The New Nas Joint Or Why You'll Wish You Were A Nigger Too

As some of you may know, this joint basically sums up my view on the "Nigger Wars" (I really hate the phrase "The N-Word." It's everything language shouldn't be--weak, evasive, passive and vague). Nas also gets to a very interesting aspect of black life--as much problems as we all have regarding race, I wouldn't trade being a Nigger for anything in the world. My old friend Joel Porter (aka DJ Renegade) once put it as follows: "By the time I'm through\You'll wish you were a nigger too."

I always, always believed that. Being black gives you a sort of knowledge, a particular and original view of America that most white people will never have access to. I'm not even talking politically necessarily. I'm talking about the unique feeling that you get around  1 A.M., when your at a great party, the D.J. throws on your song, and though you can't dance a lick, you come to understand that it really doesn't matter, that the real crime is not dancing at all. I'm talking about things that can go unspoken during, say, your tenure at Howard University, the ability to not have to repeatedly explain your every move, to translate your world-view. I'm talking about an intimate understanding of violence, the knowledge that bar-fights aren't actually fun, and when one dude punches another one in the face, there are no sound effects, and entire lives hang in the balance. I'm talking about running through Central Park in the morning and the mandatory nod you exchange with every black person that jogs past.

Though we war against it daily, it must be said--it should always be said--that it is a beautiful, beautiful thing to be here in this way, to be despised in this way, to live on the margins, just outside, to be a citizen of this country, and yet to know it in ways that it can't even know itself, to know it in ways that it simply refuses to know us. But that's white America's loss--not ours. Let us never forget the blessing of being held outdoors. There's a section in Nicholas Lemann's beautifully rendered The Promised Land, where racist whites in order to prove the loose, animal nature of their black sharecroppers claim that blacks routinely tell them,  "Boss if you could be a nigger on Saturday night, you'd never want to be white again." The "Saturday night" reference is meant to play up this idea of blacks as always partying, and never working. But as usual white racists miss the point. We are bigger than Saturday night. We always have been. We always will be.

Comments

DJ Renegade was one of my teachers in high school!!!

small world man...

Posted by dnA | April 25, 2008 4:11 PM

I just finished reading your article in the May issue of the Atlantic. As a person of color myself (Latina), I dont understand why you cant acknowledge how the lack of personal responsibility is destroying our cultures. Structural racism, the government, slavery, illegal immigration... have nothing to do with out-of-wedlock babies and fathers not being fathers.
What is so wrong with Bill Cosby addressing this issue?

Posted by Historybuff | April 25, 2008 9:05 PM

I read your piece on Bill Cosby in the Atlantic....you were so close yet missed the point. Rather I just don't think that you even realize the true potential and experience of our people. You can't look to statistics or other documentation to support or illustrate the collective black experience. I support Bill Cosby in his crusade because we are losing as a collective people. He has lived a life and undergone a struggle that YOU and I HAVE NOT! Many of us try to minimize the larger point and in the process his true accomplishments because we are afraid of the comparison. We are intimidated by the idea that we are actually capable of "ruling the world" And by the way, I am a descendant of African Kings and Queens. You can be just a descendant of slaves all you want.

Posted by baeyaki | April 25, 2008 9:35 PM

"Being black gives you a sort of knowledge, a particular and original view of America that most white people will never have access to."

This is one of the core tenets of the book I'm working on with our mutual editor and That Other Guy. Pleasestop giving it away for free, Coates! ;)

Posted by Evan Narcisse | April 25, 2008 10:05 PM

Historybuff-

Slavery has EVERYTHING to do with out-of-wedlock Black babies and absentee Black fathers. Rarely in this America's history of slavery were slaves allowed to legally marry and have that marriage honored (i.e. husband/wife were not sold off from one another, children allowed to stay with parents until adulthood, male/female slaves weren't treated as breeders to increase the plantations' capable work staff).

Over time, the adaptive response to this country's prohibitive/negative LAWS and practices as it related to black marriage and black parent/child bonding has resulted in what you see today.

And of *course* slavery nor any of the other factors you've listed are not the sole cause of the ills you've mentioned. However, saying slavery has "nothing" to do with what's happened to the Black family in this country is more than a little misguided.

Posted by slb | April 25, 2008 10:10 PM

Thanks Evan. Historybuff and Baeyaki thanks for reading my story. Sorry we disagree. But thanks for peeping in on the blog :)

Posted by Ta-Nehisi Coates | April 25, 2008 11:02 PM

Nas's flow is still splendid. And the argument in this song will grow more persuasive as the average quality of life (read as "quality of healthcare, educational resources, safety of living environment, and proportion of discretionary leisure time to economically necessary labor time") continues to increase for African Americans.

If I could choose the genes, culture, social class, era, and geographic location I would inherit before I would be born into the world, I would unhesitatingly choose 21st Century middle-class African American born into a U.S. city with a population of more than 500,000 African Americans. This combination would give me many opportunities to overcome unjust yet surmountable social challenges. It would give me more than a few opportunities to do something socially and morally heroic, iconoclastic, or courageous. Additionally, it would give me the best chance to experience a near-ideal combination of pleasurable and painful life experiences.

However, if I were limited to a space-time prior to the second-half of the 20th Century U.S., I might hesitate and deliberate more carefully. Though I would probably still choose an African's genes and an African or Africanesque culture, I probably would not choose to be dropped off in the 17th or 18th Century New America, or in the 18th, 19th, or even early 20th Century U.S. The social impediments and social attacks all African Americans endured during those eras too often caused their painful experiences to significantly outweigh their pleasurable experiences. That type of pleasure-to-pain imbalance might be good for poets, artists, or people who want to be social and moral heroes, but it's not so good for folks who just want to live small and quiet, though morally and socially respectable, lives.

Today, we African Americans live in a space-time almost all our African Americans ancestors would prefer over theirs. Though our society is hardly fair to most 21st Century African Americans, it's not intolerably unfair to most middle-class and upper-class African Americans. And I do doubt most of us would have to think twice about choosing to live our lives as 21st Century African Americans all over again now that we have an intimate phenomenological knowledge, knowledge of the many great pleasures and the few moderate pains, of the middle-class or upper-class 21st Century African American experience.

Posted by E.C. | April 26, 2008 12:55 PM

Let me clarify what I meant... Yes, I am aware that the break-up of the black family during slavery and Reconstruction contributed to illegitimacy...
But how do you account TODAY for men like Kweisi Mfume who have five kids with four different women. Or Jesse Jackson who has an illegitimate child...Or Julius Irving who doesnt have anything to do with his star tennis player daughter...

You are being disingenuous if you think the problem today can be traced back to 1865...

Posted by Historybuff | April 26, 2008 4:49 PM

NaS still owns the most hardcore song in rap music history - 'I Can'. This joint doesn't touch that classic.

Posted by DP | April 26, 2008 10:50 PM

Yeah. If you don't mind, I have to say, as a not very good Hegel scholar, what you say makes sense both on a human level and a philosophic one. (Not that it's particularly useful to compare--I just see the likeness.)

If you care about music, you know it's wrong, or at least partial, to be too white. In the poetic sense.

Hegel points out, the slave knows more than the master. His knowledge is more real, and it comes from being shunted. (His only problem, when he realizes it, is not himself becoming the partial master.)

And as most white, moderate, sensible Americans know, we ought ought to be listening to the beautiful, private knowledge that's obvious in the blues, in jazz, in hip hop.

It reminds me that Langston Hughes said, 'Besides, they'll see how beautiful I am/and be ashamed./ I too am America.

Posted by Mary | April 27, 2008 12:17 AM