Me and the N-Word: the Story of a Peculiar Locution

Abstract

As a young Southerner who came to reject segregation and Jim Crow generally, I was sometimes called a nigger lover--and accepted that epithet proudly. As an adult academic in the North, however, I became increasingly amused and bemused by the insistence of my peers at avoiding the word nigger and substituting the N-word euphemism for it. Since everyone immediately mentally converts the N-word to nigger, the whole evasion seems pointless and fatuous. While using nigger as a hostile epithet ought to be condemned, its role in history and in literature should be faced honestly, not fudged with euphemism.