The New Nas Joint Or Why You'll Wish You Were A Nigger Too

As some of you may know, this joint basically sums up my view on the "Nigger Wars" (I really hate the phrase "The N-Word." It's everything language shouldn't be--weak, evasive, passive and vague). Nas also gets to a very interesting aspect of black life--as much problems as we all have regarding race, I wouldn't trade being a Nigger for anything in the world. My old friend Joel Porter (aka DJ Renegade) once put it as follows: "By the time I'm through\You'll wish you were a nigger too."

I always, always believed that. Being black gives you a sort of knowledge, a particular and original view of America that most white people will never have access to. I'm not even talking politically necessarily. I'm talking about the unique feeling that you get around  1 A.M., when your at a great party, the D.J. throws on your song, and though you can't dance a lick, you come to understand that it really doesn't matter, that the real crime is not dancing at all. I'm talking about things that can go unspoken during, say, your tenure at Howard University, the ability to not have to repeatedly explain your every move, to translate your world-view. I'm talking about an intimate understanding of violence, the knowledge that bar-fights aren't actually fun, and when one dude punches another one in the face, there are no sound effects, and entire lives hang in the balance. I'm talking about running through Central Park in the morning and the mandatory nod you exchange with every black person that jogs past.

Though we war against it daily, it must be said--it should always be said--that it is a beautiful, beautiful thing to be here in this way, to be despised in this way, to live on the margins, just outside, to be a citizen of this country, and yet to know it in ways that it can't even know itself, to know it in ways that it simply refuses to know us. But that's white America's loss--not ours. Let us never forget the blessing of being held outdoors. There's a section in Nicholas Lemann's beautifully rendered The Promised Land, where racist whites in order to prove the loose, animal nature of their black sharecroppers claim that blacks routinely tell them,  "Boss if you could be a nigger on Saturday night, you'd never want to be white again." The "Saturday night" reference is meant to play up this idea of blacks as always partying, and never working. But as usual white racists miss the point. We are bigger than Saturday night. We always have been. We always will be.