Barack Obama sparked a minor controversy when he used the word “nigger” to discuss race in America. In the interview he was making a valid point that even though individual prejudice has declined, structural racism still plagues America. However, his use of the N-word, in relation to prejudice, has totally overshadowed his important message. Steve Doocy of Fox News, for example, said that people will be asking whether it’s “beneath the dignity of his office”.

Barack Obama invokes N-word during interview on racism in America Read more

The word is visceral and has been used in vile ways. But the matter is complicated by the fact that it has been used by African Americans for almost as long as by white racists. The N-word has been reviled, embraced and even used to mobilise people politically. The controversy surrounding the word being “beneath him” is more about respectability politics than the word itself.

The fact is it has become a word we commonly hear, thanks to its use in commercial rap music. There it is used to signify a connection to the “real niggas” on the street who are out there hustling, who experience the realities of the ghetto. Its use in rap has linked it to images of hypersexual men, engaged in drug dealing and violence. It has become more than just a word, it has become a label to attach to the black “underclass”, or as Chris Rock puts it: “There’s black people and there’s niggas. And the niggas have got to go!”

There have been campaigns by black people to ditch the N-word and to embrace a more respectable form of identity that promotes upward mobility. There is a strong tradition of this argument in African American thought, with Booker T Washington often associated with the ethos of “pulling yourself up by your bootstraps”. The idea that using the N-word is “beneath the dignity” of Obama’s presidency derives from the fact that it is seen as a word that only the poor and unworthy black people in the ghetto use. He is the wrong kind of black person to be uttering it.

But this visceral rejection of the N-word belies some of the worst forms of class politics among black people. During enslavement, “bad nigger” was a term used by black people to refer to those who were unafraid to break the rules of the plantation, openly challenging the slave master’s authority. This idea became memorialised in the figure of “Stagolee”, whose killing of a white man during a fight is incorporated into African American folklore and music. The “bad nigger” is a rejection of mainstream society and standards, a certain kind of redemption through uncompromising blackness.

The potential power of the N-word is to reconnect black politics to the most marginalised section of black communities

This idea was later taken up by groups such as the Black Panthers, who argued that the “bad nigger from the block” was the real revolutionary. The Panthers would make an effort to recruit ex-cons – which so appalled people like Bill Cosby – because they had nothing to lose, no connections to society and therefore nothing holding them back. Political versions of hip-hop are still rooted in this idea. Tupac Shakur had wanted to organise the power of the marginalised, saying that “we are niggas and bitches, until we set this straight”. The potential power of the N-word is to reconnect black politics to the most marginalised sections of black communities.

When Obama used the N-word, he was definitely not embracing a political connection to the black poor. His use was rather benign, helpfully separating out individual prejudice from structural racism. In a time where we are constantly being reminded of the entrenched nature of racism in society, it is telling that his larger point is lost in the politics of respectability.

If Obama is serious about addressing the issue of racism, then he needs to move from words to political action that engages with the black poor. After all it is they who are “catching the hell” of American racism, trapped in expansive ghettoes, being gunned down by the police, and imprisoned at historic rates.