Book on 'N-Word' Raises Ire at UIC

By: Ellyn Ong, Sarah Karp and Audra Martin Exploring the history and meanings of the word “nigger” helps strip it of its racist power, Harvard Law School professor Randall Kennedy said in a recent lecture at the University of Illinois at Chicago. But some scholars attending the lecture called the word a slur that doesn’t merit discussion.

Kennedy was speaking about his new book, “Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word,” published by Pantheon Books in New York. The book follows the word from slave-trading days to the present, including its use by whites in the Jim Crow South and by rap artists recently. “[T]here is much to be gained by allowing people of all backgrounds to yank nigger away from white supremacists, to subvert its ugliest denotation, and to convert the N-word from a negative into a positive appellation,” Kennedy writes.

“I don’t think that a fair reading of my book would give solace to racists,” he said in his lecture.

Cedric Herring, an African American sociology professor at UIC, charged that Kennedy was exploiting black experiences for personal gain. “I’m tired of Negroes who pimp aspects of black life,” he said. While Herring had not read the book, he said that it “does little or nothing to uplift African Americans, but does plenty to soothe ... the guilt of whites.”

Kennedy’s book almost encourages continued use of the word, said Valerie C. Johnson, assistant professor in the department of political science. “As a black person who definitely finds insult in the word, to have this discussion just seems so ... painstakingly irrelevant as to be offensive,” said Johnson, who also had not read the book.

Dwight McBride, head of UIC’s African American studies department, said he and his colleagues were initially reluctant to sponsor the lecture, but decided Kennedy should have the chance to “present his work in the marketplace of ideas.” The book, McBride added, is “an important scholarly endeavor worthy of our attention and consideration.”

“The fact that the discussion generates such emotion suggests, at the very least, that our subject is not irrelevant,” Kennedy contended.

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Illinois denied cash welfare benefits from 1996 to 1999 to 10,298 women convicted of drug offenses in Cook County, leaving them little way to provide for their children after being released from prison, according to a February report. The Sentencing Project, a nonprofit based in Washington, D.C., that conducts criminal justice research, also found nearly 90 percent of the women are black. The 1996 federal welfare reform law barred benefits to women convicted of felony drug offenses. The report asks Congress to drop the provision as it designs a new welfare reform law this year.

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An investment company is pressuring Chicago-based Tootsie Roll Industries to take a picture of a young boy wearing a headdress and holding a bow and arrow off the wrapper of its famous Tootsie Pop, reports the Feb. 18 Crain’s Chicago Business. Shareholders of Bethesda, Md.-based Calvert Asset Management, which has a small investment in Tootsie Roll, have a policy that calls for respecting the rights of indigenous people. Nikki Daruwala, a Calvert research analyst, said the leaders of several Native American groups told her company that the image was offensive. Tootsie Roll has successfully fought Calvert’s efforts to get shareholders to vote on dropping the image. Tootsie Roll declined to comment.

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Despite their mission to serve people of “modest means,” credit unions in the six-county Chicago region serve fewer poor than middle- and upper-class households, according to a report by the Chicago-based Woodstock Institute, which analyzes how financial policies impact communities. In Chicago, where 40 percent of households earning less than $20,000 a year don’t have checking accounts, credit unions have failed to bring poor people into the economic mainstream, said Malcolm Bush, the institute’s president. But Cliff Northup of the National Credit Union Administration, a regulatory agency, said credit unions reach more poor people than other financial institutions.