I’m white and love Snoops’ music in the 90’s. Never know what to do when I’m singing along though.
In High School, we read ‘The Color Purple’ allowed in class. Was it appropriate to say it? (we did.)
Just recast the songs as about people from Nigg. 
(Yes, it’s a real place.)
There’s a distinction between using a word and mentioning it. I would never use the word “nigger”, but I will mention it when appropriate. I don’t know The Color Purple, so I’ll use examples from Huckleberry Finn instead: It would be acceptable for a teacher or student in class to ask “How does Jim being referred to as a ‘nigger’ establish his place in the society of the book?”. It would not be acceptable to say “Jim sure was an uppity nigger, wasn’t he?”.
I’m a dork and replace it with “buddy” when I’m singing along to “New Jack Hustler”.
When it appears in literature, treat it like any other word. But in everyday conversation, there are plenty of workarounds.
Both my sons went to predominantly black public schools. So as you can imagine, there was the usual banter and taunting seen with impulsive, hormonal teenagers.
Whenever the proverbial “I can say it but you can’t” would come up, I just told my boys to take the attitude that it is just a word they don’t need. But not in a sour grapes kind of way. I would tell them there are people to whom that word is very important (almost to the point of fixation), but you are not one of them. There were some students that, I swear to God, every other word that rolled off their tongue was either the f-word or the n-word and I have serious doubts about their ability to speak at all if these two words just magically disappeared one day. I encouraged my two to develop a better vocabulary than that.
I think I was successful, because both of them feel like, “Hey, if I want to insult you, I can think of something much better than calling you that.”
For school kids, they have to lead by example, and not let other peoples’ obsession with that word have power over them. My older son told me that once in the 10th grade he was walking down the hall of his high school and a black guy he did not know said “Hey Nigga, come here” and my son just thought he was calling after somebody else so he kept walking. Then the guy said it again, and my son realized he was talking to him. My son walked over and said, “Hey man, you don’t want me calling you that, so don’t call me that, and by the way my name is J----”. After that, they became friends, and I was proud of the way he handled it.
Just because certain groups “can” say certain things and other people “can’t” doesn’t mean you have to let the group that “can” feel like they have some special privilege you don’t. Just build a better vocabulary and get on with your life.
I think teaching anyone that there are words that certain groups can’t use is possibly well-meaning but certainly counter-productive. All you are doing is giving those words additional power over and above pretty much any other collection of consonants and vowels. The fact that someone writes in wondering if it is OK to read the actual words used by the author in a book rather boggles the mind.
Context and intent is everything when it comes to how the use of that word is perceived, as this thread clearly shows. The word itself can be used aggressively, comedically, disparagingly, sarcastically, affectionately, factually and in so many other ways that are independent of the speaker’s skin colour.
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Old blues singers used to replace it with “rounder” when in the recording studio. See the Memphis Jug Band’s version of “On the Road Again.”
Are you saying that you are OK with all the motherfucker lines?
And 187 on a mf cop?
It should be as simple as that. Unfortunately we live in a world where Huckleberry Finn may be banned from the class room, and if you use the word ‘niggardly’ you’ll be accused of using the word ‘nigger’. Some would argue that ‘nigger’ should be taboo in all circumstances to eliminate the usage of this word but it hasn’t worked so far, and does harm by trying to ethnically cleanse history.
My feeling is that I can use the word in context: if it’s in a play, or a song, or a book. Richard Pryor’s album “That Nigger’s Crazy.” You can say nigger cuz it’s a title. You wouldn’t say “Richard Pryor made an album titled That N-word is Crazy.” I wouldn’t call someone that name, nor do I see any reason to use the word niggardly.
Do we? In how many classrooms has Huck Finn actually been banned? And in those where it has, how many are because of the use of the word “nigger”, and how many are because Jim didn’t know his place?
Just one of the many cases where it was banned, and many more bans have been attempted. Note that To Kill a Mockingbird was banned as well. And the existence of such controversy has likely caused a number of decisions not to use these books even without a ban.
I get what you are saying but I would venture a guess that people are reacting to the former rather than the latter. It seems nobody understands context and subtlety anymore, it all just knee-jerk reactions.
I don’t think it is banned anywhere, though.
Well I guess I stand corrected, but I will say I have 2nd cousin who has just started public school in Williamsburg, VA and she read both “To Kill a Mockingbird” and “Gone With the Wind” over the summer, as both were on her reading list. We had a wonderful discussion about all this stuff and I was glad she read them.
It was temporarily suspended for less than a week until the school board could do a review in response to a parent’s complaint. They voted to put it back on the shelves.
Does that really matter? There is no shortage of people who will take offense at the sight or sound of a word regardless of context.
A publisher went so far as to put out an edition that replaced the word “nigger” with the word “slave”. What does that tell you?
That tells me that someone thought that bans over the word “nigger” were real and widespread. It doesn’t tell me whether that thought was accurate.
One of my French textbooks had an excerpt from “Les Nègres blancs d’Amérique”. I believe our teacher translated it as “the white black people of America”.