Historian Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor has spent much of her career tracing the N-word through slavery, Jim Crow, the civil rights movement and hip-hop. But what she didn't tell her audiences was that her father, Richard Pryor, was the comedian who put the word at the center of American comedy in the 1970s.
"I was a scholar of the N-word — and so was he," Pryor says of her father.
As the child of a white mother and a Black father, Pryor describes her own relationship to the N-word as a "super complicated" one. She remembers teaching a college class in which one of her white students used the word while quoting Blazing Saddles — a film her father co-wrote. Pryor froze: She had vowed never to use the word in her classroom, but suddenly there it was.
"I [was] just kind of like like a deer in the headlights," Pryor says. "I was really worried about the Black students. ... Something I had never considered when I thought about teaching is what happens when the racism that we study and we teach comes in? ... How do I work through that in the moment?"
Pryor's new book, Something We Said: Richard Pryor, A Notorious Word, and Me, is part memoir and part history of one of the most divisive words in the English language. Late in his career, after spending time in Kenya, Richard Pryor vowed never to use the word again.
"One of the things I admire about that moment when he disavows the word is he said, 'This is for me. I'm not telling you what to do,'" she says. "There is a piece [of him] where he understood that the word had a function in Black culture. He does talk about, though, as an artist, losing control of what the word was doing."
Interview highlights
On her father's use of the N-word
[In] one of the first meaningful conversations I ever had with [my dad] as a little girl, he told me, "Don't let nobody ever call you that." And then he used it, and then his friends used it. ...
I think it's really important to emphasize that when I'm saying that he used the word that it was in the subversive way, that it was the language of protest, and that he was building on a Black tradition of protest, that Black people had used this word kind of as a slap in the face to white racism. You know, "We know how to take our punches and our knocks, and we're not afraid of this thing that you're trying to demean us as." And so bringing that use, the way that Black people perceived of the N-word, onto stage was really powerful in the 1970s.
On talking about the N-word with her college students
Teaching the word is still incredibly difficult. I have to say, the conversations are always hard, but I feel like it's important.Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor
Teaching the word is still incredibly difficult. I have to say, the conversations are always hard, but I feel like it's important because my students walk away knowing that this is not a conversation, like I said, about free speech. It's really about how how we interact, how we want to bring as many people as we can to the table. And if we do that, that means that we're going to be thinking about who we're sitting at the table with and how things will impact them.
On meeting her dad for the first time when she was 6
We were in Newark, New Jersey, ... and my mom is acting kind of ... nervous. And we knocked on the door of a hotel room, and he opened in a towel. And I was like, this is my father. Like, not only do I get a father, but I get this guy. What? I just felt like I won. I loved him immediately. Instantly. His eyes were so warm, and he was so handsome. And I just fell head over heels. … I saw my face [in his face]. ... He created a bridge immediately between us and invited me to cross over.
On vying for her father's attention as a kid
I wanted to be smart enough and creative enough, and I would try to show off. I did theater. I did improv. He would come to my plays and come to my performances. [I] tried to get intellectual with him, like when I was in college. And I had a Black awakening and he basically, like, sent me some stuff so I could awake Blackly, I guess. ... He sent me the documentary on Malcolm X that had been filmed, I think, in 1972. And then he sent me The Last Poets' [song] ... "N-words are Scared of Revolution," to listen to. And I did. I felt like he was inviting me into a secret world, and I wanted to go there. ...
At the end of his life, when he couldn't speak anymore, I would go over and read from the narrative of Frederick Douglass to him, and I could see that he was feeling proud ... of being read Frederick Douglass by me.
On Richard Pryor's upbringing with a sex worker mother and the first laugh that changed everything.
Oh, my dad. He told me a story about being 5 years old and, I don't know why, but he's wearing a little cowboy suit, and he was in front of the house and all the people were there, his grandmother, all the sex workers, and his father and his uncle. And he slipped in dog poop and they just start cracking up. And so he got up and he made himself slip in it again, and they couldn't stop laughing. And so he did it again and again. And it's pretty painful to think of the lengths that he felt that he needed to go to get their adoration and attention.
Anna Bauman and Thea Chaloner produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Meghan Sullivan adapted it for the web.
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