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BRANDT WILLIAMS: Nigger. In the next few minutes, I'm going to say the word nigger more than a few times.

SPEAKER: Nigger.

SPEAKER: Nigger.

SPEAKER: Nigger.

BRANDT WILLIAMS: And you're going to hear other people in this story saying it too. Some will be Black, some White. There's something else you should know. I'm Black. If my race makes you feel more or less comfortable hearing me say the word, then you already have an idea about why we're doing this story.

(SINGING) Damn right I'm a nigger.

SPEAKER: When somebody calls you the N-word, they're saying you are inferior. You are to be a servant.

SPEAKER: I still have a fondness for the word. If I'm talking to a friend who is the same age, maybe say, hey, what's up my nigger.

SPEAKER: There's no equal word that Blacks have for Whites. There's nothing that means nigger. I mean, you can call us honky. You can call us cracker. You can call us white trash.

SPEAKER: White folks made up nigga and don't want me to say it. Ain't that a bitch? You made it up. You shouldn't have made it up?

[PHONE RINGS]

BRANDT WILLIAMS: What's it like being called nigger? You know, I don't ever remember being called that name, at least not in a hostile way. One time, some White guys yelled go back to Africa at me from a passing car. Another time, a group of White men in a bar accused me of stealing a wallet. One of them called me Jackson. But they didn't use the word nigger. So I decided to call someone with a little more life experience.

KARL WILLIAMS: Hello.

BRANDT WILLIAMS: Hey, dad.

KARL WILLIAMS: How're are you doing?

BRANDT WILLIAMS: Not too bad, how are you doing?

KARL WILLIAMS: OK.

BRANDT WILLIAMS: Good, good. My dad's name is Karl Williams. We share the same middle name, Lewis. He's 63 and spent his early childhood in Oklahoma. When he was a teenager, the family moved to Flint, Michigan. After living in Minnesota for nearly 20 years, he and my mom moved to Colorado. And I thought, well, maybe dad has an interesting story.

KARL WILLIAMS: I don't know.

BRANDT WILLIAMS: Dad couldn't think of a story right off the bat. So I agreed to call him back in a few hours. No more than ten seconds later, he called me back with a story that surprised me. It turns out somebody had called me nigger.

KARL WILLIAMS: Immediately, I was just totally, totally, totally upset.

BRANDT WILLIAMS: When my older brother and I were probably 7 and 10 years old, we got into a sandbox altercation with a couple of White kids our age. The father of those kids yelled at us and threatened us. My dad confronted him.

KARL WILLIAMS: Because I knew that his intent was to try and demean my boys and really to just undercut their manhood, their sense of self, and everything else. So I immediately took my boys by the hands and went back to the man's house, knocked on his door. And as soon as he came to the door, I remember letting him know, in no uncertain terms, with every bit of force and potential violence that I had in me, that if that ever happened to my boys again, there would be no restraint, and I would, frankly, I would kick his butt.

KEITH MAYES: Everybody seems to have a nigger story.

BRANDT WILLIAMS: That's Dr. Keith Mayes. He's a professor in the African-American Studies Department at the University of Minnesota. Mayes is in his mid-thirties. He remembers being called nigger by a White kid when he was 12.

KEITH MAYES: It felt funny. And it stayed with me for all these years.

BRANDT WILLIAMS: Did you get mad?

KEITH MAYES: I did, I did get mad. I wasn't furious, but I was mad slash confused.

BRANDT WILLIAMS: Mayes was probably confused because up until that time, he'd only heard the word used by other Black people, like his friends, and in the music they listened to.

[A TRIBE CALLED QUEST, "SUCKA NIGGA"] Being that we use it as a term of endearment. Niggas start to bug to the dome was where the fear went. Now the little shorties say it all of the time. And a whole bunch of niggas throw the word in they rhyme.

BRANDT WILLIAMS: Rappers convinced a generation of young African-Americans that nigger was cool, or at least a version of it. Take the E-R off the end of the word and replace it with an A, and nigga became a term of endearment. And before them, in the 1970s, comedians like Richard Pryor showed us that nigger was funny.

RICHARD PRYOR: Look, up in the sky. It's a crow, it's a bat. No, it's super nigger. I was born in Peoria, Illinois. That's a city, nigga. They give niggas time like it's lunch down there. You go down there looking for justice, that's what you find, just us.

[LAUGHTER]

ALEX JACKSON: I grew up, comedy-wise, listening to Richard Pryor. And I probably started using it then because it was hip.

BRANDT WILLIAMS: Alex Jackson is a stand-up comedian and a deputy fire chief in the Minneapolis Fire Department. He's 46. And for more than 20 years, he's been a professional comedian and firefighter. Alex grew up knowing the negative power of nigger. But from Richard Pryor, he learned the word could be funny. And like a lot of other African-Americans his age, he began to change his mind when Pryor did.

ALEX JACKSON: But I remember a concert that Richard did. And actually, it was he talked about he went to Africa.

RICHARD PRYOR: But there's nothing like going and seeing nothing but Black, Black people. I mean, from the wino to the president.

ALEX JACKSON: Which changed, and of course changed his whole philosophy on the use of the word.

RICHARD PRYOR: And a voice said, do you see any niggers? I said, no. And he say, you know why? Because there aren't any.

ALEX JACKSON: And that stuck with me, his philosophy. Friends that know me, actually, if they ever hear me use it, their mouths drop open. They're like, we very rarely ever hear you. You never hear me call another brother that.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

BRANDT WILLIAMS: In researching this story, I looked for the origins of the word nigger. Some scholars say it was derived from the Latin word for the color black, which is spelled N-I-G-E-R. Then I spoke with Professor Robin Lakoff. She's a sociolinguistics professor at the University of California's Berkeley campus. She believes nigger is a deliberate mispronunciation of the word Negro. And that, she says, is why the word has so much negative power.

ROBIN LAKOFF: And there's something about deliberately, knowingly mispronouncing someone's name. That conveys, I don't even care what your name is. You have so little power. You matter to me so little that I'm not even going to try to get your name right. You're that little to me. So it wasn't just the phonetics of the word. It was all that it conveyed about the power of one person to not even care about the name of the other person.

BRANDT WILLIAMS: During our conversation, Lakoff and I talked about how African slaves were robbed of the power of self-identity and that African-Americans have been trying to recapture that ever since. Indeed, we've been known by many names, Colored, Afro-Americans, Blacks, Negroes, African-Americans. Lakoff says when young Black people call each other nigga, instead of nigger, they're merely writing a new chapter in the African-American renaming tradition. But I had neglected to ask the professor an important question. You know, I didn't ask you at the outset of our interview if you're African-American.

ROBIN LAKOFF: No. But if I were, see, it would be altogether different. It would change the entire complexion of the discourse. If I were African-American, I could use the word with no fear. But since I'm not, I'm very careful about it.

BRANDT WILLIAMS: That's the other peculiar thing about nigger. It can make White people very nervous. Lakoff is a tenured college professor. She makes a living talking about words. Lakoff says the word when she lectures about hate speech. But she does so with caution. Her advice to other White people is, just don't use it. Lakoff says, sometimes, the most well-intentioned use of the word can cause problems.

Most White people will probably acknowledge that the usage of nigger is best left to African-Americans. Black people have essentially become caretakers of the word and have created rules about when and where its use is appropriate.

SPEAKER: Like, oh no, man.

BRANDT WILLIAMS: This is Eddie's Barbershop on 4th Avenue, south of Minneapolis. Barbershop owner Eddie Withers is trimming customer Teddy Simmons' sideburns and mustache. Both men are Black and are in their 50s and 60s. Anybody called you a nigger?

SPEAKER: All the time. But my brothers, when they say it, when a brother calls me that, then I don't look at it as derogatory. The White guy coming in calls me that, he's out of line. I don't use that word myself.

SPEAKER: But you know why a lot of times you don't realize how the word, how it offends African-American people? Because simple reason is that they don't say the word pretty as we do. They got to hear that R. I mean, that R should make us go, like, irate, innocent irate. You no-good nigger. Oh, man. And then he turned around, then he said, well, y'all use it. I said, yo, y'all don't say it pretty sweet, that's why. We got to hear that full R. When you hear us call each other nigger, you don't hear the R.

BRANDT WILLIAMS: But for many African-Americans, it doesn't matter how the word is pronounced or who says it. It's never ever appropriate.

WARREN EDWARDS: I don't even feel comfortable using the word because it causes me pain.

BRANDT WILLIAMS: That's Warren Edwards. He's a tall, cleanly dressed, dark-skinned Black man with a shaved, bald head. Warren leads an activist group called 100 Men Take A Stand in Minneapolis. He doesn't think the word nigger is ever appropriate for anyone to use, not even among the young Black men he mentors and interacts with every day. In fact, it took him a while during the interview to even say it. When he finally says the word, he spits it out. He has a look on his face like he's changing a dirty diaper.

WARREN EDWARDS: Because I had an uncle-- happened in Savannah, Georgia, in the 1930s-- who was dismembered because he confronted a Caucasian man about calling him a nigger. And they murdered my uncle. And I'll never forget it. So I lost loved ones who stood up against being called that word.

[BILLIE HOLIDAY, "STRANGE FRUIT"] Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze.

BRANDT WILLIAMS: He fought and died over a word. Of course, it was much more than that. Nigger was a tool to keep Black people in their place in the Jim Crow South.

JOHN O'DELL: Racism and the word nigger, it was given to us by Southerners, by people that we loved, not by people that we hated, not the mean, stereotypical sheriffs and the race-baiting governors. It was mothers and fathers. I've heard it said in church.

BRANDT WILLIAMS: John O'Dell was born in Laurel, Mississippi, in 1951. He now lives in North Minneapolis. John has written a novel based on his experiences in the South, called The View From Delphi. He has an uneasy relationship with the word nigger. John doesn't like the word. It reminds him of the ugly side of his childhood home. But he admits that the word has afforded him and other White people a kind of power. When he moved to Minnesota to work as an executive at a Fortune 500 company in 1980, he found that the word gave him an advantage up North as well.

JOHN O'DELL: They knew who I was. They hired me from Mississippi. I was a kind of a star stud. I was a young White guy who was good at public speaking. And that was really valued in this company of sales people. And I got a lot of promotions. And one of the ways I got attention, I told nigger jokes to liberals, to people who gave to the NAACP.

BRANDT WILLIAMS: And they laughed at his jokes. Of course, John O'Dell didn't bring the word nigger with him when he came here. It was already here. Black Minnesotans are no stranger to the word. Before she died last year, Minnesota native Bernadette Anderson shared her memories of Northern racism for an American RadioWorks documentary called Up South. Anderson, like many of the Black elders interviewed for the story, could vividly remember scenes that might make some think they were talking about the Jim Crow South. She remembered one night in Fergus Falls several decades ago, eating dinner with her husband.

BERNADETTE ANDERSON: But as I sat in the restaurant with my husband, this little boy came. He was sitting there with his mother, and he said, mommy, mommy, look at the niggers. And his mama corrected. I'm raising. My husband, sit down. I said, no, did you hear what he just called us? And she said, no, no. I said, oh, she's going to correct him. Those aren't niggers, honey. You don't say that. That's not nice. Those are darkies. Smile at the darkies, and they'll smile at you. And I'll never forget that. [LAUGHS] Drove me nuts.

BRANDT WILLIAMS: But what if Black people just decided to stop getting mad about the word nigger? I asked comedian and firefighter Alex Jackson what would happen if African-Americans one day look at White people who use the word and say sticks and stones.

ALEX JACKSON: Sure, after we get through talking about their mama.

[LAUGHTER]

Because you got to do something. And I tell you the truth, I've actually found sometimes, it is true, sometimes, I've had White people get more upset when you don't respond than when you do.

BRANDT WILLIAMS: But Jackson is not optimistic that African-Americans will be turning the other cheek on the slur anytime soon. The pain and awful memories evoked by the word nigger may just never go away. And there's one other lesson. As in the case with Rich Stanek, the word nigger can wreak havoc in the lives of some White people as well. Brandt Williams, Minnesota Public Radio.

[BILLIE HOLIDAY, "STRANGE FRUIT"]

(SINGING) Pastoral scene of the gallant South. The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth. Scent of magnolia, sweet and fresh. Then the sudden smell of burning flesh. Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck. For the rain to gather.