Michael Jai White - Black People Calling Themselves "N-Word", "Dog" & "Fool" is Self-Hate (957 hits)
In this clip, Michael Jai White shared his thoughts on people in the Black culture calling themselves by the n-word and Richard Pryor having a change of mind on the situation after going to Africa. He explained that no other race refers to themselves in derogatory ways like the Black culture, and added that he believes it all comes from self-hate. To hear more, including how he stopped telling people that his family was from South Carolina after discovering his true ancestry, hit the above clip.
It is commonly believed that n*gga has been reappropriated as a term of endearment. Perhaps this perception persists incorrectly because public conversations on this word are often dominated by nonlinguists. In contrast, linguists lack comparative studies of n*gga’s historical and modern-day use. Addressing this misperception requires a multilayered approach, employed here. This study begins with a qualitative inquiry into the historical, linguistic, and social factors that have fueled the current perception of the *****/n*gga two-word dichotomy and of how n*gga was used by blacks in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The second part is a quantitative study that examines the current apportionment of n*gga by speaker race and gender, and linguistic context, as observed in computer-mediated conversations. Multivariate analysis reveals differences among black and white speakers, males and females, and in various linguistic contexts. Comparative analysis uncovers that many of n*gga’s current meanings, referents, and uses have existed since at least the nineteenth century and that any changes to the meanings occurred gradually and not through abrupt reanalysis. This fnding lends no support to the reappropriation hypothesis. And crucially, the data show that the epitomized example of reappropriation, my n*gga, does not function primarily as a genuine term of endearment but as a masculinizing marker of social identity.