Richard Pryor's Daughter Examines His Use of the "N-Word"

Richard Pryor’s daughter is putting a spotlight on her struggles with the comedy icon’s legacy. Historian Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor is the daughter of the legendary entertainer, and her mother, Maxine Silverman, was a white Jewish woman from Boston. In a conversation with NPR, Pryor talked about her scholarly examinations of the “N-word,” a topic that hits close to home because of her famous dad.

“I was a scholar of the N-word — and so was he," Pryor says of her father.

Pryor's new book, Something We Said: Richard Pryor, A Notorious Word, and Me, is part memoir but also examines the history of the uniquely divisive and polarizing word.

"I [was] just kind of like a deer in the headlights," Pryor says regarding her work. "I was really worried about the Black students. ... Something I had never considered when I thought about teaching is what happens when the racism that we study and we teach comes in? ... How do I work through that in the moment?"

Later in his career, after a 1979 trip to Kenya, Richard Pryor famously vowed never to use the word again. His own conflicted relationship with the word played out in what he taught his young daughter.

“[In] one of the first meaningful conversations I ever had with [my dad] as a little girl, he told me, ‘Don't let nobody ever call you that,’” she recalls. “And then he used it, and then his friends used it.”

But she wants to examine our cultural connections to the use of that word with nuance, understanding and context.

“I think it's really important to emphasize that when I'm saying that he used the word, that it was in the subversive way,” she explains. “That it was the language of protest, and that he was building on a Black tradition of protest, that Black people had used this word kind of as a slap in the face to white racism. You know, ‘We know how to take our punches and our knocks, and we're not afraid of this thing that you're trying to demean us as.’ And so bringing that use, the way that Black people perceived of the N-word, onto stage was really powerful in the 1970s.”

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