Hearing What We See: Censoring “Nigga,” Vernaculars, and African American Agentic Subjects

Abstract

Instead of analyzing the controversy through the politics of resignification, this article examines controversies involving the uses of words with the phoneme nigg – as part of a larger vernacular discourse and rhetoric. It proposes that the difference between “nigger” and “nigga” as suggested by the African American hip hop community is both phonetically not heard and rhetorically disregarded. This mishearing is not a mere mistake, but a symptom and an effect of positioning African American subjects as always already a victim, yet subject to Western standards of speaking and occularcentric ways of hearing. The article concludes that this controversy could be more productively articulated to vernacular rhetorical politics that challenge the multiculturalist, liberal acceptance of only people of color who conform to certain styles of speaking.