SOMETHING WE SAID

A famous parent and an incendiary racial slur.

Pryor, a Smith College history professor, builds this perceptive memoir around a very tough question: “Why is it so hard to talk about the n-word?” In 2010, a student of Pryor’s used the word when quoting from Blazing Saddles, a comedy co-written by her father, comedian Richard Pryor. “Instead of guiding the students and taking charge, I froze,” the author, who is biracial, recalls with admirable candor. Pryor became “obsessed” with the word’s history. Studying the evolution of the n-word’s “two separate meanings”—the slur ending in a “hard ‘er’” and “the one with the soft ‘ga’” that “Black people used with each other”—became a deeply personal project. The word appears in more than one of Richard Pryor’s album titles. His daughter notes that “reclaiming” the word enabled him to “distill the ugliest aspects of American culture.” Though she “never felt funny enough, or creative enough, or Black enough to be his daughter,” researching the word provided a “connection” with her late father. Her expert account of his career is complemented by memories of her own painful encounters with the n-word and page-and-a-half “interludes” on the word’s role in politics, culture, and the law; the latter are informative, though some readers will wish them longer. Recalling her father, she’s warm yet allows that “he struggled to show up as a parent.” But when she told him she was called the n-word at school, his reply—a tender, resolute “You are Black”—“tied us to each other and to other Black people.” She’s sharp on her father’s eventual disavowal of the word. In one recorded performance, his word choices suggest he might’ve read Frantz Fanon’s landmark The Wretched of the Earth.

A moving reflection on family, belonging, and language’s power to wound and heal.