Real Nigga Real Nigger

By Matt Williams

For African Americans, the path towards racial equality has often brought us into direct confrontation with American systems of governance. Whether it is through incarceration, death, or the psychological chains of oppression, countless families have been destroyed and futures ruined because of white America's seemingly insatiable desire to destroy blackness. The question is why? Why does America's system of laws and social expectations create a nation hostile towards African Americans? By implementing subconscious concepts of white superiority as well as black inferiority into the social, political, and economic systems of America, white America was able to destroy the platform necessary for the healthy development of the black psyche. Real Nigga Real Nigger is a look into how these subconscious elements of racial superiority were created as well as how they work to keep African Americans in a perpetual cycle of poverty and psychological disenfranchisement.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jan 1, 1900
• ISBN: 9781098325879

Matt Williams

Matt Williams is best known as the creator and executive producer of the hit series Roseanne and the co-creator and executive producer of Home Improvement, one of the most successful programs in television history. Williams started his television career when he joined The Cosby Show during its premiere season and worked as a writer/producer on the show for three subsequent seasons. He also co-created the series A Different World. Matt’s work was nominated for Emmy and Humanitas Awards and won a Peabody Award for Outstanding Achievement in Television Writing. In film, Matt wrote or produced Wild Hearts Can’t Be Broken, Firelight, Where the Heart Is, What Women Want, Bernie, and The Keeping Room. Matt is currently an adjunct associate professor at Columbia University School of the Arts Theatre Program. He lives in New York with his wife, actress Angelina Fiordellisi, and former artistic director of the Cherry Lane Theatre.

Book preview

America,

The Night All Real Niggas Wept

Small circle it a chosen few

Lost a real one today

And I’m asking why? why did it have to be you?

Unable to cope with the news, questioning god

Searching for answers that don’t exist to explain this loss

Our anger, and sadness hurt, but its emptiness that haunts us

Nothing could fill this void you left

Because nothing could ever explain the depth

Of the sorrow that slowly crept

You died in the streets that night, and all the real niggas wept

R.I.P Nip Hussle tha Great

Notes

The terms white and black are parenthesized throughout the first chapter because of the falseness of their implications. While race undoubtedly exists within the social, political, and economic environment the idea of separate races is simply a restrictive paradigm used to manipulate people into predefined social, and cultural roles. The truth is that true humanity exists outside this racial paradigm and therefore the terms black and white are used ironically. The parenthesis are removed after the first chapter for ease of reading.The same effect has been taken with the term’s superiority and inferiority. Because ideas of superiority/ inferiority exist in relation to a flawed social, economic, and political system no ONE human being can be superior/inferior" to another.

For our purposes, the conscious mind (consciousness) is the collection of thoughts and ideas that individuals have cognitive control over. The subconscious describes the totality of associations that pass underneath the level of cognition and are undetected by the conscious mind. The psyche is the combination of the conscious and subconscious elements of the mind.

Finally, if we are to talk at length about white America it is important to define white America. In this text, white America will refer to the totality of forces (political, economic, and social) that directly benefit from the power structure of America’s racial hierarchy. It is not meant to include ALL white people (though all whites do benefit relative to blacks within America) but specifically those whites who are unable or unwilling to pay a part in changing the status quo of their own racial bias’.

Wordplay: A Nigger by Any Other Name

No other word in the English language conjures up quite as much hate and resentment as the word nigger. Even the written word on paper is sure to draw the ire and suspicion of readers. For African Americans nigger is an unfortunate reminder of white America’s deep-seated fear, anger, and hostility toward the condition known as blackness. Even as we progress further and further away from the divisiveness of America’s racist past, an undeniable racial tension still exists in America that is impossible to escape. An examination of the host of problems still facing black America is fundamentally incomplete without the understanding that the very social, economic, and political structure America is built upon only exists because of the platform of white superiority. The word nigger represents the installation of this white superiority (as well as the resultant idea of black inferiority) into the national psyche. By unraveling the conscious elements of the word nigger that work to suppress the African American experience as well as the subconscious baggage it levies upon the entire black community, we hope to expose the underlying truth of racial relations in America; THAT THE RACIAL FLAWS WITHIN AMERICA ARE A CONSEQUENCE OF WHITE AMERICA’S IGNORANCE TOWARD RACE, AND THAT THIS WHITE IGNORANCE IS SYSTEMATICALLY INSTILLED WITHIN AMERICA TO MAINTAIN WHITE SUPERIORITY OVER BLACKNESS. Our examination of how white America has successfully implemented a program of conscious and subconscious superiority must begin with the most fundamental aspect of any culture, language.

Language is one of the essential elements of the human condition. Within a society, all ideas and concepts about the world are transmitted from person to person through the use of language. In this way, language is a pillar of power within societies with the ability to demonstrate the greatness and beauty of the human spirit as well as its malice and monstrousness. When used responsibly it can be used to unify and progress societies in a singularly important way, but when used irresponsibly, language has the potential to destroy the cohesion necessary for a peaceful society to flourish. Any attempt to progress the racial identity of America must begin by understanding the limitations and dangers of language.

Language becomes dangerous when it is used to promote regressive, false, or destructive narratives and no narrative is as regressive, fraudulent or destructive as that of race. Here, the limitations of language stem from the fact that the color of a person’s skin is the most easily identifiable trait available to the human senses. The development of language to describe race traps the human psyche within the parameters of the physical world. The struggle of both the individual psyche as well as the collective national psyche is to try and develop an understanding of the world past the limitations of these physical senses. Countless theologies and religions have attempted to rectify this limitation with differing degrees of success. Unfortunately, the truth remains unchanged, the classification of people based on the limitations of language (race, religion, class, political affiliation, etc., etc.) sets a precedent of separation and inequality that has historically proven to be problematic to all civilizations because inevitably it is upon these fault lines that strain and tension eventually destroy the foundations of societies.

The reason that classification of people using language is dangerous stems from one of the primary purposes of language, threat detection. Being able to identify something as a threat and communicate that threat for other community members to keep people safe is a quintessential part of developing human societies. For early humans, being able to communicate and alert others to dangerous plants and animals gave them an advantage when trying to survive in harsh environments. Unfortunately, as language became more and more complex, humans eventually developed language to identify other groups of people as dangerous. Fundamentally, language is used to recognize and identify other human beings as threats through the concept of group identification.

Group identification involves the classification of people based on readily identifiable traits in order to determine if they are threats or not. For group identification to work, there must be a predefined set of characteristics separating US from THEM. Once a set of attributes has been assigned to a specific group of people, deviations away from that