On Nigga

…it might not be right but it’s mine.

I think the word is as alienating as it is because it embodies a contradiction we’d rather forget. Not just non-Blacks. Not just people who aren’t Afro-Southern like me. All of us. Citizens of America and the globe alike.

And healing it is so damned confusing: “I am spawned from commodities — and their purchasers! Lorraine Hansberry, Les Blancs.

Nigga is my inheritance.

I’m a daughter of the American South and the slave trade of the 1600s, and my mother is a Black woman.

I empathize with Alicia Keys, another Black woman and femme, just with a Blackness that different from mine, when she reflects on her use of the word on her debut album with what sounds like regret. Or maybe just growth. I get that. Jeymes Samuel refused to write any variation of the word in the script of an all-Black western. I love that. But what I’m getting at is these are both variations on how we heal, deal with our collective grief, and how we evolve, but not the only ways.

And somehow I can’t shake the feeling that the language holds the history and the identity and the culture, so much of which is produced and past down by Black femmes and women, like my mother, as well as other mothers who gave me my Blackness, but that gets claimed and accessed without shame, by, it seems like, anybody but a Black femme like me.

Jeffrey McCune described green spaces in a conversation once as a tool for “civilizing,” and by extension maybe, re-colonizing Black folks who live in places with high concrete like cities. It’s often under the rousse of placemaking and “inclusion.” But the assumption is still that we’re being included graciously in a place that is for white people first, followed by anyone willing to aspire to personhood as it’s defined by whiteness.

I peeped that. And in a way, I feel the same way about the word “nigga.”

I feel like the only people suggesting I give it up are those with privilege that stems from the presumed safety of being in proximitiy to a white person or a white-washed institution — and their white aloofness.

The privilege is in not having to be reminded that our inheritance as Black folks is not without colonialism, slavery and other forms of dominance and othering.

I stop saying nigga and the presumed non-Black listener or reader has the comfort of forgetting the past that I carry with me in my muscles, in my vocal cords. And in theirs.

Picasso said if you kill the woman you kill the past she represents. He said this apparently in reference to wishing his past wives were dead when he went to remarry. Hannah Gadsby, Douglas.

I sense this parenthetical ask that I stop saying it. In the ether…and I rebuke it.

Asking me to stop saying nigga so someone won’t feel alientated

1. propagates the idea that Black men have first claim to our cultural productions and inheritances, and
2. frames my existence as only meaninful and safe to the extent that non-Black femme people are comfortable with my being here. Alive. Existing. And voicing.

Everyone’s privilege benefits from the silencing of a Black femme or a Black woman, because when she speaks, everything we’ve inherited, and that we’ve been coaxed into forgetting, comes to the surface and resounds. What comes up is what is not yet healed. But we can never hope to heal what is silenced, sedated, erased, forgotten. Inheritances haunt. Imani Perry.

The eerieness of whiteness is it erases the past as if we’re no one with no past.

So the presence of a Black femme claiming nigga and not for commercial gain — or for commercial gain — however she so chooses — it blows the cover of anyone trying to navigate white spaces by shedding or cloaking the past/lineage/inheritance we share.

We carry language in our bodies. It’s just like theory: the words matter but only to the extent that they reveal what we’re experiencing in our bodies.

Nigga hurts and weighs down sometimes, yes; but it still subverts and works to repair by illumining us to what is still there and yet is not accounted for, and that is the contradiction of being the product of both the commodity and the purchasers, in a country that erases us by calling us “all immigrants.”

Somebody’s no-pastness is being called out just by my being in the space, let alone giving such a complicated past language, and claiming it, not rejecting it in attempt to make myself invisible/undetectable/safe (mind you, everyone has their way of surviving. But we must lift up the tools we’ve created that challenge us to not just survive but really live.)

I’m not arguing what we are — no, we are not niggers. And yes: the idea of repurposing a word is often misunderstood as replacing its meaning. That’s a fantasy, and a negligent one. A garment doesn’t change its threads just because it’s been tailored to do something different.

But I think accepting nigga as this contradiction is the first part of changing the hurt it carries. We cannot change what we refuse to love first. And by love, I mean to have the desire to care for. Not fix. Not force. Not shame. Not trivialize. Care for.

Nigga is a signal of solidarity sometimes, not just among Black Afro-Southerners, but also non-Black working class folk, and non-white immigrants who come here and understand Blackness as a way to access Americanness, which it is.

And other times I’d rather not. At all. It’s not okay in my space. Still.

I think it challenges us to elevate to a place where we stop trying to correct the past by erasing it.

If what we want is wholeness, we won’t find it in fixing and policing ourselves out of what we’ve inherited — if we try cutting out what’s “bad,” we rob ourselves of the good we made with it, the beauty we gave birth to in response to it.

The answer is not to replace but repair.

So how do we relate to nigga with an intention of repairing the hurt that it holds?

I’ll start with naming the hurt: when have I heard the word and felt not-good?

There are plenty.

Next, when have I felt like nigga was exactly what I needed. (It whitens my teeth. Paul Mooney. )

There have also been many.

Finally, what gets in the way of healing that hurt, and honoring that medicine?

I figure once I’ve done these things I can say for myself, in an authentic way, whether the word serves me.

If yes, I will say where it gets to live and the boundaries around it.

If no, I will thank it and let it go, knowing that I’ve honored how it supported me in the past, and shown love and compassion to the person I was when I needed that support.

This is how I create home in my language.