Nigger to Nigga: Not Bad After All

"Nigger to Nigga: Not Bad After All"

When some think about the word nigger they immediately think about negativity and some might even venture to say that it is a "bad" word. It takes you back to a time when blacks were oppressed and demoralized. When blacks were looked at as inferior and not worthy to obtain equal rights in America. But that was decades ago and it is now the 21st century. Not only have we changed the spelling of the word, by dropping the er and adding a, but the definition has changed also. According to Gloria Naylor, we have took our "past history of struggle and present survival against the odds" and transcended the word nigger into a "victorious statement of being". So a word that was used to depict "worthlessness" by whites was transformed by us to signify many different positive meanings.

The first meaning of the word is a boyfriend or male spouse. Many females refer to there significant others as their nigga. When talking amongst friends or even in general you can often hear them refer to their man as their nigga. In the movie Baby Boy by John Singleton the main character Keisha referred to her man as "her nigga" very frequently throughout the movie. My girl even constantly refers to me as "her nigga" and I don't receive it in a bad way I look at as a word of affection. In this context the word is used a term of endearment.

In addition, the word can represent a strong adjective to describe an achievement or accomplishment that a black person has attained. In my household when you heard "This nigga" or "That nigga" at the start of a sentence you already knew that what was about to be said was something of amazement. "This nigga just won 5,000 dollars" or "That nigga just graduated from Princeton" are all typical forms of the meaning of the word in this context.

The last and most common use of the word nigga in today's society is to describe a friend or someone close to you. When greeting a friend you might say, "What's up nigga" or more commonly used on the west coast, you might say "What's up my nigga" signifying a cordial encounter with an associate. Many other races might also use the word in this manner but it is only acceptable for Hispanics because of their increasing role as a minority. A Hispanic rapper by the name of Fat Joe often refers to other blacks as nigga, but is ok but he grew up around them in a low-income housing project and therefore has street creditability to do so. This is also the only meaning acceptable for a girl. A female might have a close friend that is a girl and refer