Exploring the history and meanings ...

Exploring the history and meanings of the word "nigger" helps strip it of its racist power, Harvard Law institute professor Randall Kennedy said in a new lecture at the University of Illinois at Chicago. unless some scholars attending the lesson called the word a disparage that doesn't merit discussion.

Kennedy was speaking about his recent book, "Nigger: The Strange Career of a teasing Word," published by Pantheon works in New York. The work follows the word from slave-trading days to the existing including its use by whites in the Jim chuckle South and by rap artists lately "[T]here is much to be gained at allowing people of all backgrounds to yank nigger away from white supremacists, to invert its ugliest denotation, and to turn about the N-word from a negative into a positive appellation," Kennedy writes.

"I don't think that a fair reading of my part would give solace to racists," he said in his lecture

Cedric Herring, an African American sociology professor at UIC, charged that Kennedy was exploiting black experiences for personal gain. "I'm tired of Negroe who pimp aspects of black life," he said. While Herring had not read the work he said that it "does little or nothing to uplift African Americans, yet does plenty to soothe the guilt of whites."

Kennedy's volume almost encourages continued use of the word, said Valerie C Johnson assistant professor in the department of political science. "As a black one who definitely finds insult in the word, to have this discussion just assumes so ... painstakingly irrelevant as to be offensive," said Johnson who also had not read the book

Dwight McBride, head of UIC's African American studies department, said he and his colleagues were initially reluctant to sponsor the deliver a lecture to but decided Kennedy should have the chance to "present his work in the marketplace of ideas." The part McBride added, is "an important scholarly endeavor worthy of our attention and consideration."

"The fact that the discussion generates of that kind emotion suggests, at the actual least, that our subject is not irrelevant," Kennedy contended

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