Let me read this post to you on Apple Podcasts and Spotify too! ✨✌🏾💛 Gospel for the Culture returns as a Public Library on Apple & Spotify!
Nigga is only half the story. What becomes of a people whose pronoun was nigger before she or he?
Bonnets, durags, ghetto, & other pseudonyms for nigga:
It’s just a head covering, until entire worlds are compressed into its stitches by the memories of nigga. Speak any of these words and you full reveal the worlds compressed within them: classism, elitism, anti-blackness, and the shivering fears of white gaze.
In the hoodoo tradition of my inheritance, spelling is always spell casting. And some words become functional substitutes in public discourse.
When people want to invoke everything historically attached to nigger without saying the slur itself, they often reach for other words that have accumulated similar social work.
An hour or so ago I wondered how names occupied both surnames and first names. My surname Thomas is also a common first name. And I wondered which order the transfer happened. Like do they start as first or last names before becoming both.
Nigger is never how we called ourselves in this land. That’s the nomenclature of empire. Then it became nigga—a term of reverence and insult alike but what words existed about Blackness in the minds of empire that incubated & birthed nigger?
Every word is born by preconditions, all because a people first perceive a category.
I imagine that before nigger became a slur, there had to exist a constellation of ideas about Blackness as:
property, heathen, savage, beast, cargo, labor, impurity, danger, sexual threat, or disposable life.
The slur doesn’t invent the ideas, it simply condenses them.
All slurs become shorthand for an already existing worldview.
The white desire to say nigga is an act of dominance & a plea of redemption.
They want our redemption, to be released from what the word remembers.
With or without the hard ER, that word is poison in their mouth, bound to white domination in perpetuity.
Because we redeemed nigga as term of endearment & kinship.
Dominance is covetous, it wants everything that belongs to someone else. They want the cool of Blackness as well as the power of its oppression. Clock it.
Empire doesn’t just steal labor.
It steals language.
It steals culture.
It isn’t satisfied with control.
It wants possession.
It wants authorship.
White folks don’t actually believe themselves when they claim nigga is just a word.
They’re just actually trying to convince us that it is just a word. A quiet attempt to possess our language and our culture, and to absolve themselves of what the word still remembers.
In church we often sang don’t forget to remember, and some things I argue we are incapable of forgetting. What that word remembers in our sanctified soul and through ancestral memories of the souls that formed us.
We remember that before Black people were grammatically recognized as persons (“he,” “she”), we were first linguistically recognized through a racial category imposed by empire.
In the mouth of whiteness, nigger is what happens when race precedes personhood in the social imagination.
Blackness is the original American migrant. Movement through the Middle Passage to the sale and transfer of bodies across plantations. The Great Migration north from plantations to cities for freedom and hopeful safety. From the praise house to the storefront to the megachurch auditorium. From spirituals I go commercial gospel, blues, jazz, soul, hip-hop, house, and electronica.
In the mouth of self articulated Blackness, nigga becomes a migration, not absolution, not historical amnesia.
Let me read this post to you on Apple Podcasts and Spotify too! ✨✌🏾💛 Gospel for the Culture returns as a Public Library on Apple & Spotify!
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