Parable of a Nigguh

Parable of a Nigguh

Don’t act like you don’t know what a nigguh is, don’t go there because you know very well what a nigguh is because more than likely you are the very essence of a nigguh, especially you nigguhs who say don’t say nigguh, many of you have been the most niggardly in your behavior. Some of you who are now so holy have a history of killing nigguhs, robbing and raping nigguhs, doing the most horrible things to nigguhs, but now that you see the light you want to play holy joe and demand people not say nigguh. Well, nigguh, go say that to the people you robbed, murdered, raped, sold drugs to, pimped til their drawers fell off. Tell those people don’t call you a nigguh and see what they say. When we asked nigguhs to hug a thug, they said, “I’m not hugging no thug, I’ll slug a thug!”

As Dr. Cornel West told the NAACP, how you gonna have a funeral to bury the word nigguh yet you still act like nigguhs. More recently, your behavior was very niggardly in regard to selling out to Wells Fargo after you sued them for robbing nigguhs with their sub-prime loan scam, but for a few dollars you allow them to sponsor your national association of nigguhs convention!

Don’t say nothing to a nigguh because they take it the wrong way every time, without fail. Anything you say to a nigguh is taken the wrong way, misunderstood, misconstrued,

misinterpreted, misdiagnosed. Nigguhs have their own interpretation and definition of the English language, yes, it’s called Nigguh English. And half the words nigguhs use they don’t understand themselves, they just, in the words of ancestor James Brown, talking loud but saying nothing. For example, I asked an OG nigguh is he a rooster or a hen? He replied just like an ignut nigguh, proudly, “I’m a hen, pimp!” James Brown said, “Loud and wrong!”

The best thing to say to a nigguh is nothing, absolutely nothing, or as the Hadith tells us, “When you see the ignut say peace!” Even and most especially with your loved ones, it is best to just be silent or say peace. I remember asking a brother why he had to ask his wife whether he could come to an event. He didn’t even answer, he simply held up two fingers for the peace (in the family) sign. He’s right, if you want peace, don’t say shit, be silent.

I adopted this policy in my relationship with a female and it worked perfectly, because I saw no matter what I said to her was wrong, taken negatively, sparking an argument that was not my intention. So I just shut up or shut down. What’s the use when every and anything I say is wrong. If I should say, “I love you,” it is taken the wrong way or I must define what I mean or give a rationale for my past behavior going back forty years.

Some hip hop youth asked me to intervene with a male/female problem they were having, so I called a meeting. The two women and one man came for mediation. In short, the young man got down on his knees to apologize but was rejected, down on his knees pleading for forgiveness. One thing about nigguhs, they don’t forget or forgive, at least not another nigguh. Now they rush to forgive the white man for kidnapping, raping, robbing, mass murdering and enslaving them for 400 years. Yes, they want to let bygones be bygones with the white man. They recently were rewarded with a plaque for building the nation’s capitol. Imagine, they were rewarded but no awarded one nickel. At the ceremony the nigguhs were told their slave master was paid five dollars a month for employing his nigguhs. Amiri Baraka tells us not to accept rewards, only awards because that’s the money, as in reparations.

At the same time we forgive the white man, a nigguh will never forgive another nigguh. If you do the slightest thing to a nigguh, he’s ready to kill. Remember, we used to get killed for stepping on a nigguh’s shoe. We used to get killed for calling a nigguh black.

Now that the hip hop generation has made nigguh a universal, multiracial term, plus a billion dollar word, nigguhs don’t want to say nigguh. I said it before and I’ll say it again, Nigguh please!

--Marvin X

6/19/10

See his The Psycholinguistic Crisis of the North American African, In The Crazy House Called America, essays, 2002, Black Bird Press, Berkeley.