Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word

Randall Kennedy

Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, Dec 18, 2008 - Social Science - 208 pages

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.


From the Trade Paperback edition.

What people are saying

Review: Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word

User Review  - Kelly - Goodreads

This book offers some insight into the potential complexity of the word, the reactions it generates in people, and the multiple contexts in which it's use must be examined. It offers a historical ...

Review: Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word

User Review  - Jakub - Goodreads

I started reading this book while cleaning out my house. I was captured by the titile and the fact that the authors name is Kennedy, I assumed it was the president. False. When I started reading the ...

About the author

Randall Kennedy received his undergraduate degree from Princeton and his law degree from Yale. He is a Rhodes Scholar and served as a law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall before joining the faculty of the Harvard Law School. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Association, and the American Law Institute, Mr. Kennedy lives in Dedham, Massachusetts.


From the Trade Paperback edition.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word
• Author: Randall Kennedy
• Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2008
• ISBN: 0307538915, 9780307538918
• Length: 208 pages
• Subjects: Social Science / Anthropology / Cultural; Social Science / Ethnic Studies / African American Studies