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The N Word
Who Can Say It,
Who Shouldn’t, and Why
by Jabari Asim
Houghton Mifflin, 2007 239 pp $26
Nigger: The Strange Career
of a Troublesome Word
by Randall Kennedy
Vintage, 2003 208 pp $12.95 paper
Who Can Say It,
Who Shouldn’t, and Why
by Jabari Asim
Houghton Mifflin, 2007 239 pp $26
Nigger: The Strange Career
of a Troublesome Word
by Randall Kennedy
Vintage, 2003 208 pp $12.95 paper
THE SUBJECT is small—a word. Yet the subject contained within the subject is immeasurable: racism American-style. It isn’t always a good idea to reduce vast social dimensions to a pithy cognomen—all the great “isms” are finally irreducible—but there are special cases, and when Jabari Asim asks us to examine American racism (particularly racism against black Americans) through the lens of a single word, it’s remarkable how much history he squeezes into the text.
For truly the N word (as it has been known for several decades now) is the privileged American racial epithet. It sits at the heart of the American consciousness like the evil twin of “l...
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