In it she has a poem, “Denigration,” that deconstructs the etymology of "Negro" phobia and some of the "neg" "nig" roots of words: “niggling,” “niggardly,” “enigma”,” etc.
Look at Harryette Mullen's Sleeping With the Dictionary. Nigger continues to be a charged word which people of all colors and ethnic persuasion invoke for myriad reasons. "Nigger, Nigger, never die, black face and shiny eye!" Here's Hermine Pinson’s response to the nigger chants of members of the University of Oklahoma’s now defunct chapter of Sigma Alpha Epsilon. Coon music launched the American popular music industry of the late 19th and early 20th centuries and sustains it today.Īnd in continuing for so long, maybe the denigration will be worn so thin from "nigga" that all that remains will be the affectionate connotation that black men gave it. The rant video uses nigga behavior to call out niggaz. Covers of their nigger rant are shown below. Political incorrectness became transgressive chic and the nigger head grinned with tongue in cheek.Īnd will continue as long as there is a nigger in consciousness to exorcise.Īnd continue as long as nigga profiteers like Sony and Universal Music corporations through lyricists and performers like Noel Fisher, Nicki Minaj, Kemion Cooks and Maurice Brown make bank. The white art establishment could then slip out from the strictures of multicultural etiquette. Their "positive black images," beginning in the 1960s, were the antidote.Ĭontemporary African American artists could signify all dey want, including to make negative black images the antidote to the "positive black imagery" stranglehold. When the black arts leaders were born, the bug eye, burr head nigga was still popping up in society and boring holes like swiss cheese into their psyches. The most immediate artistic tradition that these artists were evolving beyond was the "positive black imagery" mandate of the black arts movement.
(“Extreme Times Call for Extreme Heroes,” IRAAA, v. In the work of these sublime artists, the black object has become the black subject in a profound act of artistic exorcism. In drawing upon this peculiarly American repertoire of debased, racist images - the artists are seeking to liberate both the tradition of the representation of the black in popular and high art forms and to liberate our people from residual, debilitating effects that the proliferation of those images undoubtedly has had upon the collective unconscious of the African American people and indeed upon our artists themselves and their modes of representation.įor artistic tradition to evolve beyond realism to the meta-level of self-consciousness, political and formalistic commentary is a sign of sophistication, self-confidence, self-awareness and control. told IRAAA that the artists dealing with this subject were performing "a profound act of artistic of exorcism":
Most African American artists create nigger imagery as a form of satire or protest - for example, painter Robert Colescott’s coon caricatures, Camille Billops’ "Minstrel" series bead artist Joyce Scott's "Nanny Now and Nigger Later" series and Nigger Lips neckace and Michael Ray Charles’ and Kara Walker’s career body of work.Ĭommenting on the nigger in the psyche shufflin' down to the nigger in African American visual art in the mid-to-late 1990s, cultural critic Henry Louis Gates, Jr. The sarcastic head in African American visual art.Īfrican American visual artists have probed a “nigger” concept burrowed so deep in the American collective consciousness that it may never be completely expunged unless we become a totally racially amalgamated people - obliterate every trace of "otherness." The paradoxical head in pop culture rap music, in particular. The grotesque head, most notably, recently, on the University of Oklahoma frat bus. If So, The Nigger Will Never Die Juliette Harris with rant by Hermine Pinsonĭespite the advancement of colored people, the nigger continues to rear its three (or more) heads: The Nigger Head Deep In All Of Our Heads The Exorcism May Never Be Completed.