kennedy, who won the 1998 Robert F. Kennedy Book Award for Race, Crime, and the Law (Crown Publishing Group, December 1998, ISBN 0-517-28458-8), clearly knows the legal territory. That book presented an analysis of race in American criminal justice. In this one, he appears to be equally at home discussing the use of "nigger" in humor, literature, music and politics, as well as in the vernacular of the streets, schools and the workplace.

A native of Columbia, South Carolina, Kennedy may have heard the word a time or two in conversation. Here, he tackles the subject as a scholar; Kennedy writes, because "To be ignorant of its meanings and effects is to make oneself vulnerable to all manner of perils, including the loss of a job, a reputation, a friend, even one's life."

In dispassionate, almost clinical but engaging and witty prose, he lays out the linguistic history. The word entered the language innocently enough, he recalls, derived from the Latin word for the color black: "niger." Documents describe the earliest involuntary African immigrants to this country in the 1600s as "negars" or "negers," or "niggors."

As early as 1837, Kennedy finds a citation indicating enlightened people already considered the word "nigger" a slur with a "purpose to injure." By the 20th century, even some of the most ardent segregationists banned it from their vocabulary, Kennedy recounts, lest they be associated with unsavory members of their own race.

Nevertheless, over the years "nigger" built up a sizeable legal history, figuring in 4,219 reported court cases as of July 2001, compared with similar slurs against others "kike" (84 times), "wetback" (50), "gook" (90) and "honky" (286).

Conceding that these disparities could have other interpretations, Kennedy outlines how actual and specific use of the word "nigger" determined outcomes all the way up to the Supreme Court in civil and criminal cases. They range from judging discrimination in a factory to mitigating circumstances when a murderer has been subjected to the word.

High-profile issues about the n-word crop up throughout the book. Among them are the decision to allow a jury to hear only two of the 41 times Mark Fuhrman said "nigger" on a tape during the O.J. Simpson trial, after Fuhrman denied the word was in his vocabulary; the resignation of a white Washington, D.C. city official over use of the unrelated word "niggardly" for frugality; and the petitions that forced some dictionary publishers to change the way slurs are described.

The examination of the word "nigger" in culture, from the brilliant satirical use in Huckleberry Finn and similar literature, to the casual use of the word and offshoots like "nigga" in rap, comedy and film today is well worth reading. Yes, Kennedy takes on such loaded questions as "Why is it okay for blacks to use it sometimes ...?"

But while this debate could probably fill volumes, Kennedy has done it neatly in this small handbook and made it an easy, if not always comfortable, read.

--Angela Dodson is a BIBR contributing editor and writer who lives in New Jersey.