N*gga Theory. Jody David Armour
Language, Unequal Justice and the Law
JODY ARMOUR
PROLOGUE
Nigga Theory: A Song of Solidarity
Call me a Nigga.
Call ME a Nigga: I utter these words as a political battle cry for the Black, damned, and forsaken—that is, for the staggeringly high percentage of poor black boys and men languishing in jail cells, for those selling drugs, gangbanging, or otherwise scrambling for survival and self-respect.
I say it because we have a fundamental divide that needs bridging. This divide is cultural fact as well as a social fact. It is an economic divide crossed by moral judgment. It is the divide between the haves and the have-nots, but it is also, for many, seen as a divide between the morally upstanding and the morally corrupt. This book will dismantle that distinction.
And it will dismantle it with Nigga Theory. So call me a Nigga With Theory. NWT.
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Call me a Nigga is what language philosopher J.L. Austin would call a “performative”—a form of symbolic communication that performs a social action, a “speech act” that doesn’t simply say something—it does something1. Phrases like “I pledge allegiance” and “with this ring, I thee wed,” and “I promise” epitomize linguistic bonding performatives. Nonlinguistic ones include flags (like Old Glory), personifications (like Uncle Sam), and melodies (like instrumental versions of the Star-Spangled Banner and America the Beautiful). In political communication bonding performatives like these unify and rally individuals; they create collective social actors and forge social identities. And re-appropriating ugly racial epithets like “nigga” and “niggas” can turn them into forceful bonding performatives. Reviled and revered rapper Tupac Shakur bonded with black criminals by expressly linking “brothas,” “Niggas,” and “criminal gangstas,” or “G’s” in the following hook, from his solidarity dirge, “Life Goes On”2:
How many brothas fell victim to the street
Rest in peace, young Nigga, there’s a heaven for a G
Be a lie if told you that I never thought of death
My Niggas, we the last ones left.
Despite having no criminal record myself, I say call me a Nigga to perform my solidarity with and rally political support for black criminals and convicts: those in my family, those in the poverty-stricken neighborhoods down the hill from my own economically gated community, and those in cynically de-industrialized rustbelt cities like my hometown of Akron, Ohio, where crime goes hand-in-hand with concentrated disadvantage. I also say call me a Nigga to promote unity and assert solidarity among blacks across moral lines of good and bad, right and wrong, wicked and worthy. And because a grossly disproportionate number of the black criminals we judge to be bad, wrong, and wicked are poor, I utter this profane performative to promote a necessary political alliance: an alliance between the statistically less “crime prone” black bourgeoisie and the more “crime prone” black underclass.
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The vilification of a “crime prone” underclass figures centrally in what I call “Good Negro Theory”: the values, beliefs, and assumptions that underlie efforts to morally and politically distinguish between law-abiding “good Negroes” and law-breaking “niggas.” In its place I offer “Nigga Theory.”
Earlier generations of civil rights advocates found that they were most successful—their rhetoric most effective—when they distinguished and distanced themselves from the most stigmatized elements of the black (for present purposes, disproportionately poor, law-breaking black) community and drew the attention of the public and policymakers to certain black people, namely, those understood by mainstream whites as “good,” “sympathetic,” and “respectable” (for present purposes, disproportionately better off, law-abiding black people). This political strategy—commonly called the “politics of respectability”—was practiced by civil rights era activists and rested on the belief that racial oppression can only be ended if black people prove to whites that they are worthy of respect and sympathy. Even if the basic social order is unjust and racist, this theory goes, blacks must show they look at the world through conventional moral lenses and aspire to the same moral codes as the white middle class.
Nigga Theory is a repudiation of Good Negro Theory and the politics of respectability on which it rests.
But first a quick word to those who might object. As part of my political practice, I have made my performative declaration, call me a Nigga, in many venues, under many different conditions. I have said it, or performed it, in prisons and intervention programs for juvenile and adult offenders; in black churches and before formal gatherings of black judges and justices; and in the company of scholars at conferences, in performing arts halls, university auditoriums, downtown law firms, alumni magazines, and on social media. In other words, I’ve vetted this invitation to bond with black criminals with three key audiences: 1) the objects of our criminal condemnations themselves, namely, the truly disadvantaged blacks who are doing time or still doing street crime; 2) the weightiest authorities on morality and justice in the black community, namely, the black church and judiciary; and 3) those who must morally assess black wrongdoers on juries, in legislative chambers, and at the ballot box, namely, ordinary Americans of all races and walks of life.
Some vehemently reject my use of the emotionally charged catchphrase, and they do so on one of two grounds. First, some contend that any sentence that wholeheartedly embraces the word “nigga” cannot be a progressive performative utterance and cannot unify Blacks or produce positive social change; I respond to their concerns in a chapter devoted to ordinary language philosophy and the N-word. Others object not to the word “nigga” itself but to my self-referential use of it—that is, they see the statement call me a Nigga as a claim that cannot be authentically uttered by a respectable law professor in reference to his own privileged black self. The following blog criticizing my exhortation succinctly captures this viewpoint and the righteous invective that often accompanies it:
Prof. Armour, I’ve met niggas. I know niggas. I have nigga clients. You, sir, are no nigga. First, you graduated high school, then you graduated college, then you became a professor. You’ve probably never even fired a gun, let alone killed anyone. Your son will never visit you in prison. You’ve probably never sold a single gram of cocaine, and I’ll bet a thorough inspecting would reveal no gang tats anywhere on your body. You drive a German sedan with GPS but not 22″ chrome wheels. You don’t receive public assistance, daydream about starting a record album, or have half-dozen illegitimate children you don’t support. You probably have a six-figure salary from legitimate sources. You are about as far away from a “nigga” as a black man can be. Hell, I may be more nigga than you.
So I say call me a Nigga despite not fitting this popular stereotype—despite my lack of a criminal record, my light-skin privilege (I’ve been called a yellow nigga, a sand nigga, and a Spic), my Ivy League diplomas, my respectable salary befitting the occupant of the Roy P. Crocker Chair at the University of Southern California Law School, my residence in the Black Beverly Hills, my three sons who attended exclusive private high schools and colleges, my respectable rims, my fluency in “talking White,” and my red-headed Irish Catholic mom. Thanks to my lighter shade, academic pedigree, chaired professorship, tax bracket, ZIP code, speech patterns, and mixed ancestry, I am not what cognitive science would call a “prototypical” nigga.3
If the sentence call me a Nigga were a statement of fact, or if the blood-soaked epithet on which it turns had a fixed meaning, which it does not, then perhaps I could not authentically utter it and perhaps its use could not produce “real” social change. But the boundaries of “nigga” (lower-case “n”) and “Nigga” (upper-case “N”), like most linguistic boundaries, are malleable and always up for grabs, and I, like many others, am repurposing the words as terms of art in an oppositional discourse that uses words as tools, tools that can accomplish two tasks, one critical, the other political: 1) I use “nigga” (lower-case “n”) critically, conceptually, and analytically to highlight and