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The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word
Vintage
January 2003
On Sale: January 14, 2003
208 pages
ISBN: 0375713719
EAN: 9780375713712
Paperback
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Non-Fiction
It’s “the nuclear bomb of racial epithets,” a word that
whites have employed to wound and degrade African Americans
for three centuries. Paradoxically, among many black people
it has become a term of affection and even empowerment. The
word, of course, is nigger, and in this candid, lucidly
argued book the distinguished legal scholar Randall Kennedy
traces its origins, maps its multifarious connotations, and
explores the controversies that rage around it. Should blacks be able to use nigger in ways forbidden to
others? Should the law treat it as a provocation that
reduces the culpability of those who respond to it
violently? Should it cost a person his job, or a book like
Huckleberry Finn its place on library shelves? With a range
of reference that extends from the Jim Crow south to Chris
Rock routines and the O. J. Simpson trial, Kennedy takes on
not just a word, but our laws, attitudes, and culture with
bracing courage and intelligence.
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