R.I.P. Dick Gregory

I once interviewed author/comedian/activist Dick Gregory, who passed away yesterday at age 84, and can say that it took only a minute or two to know, or to be reminded, that I was talking with a stone cold genius — and a misunderstood one at that.

His angle on almost every subject was completely original, his wit was fresh and irreverent and his ability to reach back into memory about his participation in iconic historical events was breathtaking. (For example, in making a linguistic point, he casually recounted a story about how he and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. faced down the notorious Al Lingo of the Alabama National Guard in ‘63.)

And politically correct he was not. When I spoke with him, he launched into a passionate defense of the word “nigger,” which he has put in the title of at least two of his books.

In my interview, which I conducted one-on-one on September 8, 2005, he used the word thirteen times! But not for shock value, Rather, he used it to make penetrating and subtle points about erasing history and about that relatively recently-invented euphemism, “the n-word.”

And his defense of the word is novel and persuasive. First, he notes that the “n-word” and “nigger” are two separate words with completely different etymologies and origins. The “n-word” he claims, was born in the mid-1990s, during the first O.J. Simpson trial. “Nigger,” of course, has been around for centuries.

“The word is nigger, nigger, nigger,” said Gregory in the interview. “And if that bothers any of you black folks, then you need to go pray, cause there’s some nigger down inside of you. Because if I say, ‘All you ho’s in this room, stand up.’ Anybody [who] gets upset is a ho, ‘cause I didn’t call your name.”

Gregory then took pains to distinguish the “n-word” from “nigger.” “The ‘n-word’ is an insult,” said Gregory. “...When white America invented the ‘n-word,’ it was during the O.J. Simpson trial. And they changed [nigger] to the n-word. Can you imagine the Germans, when they got so upset with Hitler and what the Nazis did to the Jews, they changed the word swastika to the s-word and concentration camp to the c-word?”

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