LETTER FROM AMERICA: This a bit embarrassing really. Downright silly. But I suppose I'd better 'fess up. It all just proves Randall Kennedy's point.
I couldn't see his book on the shelves of Bethesda's largest bookshop anywhere. So the logical thing to do was join the queue and ask at the information desk. But in the queue were two large black men. And for the life of me I couldn't bring myself to march up to the desk and ask for a book called Nigger.
They might not know, you see, that the African American Harvard law professor had just published an erudite study of the history of the use of the "N" word and its new meanings, subtitled The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word. All I could see was the headline: "Irish Times reporter starts race riot".
I got it in the shop round the corner where, courage restored to the point of asking the question, a nice African American man grinned at my obvious embarrassment and brought me to the very shelf. I'm not alone in my discomfiture. Even before the book appeared, its uncomfortable title has elicited considerable hand-wringing among the mostly white staff of its publisher, Pantheon Books, where some executives have even refused to say its name. But the firm's executive editor, Mr Erroll McDonald, a Costa Rican who is one of the few blacks at the head of a publishing house, is unapologetic.
The aim of this new book, he says, is "to bring 'nigger' out of the closet, to out 'nigger'.
"My personal opinion about the word is that it allows for a certain amount of sanctimoniousness on the part of both blacks and whites," he argues. "Black people feel virtuous by invoking the pain of the word and embracing the victimhood that it suggests. White people feel virtuous because they say 'the N-word.' They don't call people nigger anymore. It doesn't mean they are not racist.
"This just all has to stop. People need to chill and realise the problem is not the word." The cancer of racism is the problem, he argues.
Mr Kennedy says that new uses of nigger by blacks should be welcomed. "I want to defang the word by making people knowledgeable about the word," he says. The new uses are gradually helping to exorcise the word's power as America's "paradigmatic ethnic slur". He is not so much encouraging its use as trying to make blacks less super-sensitive to it. But the logic is flawed. The word cannot be diluted. Parallel uses have developed, invested with a new meaning because of a clearly different purpose and context on the part of the utterer.
But at no point have they diminished the force of the term when used as a racist slur.
Patricia Williams, an African-American professor at Columbia Law School, objects to the title: "That word is a bit like fire - you can warm your hands with the kind of upside-down camaraderie that it gives, or you can burn a cross with it. But in any case it depends on the context and the users' intention, and seeing it floating abstractly on a book shelf in a world that is still as polarised as ours makes me cringe."
"When I show up on CNN, I get e-mails from racists calling me a nigger bitch, OK?" Julianne Malveaux, an African-American economist and newspaper columnist, told the Washington Post, "so I don't think its use is taking the sting out of it. I think it's escalating at this point. You are just giving a whole bunch of racists who love to use the word permission to use it even more, like, 'I am not really using it, I am just talking about a book'!"
The interest of the book lies not so much in the unconvincing case for the word's rehabilitation or in Kennedy's swipe at political correctness, but precisely in the exploration of that extraordinary flourishing of simultaneous meanings in a profusion that few words can ever emulate and which is rich in ironies.
Take the latest trouble that the Rev Jesse Jackson has landed himself in. He is being sued for intimidation by a prominent conservative African-American opponent who claims Mr Jackson and his son at an event recently taunted and harassed him as "a nigger". Their sense was clearly derogatory, implying his capitulation to white values.
Young people and black comedians have appropriated the word, led initially by Richard Pryor, and a whole new humour emerged in which nigger can either be a term of praise and racial solidarity, or a pitying expression of black identification with white stereotypes. The comic Chris Rock proclaims "I love blacks but hate niggers", decrying the tendency to live down to white expectations and the cult of victimhood.
"Man, why you got to say that? 'It isn't us it's the media'," he asks in one routine that no white could perform. "The media has distorted our image to make us look bad. Please cut the s**t. When I go to the money machine at night I'm not looking over my shoulder for the media. I'm looking for the niggers. Ted Koppel never took anything from me."
Mr Kennedy notes that African-American rappers and comedians do not concern themselves much with whether they are encouraging white racists or disarming them. "They say, 'We don't feel constrained that we have to burnish the image of the Negro - we think this is fun and we are going to do it'," he told the Post. "Frankly, I felt inspired by that." The word is sometimes used among black people, Mr Kennedy writes, simply because it is off-limits to white people. And yet there are good reasons, Mr Kennedy reminds us, why we must not be complacent.
America remains a profoundly divided society where racism flourishes. He tells the story of how, in 1988 local authorities in Indianapolis established a residential treatment centre for child molesters in an all-white neighbourhood. Until it closed in 1991 there were no objections.
It was then reopened as home for 40 homeless veterans, 25 of whom were black. Within days there were protests at the encroachment of the "niggers" and crosses burned on the lawn.
"The word 'nigger' still has a grotesque and deadly meaning," says columnist Earl Ofari Hutchinson.
But there is another side. "I think it is pretty fun," Mr McDonald told the Post, imagining customers asking a bookstore clerk, "Can I have one 'Nigger' please? Where are your 'Niggers'?" He added: "I am not afraid of the word 'nigger'." Ouch. Been there.
psmyth@irish-times.ie