Richard Pryor Put the N-Word on Stage. His Daughter Reckons with Its Legacy

BIANNA GOLODRYGA: Now, how a single word can shape history, identity, and family. Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor began researching the changing use and power of the N-word after an incident in her classroom with a white student. Growing up as a biracial woman in America, she always understood the word’s impact, but it wasn’t until later, when connecting with her father, legendary comedian Richard Pryor, that she began to process how that word influences questions of selfhood. Elizabeth joins Michel Martin to discuss her new book, “Something We Said,” and about what it reveals about language and family legacy.

 

MICHEL MARTIN: Thanks Bianna. Professor Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor, thank you so much for joining us.

 

ELIZABETH STORDEUR PRYOR: Thank you for having me.

 

MARTIN: You know, I have to tell you, I have followed your work for years. Your TED talk, for example, it’s been viewed more than 2 million times. Until you wrote this book. I never knew that you were Richard Pryor’s daughter. And I kind of got the impression from reading the book that you preferred it that way. You at least preferred it that way professionally. Am I correct?

 

PRYOR:Professionally and personally, a hundred percent. It was in doing this work and writing this book that I finally started to publicly and I guess privately claim my father because it, I don’t know, it was just awkward for me. 

 

MARTIN: Really? I mean, come on. He was one of the most famous,, certainly one of the, he was at one point he was one of the most famous comedians in America. He was certainly one of the most influential black comedians in America. One of the most famous, I guess, entertainers.

 

PRYOR: Well, it had – I mean, I’ve always been so proud of my father and wanted to claim him, but it was just,  there were so many intrusive questions when I was younger that people would ask me: do you know him? Are you close? How often do you see him? And then my father became as famous for his demons in some ways, as he did for his brilliance. And people would talk to me about that. And the best way for me to kind of protect myself – not from my father or my connection to him, but from people’s intrusion – was to start coordinating that reality off. And I didn’t do it until I really got into the middle of this work.

 

MARTIN: How I read the book is that you intended to start writing a scholarly treatise about the origin of the N-word, as we now call it. And you’re gonna tell us more about that. But the family story kept intervening, you know, kind of the way like a pesky kid keeps coming into your study when you’re trying to get your work done. Would you say more about that? 

 

PRYOR:I mean, well, first of all I, as I delved into the research, there was few things that I read that didn’t mention Richard Pryor. Okay. So he is – part of his groundbreaking work is to bring like the authentic authenticity of the black experience that he had growing up and speaking that way. And that included the black use of the N-word that many Americans had never really, you know, engaged with before. And he brought that on stage. And that two of his Grammy award winning albums from the 1970s have the N-word in the title. So his name came up over and over again. And in fact, this journey started in my classroom when a white student said the N-word quoting a line from a 1974 film, Blazing Saddles that my father co-wrote.

 

MARTIN: That your father co-wrote and he co-wrote. 

 

PRYOR: Well, what happened shocked me because I actually froze and had no idea like what to do. I really became sort of un– disarmed in that moment, in the classroom in front of my students, in real time. And it kind of catapulted me into a journey a three-pronged discovery really, because I knew something was happening to me on a personal level. I knew I had to be more intentional as a classroom teacher about how to teach the history of racism and pay attention to the fact that racism would appear at times in the classroom even inadvertently and how to negotiate that. And to think about, did I even know what this word meant and digging into that history. And it was in that history that I kept confronting my father more and more and in my own memories.

 

MARTIN: You’ve described sort of very movingly how – I hope you don’t object to this word – how traumatic in some ways it was for those thoughts to keep intruding into your scholarly work. I mean, you describe it very vividly. You write about this early in the book, and you said, look, “In a daze I walked back to my office trying to process what happened. How could a group of six letters so easily throw me off my game? As a black professor of African American history this was exactly the kind of racially charged moment I thought I should know how to handle. But instead of guiding the students and taking charge, I just stood there. Growing up with my white Jewish mother and going to mostly white schools. I never felt comfortable saying the N-word. It dried up on my tongue like dirt, even though it was a mainstay of my father’s comedy. But in academia, there was an expectation to say the word for the sake of historical accuracy known as the ‘mention exception.’”

 

And then you sort of go on to sort of talk about how it sent a chill through the classroom. And even you, you sat on a bench catching your breath. I just found that so profound that it had like almost like a physical reaction, can you say, why do you think it is?

 

PRYOR: Well, what I know is that there is a way in which this racism is not processed. There was no, I know growing up I had no space to even have the conversation, which is part of the reason I wrote the book is I was hoping that people could have a jumping off point to really understand that this isn’t – and I think trauma’s the right word – but this, that this doesn’t only represent this national trauma, this relic of racism past, if you will, but it has this intimate hurt, this intimate – and hurt, even hurt, diminishes what it does because this is clearly part of, you know, systemic racism. But it touches us in these ways that are so uniquely personal to us even as it has this national impact. And I think that’s what I saw in that moment that I didn’t really understand before it.

 

MARTIN: Say more about your own story, if you would. Your parents came from very different worlds. Your father was a young black comedian from segregated Peoria, Illinois. Some people know his backstory, you do go into it a bit in the book, but he was raised in a brothel. I mean, his grandmother was a madam. His mother was a sex worker. His dad was a pimp. He grew up, like you describe in the book, you know, seeing the people who cooked his breakfast and sent him off to school, having to have sex with strangers for their job. I mean, you describe this in really sort of vivid terms. Your mom was a white Jewish woman from Boston, his first serious white girlfriend. How did they meet?

 

PRYOR: They met in a nightclub called Cafe Wa in Greenwich Village when they were like 22 and 23. And they were on dates with other people and they liked each other better. Yeah.

 

MARTIN: Oh, okay. 

 

PRYOR: And that was that, 

 

MARTIN: And you know, you were born, there’s a picture of you of him holding you as a baby, you know, in the book, but you didn’t actually meet him until you were six, six years old? I mean, you have a really vivid memory of it. Do you, do you mind telling that story?

 

PRYOR: Not at all. 

 

MARTIN: They split up, obviously. They split up, obviously. So –

 

PRYOR: I mean, they split up pretty much right after I was born. And my mom took me back to her – you know, they were in LA and my father was making it in Hollywood. And my mom, you know, went basically with her tail between her legs back to her folks in Boston and raised me with them. And she wrote him a letter when I was about six years old because my father was not involved at all and said, how is it possible that I love a child so much and her father feels nothing? And a few weeks or months later or so, my father sent for us and we went to Newark, New Jersey to watch him perform. And that was the first time I met my father. And I met him in a hotel room when he was about to go on stage. And I, the second I saw him, I was head over heels. I was like, wait, this is what having a father is like, yes. I want this. And I was terrified. I was never gonna see him again because I hadn’t seen him for so long.

 

MARTIN: Would you describe the – what in your Ted talk, you call these moments of encounter –

 

PRYOR: Yes.

 

MARTIN:With the N-word. I wanna ask you two stories. Like what was your moment of encounter with the N-word in his work? But what was your moment of encounter with it in your own life? 

 

PRYOR:In my class, in my conversations, in my workshops over and over again, people would tell me about these unprocessed moments that they had with the N-word and not really knowing how to respond or what to do. And I came to call them points of encounter. And as I dug more deeply into my own life, I realized, of course I had them too. One of them was the very first meaningful conversation I had with my father. 

 

So like I said, I thought I was never gonna see him again. And then he appeared for my seventh birthday, like, which I was so shocked. And my mother was like, you know, tell your father what happened at school. Well, what happened at school was two boys had called me the N-word at the playground. And I, I got the sense that this was really different because my white teachers who always told me, you know, you know, you’re not stupid when the kids call me stupid. You know, you’re not ugly, when the kids called me ugly didn’t tell me I wasn’t an N-word when the kids called me an N-word. So I was like, what is happening here? So I told my father at this dinner for my birthday, and I thought he was gonna be ashamed of me for not, you know, being stronger and sticking up for myself. And he said, you know, don’t let nobody ever call you that. And he said, you are black, which I did not know. I knew I was Jewish. I didn’t think I was white because I didn’t know that either. White didn’t mean anything to me either. But he said, you are black and you are connected to other black people. And if anybody ever calls you or them this word, you’ve gotta knock them out. That was the direction the marching orders.

 

MARTIN: So how did you figure out that the N-word was such a big part of his work?

 

PRYOR: Well, I knew it was part of his work, but I didn’t know that it mattered. I didn’t know that he had a journey with the N-word, let me put it that way. That he was building on black power luminaries, that this was an artistic decision that he had walked off of a Las Vegas stage in 1967 and said, I’m not doing shtick or vaudeville anymore, but I’m speaking authentically, whatever that is. I am gonna be the real Richard Pryor and a truth teller on stage. 

 

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

 

RICHARD PRYOR, COMEDIAN: I mean, they accidentally shoot more — out here than any place in the world. Every time you pick up a paper, —

 

accidentally shot in the ass. How do you accidentally shoot a — six times in the chest? Well, my gun fell and just went crazy.

 

(END VIDEO CLIP)

 

And I didn’t understand that part of it, that that was connected. And then at the end of the seventies, when my father is at pretty much the height of his fame, he goes on a journey to Africa inspired by you know, Alex Haley’s Roots. He goes to Africa and he has this epiphany there that in the context of, you know, Kenya where black people are doing the most menial things and running the country, that the N-word really doesn’t mean anything outside of the white supremacy of the United States. That it has no meaning for him. And he vows that he’s never going to call another black man the N-word again. 

 

And he pulled me aside before he said that on stage and told me that he was never gonna call anybody the N-word again. And as far as I know, he never did.

 

MARTIN: Wow. So here’s where I need you to put your professor hat on, because one of the interesting things about the book is, this is a, a meditation into the origins of the word, how it became a slur, and what social meaning it has. Okay. So as briefly as you can, what is the origin of this word?

 

PRYOR: The word did exist and not exactly as a slur. In 1619, when the first, you know, in 20 enslaved people were kidnapped and brought to Jamestown, those people were referred to in the records as the N-word. But at that point, that word, you know, described a labor category, people marked by the color of their skin, involuntary laborers in perpetuity, you know, me, my children, and my children’s children. And then it really becomes a slur in the 1830s when black people become free and are still called this word. So this is less an indictment on black people being enslaved and more on a statement of the impossibility in this ideology of black people ever really becoming free. It’s an, it’s an assault, an attack on black prosperity. And that’s where you hear the N-word used as the slur that we understand it to be today.

 

MARTIN: There’s this other painful moment, When your white mother who clearly adored you and whom you adored uses that word during an argument, do you mind telling that story?

 

PRYOR: I had just found out some information about my parents and that I hadn’t known. And I came in and confronted my mother – at my father’s. And I came in and confronted my mother with it. My mother was pugilistic if she was anything, and she was a boxer, and she just would go low. And she, at the end of the argument, I think she was trying to go low by saying, you’re just like your father. And I said, I am. And that’s when she called me the word. And to me, I got right – it jarred me awake. Like, I was like, okay, the, we’re not in a fight any –like the, but my mother never stopped fighting. And actually she never apologized for it either. She wasn’t able to. And I do think there’s –

 

MARTIN: All those years?  I can’t believe that you were only like 12 years old or something like that? I mean…

 

PRYOR: I was 12. I was 12.

 

MARTIN: And you write in the book that you actually brought it up to her subsequently, and you gave her the opportunity to, and she never, she never did?

 

PRYOR: Many, many, many opportunities to. She couldn’t. Because of who she was. She just couldn’t. And I had to make a decision as her daughter. I know a lot of people talk about things like going no contact or whatever. But I had to make a decision that I was going to – she had a hard life and I was gonna love her the very best I could. But always, it, it, it, I think about it like the princess and the pea. And it was a, it was a hard knot between us that just never unfurled. Like, it just never cleared up in our entire relationship was a shame. Because you’re right. She loved me so much.

 

MARTIN: Why do you think all these years later, decades, actually centuries later, this word retains so much power?

 

PRYOR: I mean, it really is a representation of the racial and foundational racial, racist history of the United States in so many ways. And one of the questions I asked myself for a long time, I mean, I understand why – I do still understand the kind of ways that it’s vicious and used by, you know, racists. But why would black people want to use a word – the question might be – to subjugate us? And I think that’s a misguided question because the real question is why does it still resonate for black people to use among each other from certain places? And I think it is always going to be a statement against social injustice against inequality. And as long as those things are in place, this word is gonna resonate for African Americans. 

 

MARTIN: Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor, professor Pryor, thank you so much for talking with us. 

 

PRYOR: Thank you so much for having me.