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Kennedy’s attention to the importance of the N-word??s role in African-American history shows his appreciation for the subject’s complexity and demand for nuanced interpretation. To dismiss the word as a one-dimensional insult disregards its deep and loaded history. Kennedy’s book is in many ways an effort to analyze this history and place the deeply stigmatized and tabooed word at the forefront of race-relations dialogue in America. In fact, Kennedy censured what he called the “eradicationist” position, espoused by those...
...premise of Kennedy’s book is to illuminate African-American history through the prism of the word “nigger” and to chart the word??s strange and troubling history. As Oliver Wendell Holmes said, a word “is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged,” but “the skin of a living thought [that] may vary greatly in color and content according to the circumstances and the time in which it is used.” Kennedy’s book aims to study these circumstances...
Kennedy offers some controversial solutions to society’s problems with this tenacious word. Using the N-word liberally, he thinks, may soften its offensive blow, a theory propounded by filmmakers Quentin Tarantino and Lenny Bruce. This way, speakers can take control of the word??s semantic implications, “owning” and defining it according to a more positive, and self-determined, ideal...
...Kennedy can be unclear about when the N-word is and isn’t appropriate. On the one hand, he suggests that anyone, of any race or gender, should be condemned for using the word in a racist manner. But due to the word??s chameleon-like quality, there still exist contexts in which the word is not racist and yet, according to Kennedy, should not be used...
...Kennedy thinks that Dumbrot’s usage was ill-advised, but thinks his being fired was too harsh a sentence. Herein lies the contradiction. If racist intent was not apparent in Dambrot’s use, what else constituted its inappropriateness? Is ignorance or the simplification of the word??s far-reaching implications alone worthy of criticism? And if so, should all speakers, of all races, be aware of these implications before they use the word...