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How did we get non-Black people to stop saying “nigger” and to start using the “n-word”?
No other word in the American vocabulary has sparked more passion, vitriol, debate and censorship than the word “nigger.”
It’s likely that just hearing the word made you cringe a little.
But one thing is for certain, non-Black people would still be casually saying the word “nigger” if it wasn’t for OJ Simpson.
I’m fascinated by the way little moments can have an outsized impact on the world. The way little decisions can snowball into unstoppable avalanches of consequence.
There are few greater examples of this idea in American pop culture history than the OJ Simpson trial. Almost 30 years later, we are still obsessed with the smallest details and side characters in this story. There are, literally, dozens of highly produced documentaries and movies about OJ’s eventual acquittal. Folks are still scratching their heads in bewilderment, asking, “What went wrong? Where did we fail? How did he get away with it?”
I’m not particularly interested in rehashing whether or not OJ did it because I think the obsession with OJ’s trial was always about more than the crime he was accused of committing. More on that in a bit.
OJ has managed to stay relevant to this very day. He has nearly a million twitter followers and videos of him doing random things ride the algorithmic wave every few months. OJ is the gift that keeps on giving —and boy, has he given us a lot.
We wouldn’t have the Kardashians without OJ; Jay-Z’s 4:44 album wouldn’t be complete without OJ; and most importantly, non-Black people would still be casual saying “nigger” if it wasn’t for OJ.
Technically, we should thank this guy: Chris Darden, the Black man tasked with prosecuting OJ for the 1994 murder of Nicole Simpson and Ronald Goldman. Chris Darden may be the most unlucky man in the history of American jurisprudence — but he should also be recognized as an unsung hero in meaningfully changing racial discourse forever.
It’s no secret that the OJ Trial — known as the Trial of the Century — stopped being about OJ at some point in the legal proceedings. Whether intentionally or by chance, the OJ trial became a proxy for our nation’s eternal debate on race — and through the course of the trial, it became, explicitly, about the word “nigger.”
When it was discovered that the lead detective in the case, Mark Fuhrman, routinely used the word “nigger” to describe Black people — and that there were recordings of him doing so, while bragging about brutalizing Black people — doubt was cast on whether or not the crime scene “evidence” he “discovered” could be trusted. Questions swirled about whether he planted the now-infamous glove to frame a successful Black man, married to a white woman, no less. Could the LAPD, notoriously cruel toward the Black community, even be trusted to conduct a fair assessment of the accused multi-hyphenate entertainer?
OJ’s defense made such a big deal out of this blockbuster revelation that the entire case became about these tapes — and by extension, the word “nigger.”
The prosecution hated this angle. Chris Darden and lead prosecutor, Marcia Clark, knew that the fix was in. The defense, led by Johnnie Cochran, was seizing control of the narrative by centering one of the bloodiest words in American history.
The prosecution was going to have to convince a majority-Black jury to trust the “integrity” of their star witness, detective Mark Fuhrman, after hearing him commit the cardinal sin of racism and break the Nigger Rule of 1968
The rule is simple: After the year 1968, the word “nigger” is to be avoided, only permissible when quoting someone else.
The rule is pretty intuitive, but Republican political strategist, Lee Atwater, gives it some helpful context in what has been called the “Southern Strategy” tape. This political strategy was designed to help Republicans capitalize on the racial hostility of Southern white people after the Civil Rights Movement. He said, “You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger.’ By 1968 you can't say ‘nigger’ — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.”
Atwater’s description is the cliff notes version of how the word “nigger” became politically unsayable as an insult. And in many ways, this development was great! For nearly 400 years, the word had been used to control, harm, demean and categorize Black people as a subhuman species — and, suddenly, the tide of public opinion had rendered it virtually untouchable in 1968. This is, largely, a testament to the incredible narrative success of the Civil Rights Movement. Being “racist” in explicit terms wasn’t cool anymore and the country knew it.
There are, however, a few problems still present here — one, the sinister and intentional abstraction of racism that Atwater describes, has forever changed the identifiability of racism and thrusted us into the era of what one author described as “racism without racists.”
Secondly, just because the word became politically unsayable in popular culture as an insult, doesn’t mean it completely dropped out of the American lexicon. It certainly hasn’t.
For starters, I was born in the early 90s and have been called a “nigger” in my lifetime — bigots still exist. Which means the word still holds a great deal of potency as a slur. For most Black people today, hearing the word is startling and angering because the dehumanizing intent is so clear. It’s mind boggling that, even after being told of the demeaning and lethal power of the word, some white people still want to use it.
It’s just a word, they say. It’s racist to be told you can’t say a word because of your race, they say.
The history of the word “nigger” has laden it with barbs so intractable that even hearing someone use the word to quote someone else using the word is unacceptable, today.
But this wasn’t always the case. Up until the mid-1990s it was common for public figures to casually blurt out the word “nigger” when quoting someone else or asking a question. The habit was so bad it makes Donald Sterling look like a saint — at least he called us “Black people.”
Back to OJ’s trial.
Johnnie Cochran’s plan to introduce these “nigger tapes” into the trial would make the word a constant part of the courtroom discourse. It would, inevitably, extend to the nearly non-stop news coverage of the case, and naturally the national conversation around America. Watercoolers, barbershops and dysfunctional family dinners would suddenly be littered with the word “nigger” — nonstop.
I’d like to imagine that Chris Darden couldn’t abide such a possibility. He later stated how much he hated the word and didn’t allow it to be said in his home. And so, he refused to say it in the courtroom — creating, instead, the term that has become the now-ubiquitous euphemism for “nigger” — the “n-word.”
Darden is making his case to Judge Lance Ito for why the tapes shouldn’t be included in the trial. The poetry, performance and passion are something to behold:
Unfortunately, not much of the actual courtroom footage from that day is on the internet; we have a short clip, the transcript and this reenactment from the show, “American Crime Story,” starring Sterling K. Brown as Christopher Darden and Courtney B. Vance as Johnnie Cochran. Darden’s speech, and make no mistake, it was a speech, is a soaring 3,370 word diatribe on why the majority-Black jury would be utterly and irreversibly prejudiced if the “n-word” was introduced into the courtroom.
Darden refers to the “n-word” five times. Never once uttering the actual word.
And, just like that, — around 10:15 a.m. on January 13, 1995 — in a deliberate refusal to say the most American word in the English language, Christopher Darden renders the word “nigger” unsayable. He creates a new Nigger Rule: The Nigger Rule of 1995.
He gifts the American people, in the most closely watched trial in history, an alternative and changes the course of racial dialogue forever.
That is, perhaps, the most incredible part of the story. Not only Chris Darden’s refusal, but also how willingly mainstream society adopted an alternative to a word so deeply rooted in our vocabulary.
A singular decision that snowballed into an unstoppable avalanche of consequence.