Word: nigger
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...couple of mollycoddles out there want to put the kibosh on that? Line 'em up, man. Line up pop culture from The Nigger of the Narcissus to The Birth of a Nation to To Kill a Mockingbird, right on through N.W.A. and "Niggas vs. Black People," and on to comedian Dave Chappelle playing a blind Ku Klux Klan member who ends up yelling "nigger" at himself...
...blaxploitation era in the 1960s, when blacks suddenly were allowed to make movies told from our point of view. Melvin Van Peebles' 1971 Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song--an ode to a wronged black man on the run from the cops--introduced the lead character as a "baadasssss nigger coming back to collect some dues!" And that "nigger" in the film, as Van Peebles tells it, snapped the streak of "liberal, sort of nice movies where we always ended up dead...
...Soldier's Story, a black military officer is investigating the murder of an unpopular black soldier near an Army base in Louisiana. Sergeant Waters, the victim, brutally compels a young black private to give up his country ways and "quit thinking like a nigger." It was a rarely seen public representation of our private interactions: the impatience some blacks have with a victim mentality. Shocking. Powerful. A message to a white populace that we are not lemmings. And that even among ourselves, we're not a single tribe...
Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy and Chris Rock have all traded on demystifying nigger. And in doing so, they have advanced the racial debate further than a thousand roundtable discussions populated with the best Ivy League minds. Pryor and Chevy Chase's Saturday Night Live "word association" sketch was a prime example of comedy's power to explore racial interplay in the workplace, the constant questioning of blacks as to when a comment is harmless and when is it racist. Chase is the white human-resources executive. Pryor, the black job applicant. What begins with Chase: "White," Pryor: "Black," devolves...
...Silver Streak, Pryor and Gene Wilder's comedic take on The Defiant Ones. In the penultimate moment, Pryor's character, camouflaged as a lowly train porter, flips a gat on the uppity white villain, demanding to know, in a brilliant combination of anger and comic timing, "Who you callin' nigger?" Yeah. That was all of us. That was all of black America wanting to know from any race baiter as we moved through the Establishment: Excuse me, who exactly are you calling nigger...