Can a Racial Slur Be Reclaimed?

Liz Stordeur Pryor, J89, lived mostly with her white, Jewish mother growing up, but when she was with her father, the comedian Richard Pryor, she noticed that he and his family and friends constantly used the N-word in casual conversation. Hearing the racist slur being embraced by Black people it was meant to demean was often confusing and painful for her, even when her father tried to talk with her about it.

At the same time, tension around the inflammatory word was playing out on public stages. Her father became a legend in part for the way he wielded the term on Grammy-winning comedy albums like 1974’s That [N-word]’s Crazy and 1976’s Bicentennial [N-word]. (Pryor used the actual word.)

Richard Pryor took a word that had been used to demonize and dehumanize Black people and, beginning with a bit called “Super [N-word],” reclaimed it for himself and the Black community. His goal at the time was “to take the sting out of it … [as] if saying it over and over again would numb me and everybody else to its wretchedness,” he explained in his 1995 autobiography Pryor Convictions. But after a 1979 trip to Africa and a 1980 drug-and-alcohol-fueled incident in which he set himself on fire, he stopped using the word in public and private.

A Word Used Many Ways

Liz Pryor is now a Smith College professor, teaching and writing about race and slavery, mostly in the 19th century. For many years, she avoided drawing direct connections to her father in her work. (She even avoided listening to those award-winning albums or watching the satirical 1974 Western film Blazing Saddles, which he co-wrote.)

Then in 2010, a white student used the N-word in Pryor’s class while quoting a line from Blazing Saddles, stunning her and the other students. Pryor began confronting more directly the way the word is used in modern culture and began acknowledging her connection to her father publicly. She also listened to and watched all of his groundbreaking work.

This journey is the heart of Something We Said: Richard Pryor, a Notorious Word, and Me, which blends an intimate memoir of growing up with an iconic but troubled father, an account of discussing the N-word in class over the last 15-plus years, and a historical examination of the word’s use from the 1620s through 1980s hip-hop to the present day.

The book avoids being prescriptive about whether people should use the word, including Black people who use it familiarly with an “a” at the end instead of an “er.” While even that usage remains controversial, Pryor believes we must talk about the word. “I want people to have many points of entry to begin having honest, open-hearted conversations about the word, the ideas that it generates, and its impact on people,” she says.

“It’s important for us as a society to be thinking about this word, which is a stand-in for racism and is the great symbolic word,” she adds. “But it also has multiple ways that it’s used by Black people, including in protest the way my father did.”

Writing the book helped Pryor see her father as an intellectual, she says; poring over his comedy notebooks made her realize that people underestimate how hard he worked on his craft. But she also wanted to show him as a father. “He had his demons, but he loved his kids and did the best he could.”

An Appetite for Learning

Pryor didn’t meet her father until she was 6 years old, and their relationship was complex. Richard Pryor had seven children with six different women, not to mention a demanding career, a lifetime of hurt from his own traumatic childhood, and a growing addiction to drugs—but he also could see her as no one else did.

As a child, Elizabeth Pryor was initially disappointed when her father gave her gifts like The Annotated Shakespeare and his marked-up copy of paleoanthropologist Richard Leakey’s Origins. “What I heard was ‘you are not funny, you’re smart. You are different from me,’” she writes. “What I didn’t understand was that my father’s comedy only existed because of his voracious appetite for learning. … All these years later, I still have the Shakespeare books.”

At Tufts, Pryor had a “spiritual awakening, a Black awakening,” finding her people among the Black theater kids and at the Capen House’s Afro-American Cultural Center (now the Africana Center). “A bunch of kids said, ‘Welcome; you’re one of us,’ and took me under their wing,” she says, “which really helped inspire my intellectual life as a historian of Black history and culture.”

Not long after she got to Tufts, her father, who never went to college, sent her material he’d learned about in his own explorations about race: a 1972 documentary about Malcolm X and a 1970 album by a group called The Last Poets.

Working on the book helped her recognize the thoughtful generosity behind those gifts. She had never re-examined her childhood memories before. “My 11-year-old reactions were still bouncing around in my body, and I learned how to be in relationship with those memories as an adult woman,” she says.

It had been hard to move on partly because her father’s final years before his death in 2005 were haunted by multiple sclerosis that left him largely unable to speak or move. “Writing the book helped me remember the love I had for both of my parents in a way I hadn't been able to purely feel for a long time,” Pryor says, adding that it also let her see that she wasn’t “an accidental tourist in my own experiences” as she’d imagined.

“I came to realize I’d made these real intellectual choices and I own those,” she says.

Her latest choice is teaching a new class that examines the N-word and contemporary race issues through a personal and specific lens. The course is called “Richard Pryor's America.”