I am not making the argument that we should encourage the use of the word nigger. Words do indeed have power and to ignore that is to be a fool. I am only concerned with strategy. Blacks will stop using the word nigger when the world stops treating us like niggers, not the other way around. It’s self-serving to blame a victim for what the victim chooses to call itself.

The word nigger has been used as a tool for white supremacy, and sometimes blacks can be the biggest perpetuators of white supremacy. When we call each other niggers to invoke racist stereotypes, that’s perpetuating white supremacy. When we make songs about how many niggers we gonna kill, that perpetuates white supremacy. We become the victims of it and the perpetuators of it at the same damn time. We just need to be honest about its history and its actual ramifications. It’s not the word nigga that should die, it’s racism. You don’t cure an ailment by attacking the symptom, and black people who call each other nigga is most definitely the symptom, not the cause of racism.

The conflict over this word has existed in our community since slavery, it’s not something new that hip-hop invented. In 2006 Reverend Jesse Jackson called for a moratorium on the word, but in 2008 he was caught on an open mic accusing Barack Obama of “trying to tell niggas how to behave.” It is unfair to frame the usage of this word entirely within a hip-hop context.

Jesse Jackson called for a moratorium on the word, but he was caught on an open mic accusing Obama of “trying to tell niggas how to behave.”

Hip-hop music is loud and in your face, as it should be. The best hip hop tells us what is beautiful and what is ugly about our community in equal measure. As Q-Tip eloquently rapped in his song “Sucka Nigga,” hip-hop “embraces adversity.” Because of its loquaciousness, hip-hop has excelled at painting pictures of our underbelly that other genres of music never could. The hip-hop generation is no more misogynistic, vulgar or gangsta than the generation that came before it, we just make more art about being like that. In a way, that’s more honest.

Our music comes from the oppressed, the powerless, the poor. Our musicians have always come from those communities. Old school jazz, soul and R&B artists come from communities of people who called each other nigga as well. However, white people didn’t care about blacks calling each other nigga until they wanted to sing along with their favorite rappers. As long as blacks degrade themselves it’s not an issue, but once a white person wants to say it at a concert and can’t—now it’s an issue.