In order to break out of the trap of mass incarceration, we, as a society, need to rethink the basic processes of our criminal justice system through the moral and legal lenses of Nigga Theory, lenses that expose a system corrupted by racism of an absolutely mundane, everyday kind, and corrupted at every level:
At the level of arrest.
At the level of charging.
At the level of factfinding.
At the level of trial.
At the level of sentencing.
It is the project of Nigga Theory to interrogate the system at every one of these levels in order to expose where racial bias lives in the criminal law and adjudication of just deserts.
—
Harvard University law professor Randall Kennedy, in Race, Crime, and the Law, urged morally innocent and law-abiding “good Negroes” to distinguish and distance themselves from morally culpable and criminal “bad Negroes”—a classic instance of the politics of respectability. This same wicked-worthy moral dichotomy runs through popular culture, figuring centrally in a famous standup routine by iconic black comedian Chris Rock (Bring the Pain, 1996), in which he paces the stage and declares that “it’s like there’s a civil war going on in black America” between respectable, law-abiding, lovable “black people” and disreputable, criminal, blameworthy “niggas.” He liberally sprinkles his long and sneering rant against morally condemnable black wrongdoers with the trenchant punchline: “I love Black People, but I hate niggas.” As James Boyd White points out, jokes, like all texts, are invitations to share the speaker’s response to the world, an invitation which we accept through our laughter,17 and implicit in Rock’s joke is a political invitation to sharply distinguish between a law-abiding and morally upright “us” and a criminally blameworthy “them.” It’s an invitation to niggerize black wrongdoers, which black audiences in packed auditoriums merrily accepted through peals of laughter and a chorus of “amens,” “uh-huhs,” and “preach!” No utterance in the English language more forcefully distinguishes and distances a respectable “us” from a contemptible “them” than the N-word, no word drives a deeper moral and political wedge between the worthy and the wicked, no epithet more utterly otherizes its referent.
Nigga Theory instead appropriates the N-word’s unparaphrasable power, the power it has to morally condemn and otherize criminals, especially violent black ones, and instead uses it as a term of art in a radically progressive theory of blame and punishment, a theory crafted to shake the foundations of all our conventional condemnations of criminals, including the most violent and forsaken black ones. I could adopt professor Kennedy’s more genteel language and call this brand of Critical Race Theory “Bad Negro Theory,” but “Bad Negro” doesn’t otherize wrongdoers as forcefully or condemn them as contemptuously as the N-word. In the hands of black speakers and writers, the N-word can be a jagged-edged assault weapon that draws blood or a healing scalpel that sutures the places where blood flows. I reclaim this reclaimed word by both denying any substantive moral basis for using it to divide the worthy from the wicked and, at the same time, embracing its healing, bonding, unifying force.
This book also uses the racially charged N-word to keep race itself front and center in the discussion of mass incarceration, and to pointedly reject the canard pushed by leftists, liberals, and conservatives that class trumps race in our criminal justice system. Yet more proof that race takes priority came across my timeline as I was writing this Introduction: a viral video, in which a phalanx of cops physically assaults a black student at Columbia University because he looked like he did not belong in those hallowed halls of ivy. I’ve had many similar experiences.
What do they call a black man getting a Columbia degree?
A nigga.
What do they call one who has already earned said degree?
A nigga.
What do they call one like me who’s a chaired law professor with degrees from Harvard and Berkeley?
A nigga.
Word to black America—you might earn fancy degrees and make big cash, but you cannot cash in your face, for the face of crime in the eyes of law enforcement and civilians alike is black. As Jay-Z puts it in “The Story of O.J.”:
Light nigga, dark nigga, faux nigga, real nigga
Rich nigga, poor nigga, house nigga, field nigga
Still nigga, still nigga
To signal its sharp departure in style and substance from conventional morality and respectability politics, as well as to keep the independent importance of race at all times front and center, the central argument of this book, Nigga Theory, adopts a profane, transgressive, disruptive, and disreputable N-word-laden rhetoric steeped in irony, inversion, and oppositional black art of the kind crafted by politically conscious N-word virtuosos like Pac, Nas, Cube, and Hov.
I understand readers who nevertheless inwardly recoil at every utterance of the ugly epithet. I respect the N-word abolitionists who have protested some of my N-word-laden performances, exhibits, and speeches because, in their view, the word’s racist roots make it inherently hateful and hence make some of my celebrations of its “virtues” misguided hate speech. I once shared that view myself. Like many others, I viewed the N-word as a variety of what the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) calls “fighting words,” words that “by their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace.”18 I quoted that language to Santa Monica police officers in my explanation of why a white male store clerk’s application of the N-word to me during a verbal exchange provoked a reflexive backhand. I avoided charges and a mug shot, but it was not my proudest moment. And still, despite my longstanding visceral distaste for the violent insult, I have become convinced—by many radically progressive black writers, performing artists, poets, philosophers, and commentators—of the unique rhetorical efficacy of the N-word. When black folk use it with care and precision to disrupt and displace dehumanizing discourses about them, they ultimately enact their own transgressive, transformational word work.
—
Nigga Theory refuses to reduce race to class (Rich nigga, poor nigga ... still nigga), while some progressive narratives carelessly conflate the two. “All of Us or None” is a terrific grassroots organization of formerly incarcerated men and women whose name is the perfect slogan for a politics that centers incarcerated violent black offenders and refuses to leave them behind; but for Michelle Alexander, its importance lies in its ability to encourage political solidarity between blacks and poor and working-class whites.19 For many on the left, the election of Donald Trump was a confirmation of the standard liberal account of why poor and working-class whites support racially illiberal politicians and policies. Economically distressed working-class white people, anxious about trade and lost manufacturing jobs and the decline in their overall economic level, especially after the 2008 Great Recession, felt financially “left behind” and so sought solace in the catharsis provided by hating and hurting Blacks, Latinos, Muslims, foreigners, in a word, others, and thus cast ballots for Trump to shore up their social status and threatened sense of social superiority, to give themselves a form of cultural and psychological compensation, a psychic benefit, that W.E.B. Du Bois calls the “public and psychological wage” of whiteness—an anodyne for their economic pain and suffering and anxiety.
Alexander agrees; she claims that conservatives garnered the votes they needed to create racialized mass incarceration by “appealing to the racism and vulnerability of lower class whites, a group of people who are understandably eager to ensure that they never find themselves trapped at the bottom of the American totem pole.”20 Thanks to the special susceptibility of poor and working-class whites to racist demagoguery, according