Beloved Family: we are gathered here today under the watchful eye of the Benevolent Source of All Things to perform a service that’s long overdue. As proof of It’s mysterious ways, the catalyst for this ceremony was the bizarre rant of—as Dr. King might have said—one of our sick brothers, Michael Richards. I have come not to condemn him, but to drive the scourge of his words from our hearts and minds. More specifically, I am referring to that one word—you know the one, our faithful companion through the years, our trusty dagger, the albatross around our necks…the N-word. 

I know some of this will be hard to hear, but the truth must be spoken. If we face this truth without shame we can begin the process of healing, and with it, liberation.

In 2005, a study ranked the twenty-five most dangerous cities in America with over 75,000 inhabitants. It is with extreme displeasure that I point out that many of these cities—Detroit, Compton, Oakland, Gary, Baltimore, Atlanta—are either predominately African American, or have large African American communities. Despite the real progress we have made in this country, there are still vast reservoirs of pain, disillusionment, frustration, and anger in the black community. The poet LeRoi Jones once famously referred to us as “Blues People.” From the very beginning, our most profound, vital or trendsetting cultural expression has emerged from pain. Langston Hughes rendered it in verse: We Jazz June, We Die Soon.  Alvin Ailey defied gravity with it.  Billie Holiday drove us to tears with it.  John Coltrane made mind-bending sounds out of it. Tupac and the Notorious B.I.G. spit sixteen bars of pure fire from it. Black people have a genius for spinning the lead of life into pure gold. We took the leftovers from massa’s house and turned them into a cuisine. We took a word meant to mark us with inferiority and indignity and turned it into a worldwide brand. The suffocating legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, oppression, and ongoing degradation—it’s all right there in the hot, hot fire of our collective cultural creativity. 

There is, however, a dark side to this cultural creativity. It’s not like black folks hold a patent on suffering. But I haven’t seen any other group—ethnic, religious, or otherwise—so ready to celebrate its own dysfunction as African Americans. Black comedians have made it their stock in trade. We cut each other down with ‘the dozens’, the most vicious insults winning the awe and respect of onlookers. Rappers raise glasses of Petron, toasting to fortunes created by dealing poison in the neighborhood and violating women. We cheered on O.J., some being candid enough to admit they liked the idea that a brotha beat the system. For many of us, being in our skin is so tied up in pain, loss, injustice and sorrow that we’ve embraced badness and made it a badge of pride. It’s become a survival mechanism. But I don’t believe our circumstances warrant that kind of thinking today. 

And so here is this word, NIGGER. It captures all the agony and destitution of our collective experience, mutated into deep, nihilistic self-loathing. We project this self-loathing onto others with a similar appearance. Physical violence can be the result. White people go out of their way to avoid passing me on the street even though it’s more likely that a black person will be the target of a black criminal act. 

The trauma of NIGGER is trotted out daily in hip hop and the whole world is watching—and eating it up. Rap music abounds with examples of embraced dysfunction. The Notorious B.I.G. recorded on a label called Bad Boy. Tupac recorded on a label called Death Row. There’s also a label called Murder, Inc. Rap personalities regularly take up the names of criminals, both real and fictional: Escobar, Scarface, Gotti, and Rick Ross only name a few. Here, use of the N-word is epidemic. It’s used for friend or foe, the audience, other rappers or the rappers themselves. In the popular film Menace to Society, MC Eiht’s character, A-Wax, pretends to help a guy shot by his boys Caine and O-Dog, but instead shoots him dead, shouting “punk–ass nigga!” Immediately afterwords he yells “come on, niggas!” to his patnas. He uses the same word for his enemy—whose blood is running into the gutter—and his homies.  

Is this what its come to? If there’s no difference between the nigga in me and the nigga in you, the nigga we ride with and the one we kill, then just about anyone can be nigger-ized.  Let’s remember the pedigree of this word—a perversion of black in French and Spanish—and what it was supposed to say about us. Given its crushing history, it will never be fully divested of its ugly meaning, or its psychic resonance. To be called the N-word is to be condemned, marked as sub-human, unworthy, indecent. It makes no difference whether it’s pronounced with an “a”’ or an “er.” And since hip hop culture has made it acceptable for folks of all backgrounds to call each other by that name, the issue now extends far beyond the African American community. We’re well on our way to nigger-izing the whole of humanity.

After the brouhaha over the Michael Richards comedy collapse, I am taking the same stance as comedian Paul Mooney—the one taken up by Richard Pryor before him. It is my intention to abolish the N-word entirely from my vocabulary. It’s a terrible word.  Nobody is a NIGGER. We’re all just human beings—hearts and bones, imperfect and precious, doing the best we can with what we’ve been given. I know it can feel cathartic, empowering, or entertaining, to utter the N-word.  But the price is too high. It’s got to go.  It’s a word we can no longer afford to use. 

Let us now bid a final adieu to the N-word. We’re not going to kill or destroy it; there’s already far too much killing and destruction in the world. Visualize walking quietly to the shores of an ancient riverbank, say, the Nile or the Ganges. At the water’s edge we take out a black marker and scrawl the word NIGGER in large, jagged letters on a piece of parchment paper. Then, cradling the paper in both hands, we focus our attention on the word and we thank it. Yes, we thank it for faithfully embodying our wounded, isolated powerlessness, our muted rage, our fear of being unlovable. We thank it for drawing out of us the toxins of self-hatred and abasement. We apologize to those we lashed out at using the word. We forgive ourselves for speaking or writing it in moments of unconsciousness. We solemnly acknowledge the role it has played, the service it has provided. We tell it we will not need it anymore. We gather scattered reeds or sticks and fashion them into a small altar. We fold the paper into a small square and lay it on the alter. Finally, we light a candle, using its flame to ignite the paper and set both adrift on the altar. The Mother River’s currents know exactly what to do with it. 

Abolishing the N-word would not instantly end black-on-black violence. It may not even remedy the way a large segment of American society perceives African Americans. It would, however, be a powerful first step in overcoming our deeply troubled relationship with ourselves. Changes we can only dream of today would become real possibilities.

Someday we shall meet on the field of loving-kindness and compassion, transformed, healed, accepting one another as sacred. And we will embrace. 

I’ll see you there.


 
Kyva Holman is a rapper/singer, multi-instrumentalist, producer, and social/political activist. He was a founding member of the underground hip hop group Exile Society/Subterraneanz. He recently recorded an album called Nyambezi (ny-am-BAY-zee), Enter the Black Bodhisattva.