About a year ago, Nicholas “Fat Nick” Minucci, a rotund, 19-year-old White youth, took an aluminum baseball bat and fractured the skull of a 22-year-old Black man. This was after Nick issued a greeting to the Black youth that contained the word nigger. Or was it nigga? A key issue in his recent trial was whether Nick’s use of an N-word implies that what occurred was a hate crime.
I would like to report that language study is simple — it is sometimes, but not always. And some words have amazingly complex histories and patterns of use. This said, I’ll enter some basic points about the N-word, which I’ll henceforth use in its full form. Explanation requires exemplification. Those with delicate sensibilities should not read further.
First, there are indeed two N-words, with separate though closely related histories: nigger and nigga. This is not unusual with languages around the world. Consider glamour and grammar, which both come from the same word. Nigger and nigga, however, both have more than one pronunciation, and, in some cases, their pronunciations converge. The first can sound just like the second, especially in the South. The first one nowadays (the historical period and communities one speaks of are always important) is primarily a term of abuse leveled at those of African descent. It carries great psychological baggage, and its use can cause serious bodily harm. Nigga, spelled thus, to distinguish it, is highly versatile in terms of use, ranging from invective to term of endearment. “My nigga,” for many African-Americans, refers to a boyfriend or girlfriend or someone dear in other ways.
In many African-American neighborhoods, nigga is simply the most common term used to refer to any male, of any race or ethnicity. Increasingly, the term has been applied to any person, male or female. “Where y’all niggas goin?” is said with no self-consciousness or animosity to a group of women, for the routine purpose of obtaining information. The point: Nigga is evaluatively neutral in terms of its inherent meaning; it may express positive, neutral or negative attitudes. It’s just like the word Republican, which can range from an insult all the way to a term of praise.
Neutral evaluation, in this sense, also characterizes a series of controversial words, among them muthafucka, bitch and ho. I say this based on empirical observation of speech behavior. The feelings, wishes and opinions of individuals are NOT what determine speech use. Speech use in communities is out of the hands of social commentators, moral guardians and others. Some uses of language and of specific words develop in certain ways whether we like it or not. Moreover, we sometimes refuse to recognize the realities of language use around us, and that our use of language sometimes goes against what we advocate. Observe what was said by a church lady who routinely condemned the use of nigga: “Why niggas got to always be usin’ nigga so much?”
