Richard Pryor’s Daughter Has Spent a Career Studying the N-Word
*Historian Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor, daughter of Richard Pryor, built an academic career studying one of the most divisive words in the English language, but she never told her students that the comedian who made that word synonymous with American comedy in the 1970s was her own father. “I was a scholar of the N-word and […] The post Richard Pryor’s Daughter Has Spent a Career Studying the N-Word appeared first on EURweb | Black News, Culture, Entertainment & More.
Black News 
*Historian Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor, daughter of Richard Pryor, built an academic career studying one of the most divisive words in the English language, but she never told her students that the comedian who made that word synonymous with American comedy in the 1970s was her own father.
“I was a scholar of the N-word and so was he,” she said in a conversation with NPR. Growing up biracial gave Pryor a relationship with the word that she has never been able to reduce to something simple, and that personal complexity eventually followed her into her own classroom in an unexpected way.
The moment arrived during a lecture when a white student quoted the N-word aloud while discussing “Blazing Saddles,” the film her father co-wrote. “I was just kind of like a deer in the headlights,” she recalled. “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?”
That collision of the personal and the academic sits at the heart of her new book, “Something We Said: Richard Pryor, A Notorious Word, and Me,” part memoir and part cultural history. “I was a scholar of the N-word and so was he,” she told NPR of her father.
What makes the story more layered is that Richard Pryor himself eventually walked away from the word. After traveling to Kenya later in his career, he made a public decision to stop using it. His daughter found meaning in how he framed that choice. “One of the things I admire about that moment when he disavows the word is he said, ‘This is for me. I’m not telling you what to do,'” Pryor said.
As a child, Pryor’s father gave her a warning she never forgot: never let anyone call you that word, even as he used it on stage as an act of cultural defiance rooted in a long tradition of Black protest against white racism.
She still teaches the subject today, and the conversations have never gotten easier. “Teaching the word is still incredibly difficult. I have to say, the conversations are always hard, but I feel like it’s important,” Pryor said, “because my students walk away knowing that this is not a conversation about free speech. It’s really about how we interact, how we want to bring as many people as we can to the table.”
MORE NEWS ON EURWEB.COM: ‘Why Me?’ The Day Richard Pryor Cried: His Forgotten MLK Speech | WATCH
Sign up for our Free daily newsletter HERE
The post Richard Pryor’s Daughter Has Spent a Career Studying the N-Word appeared first on EURweb | Black News, Culture, Entertainment & More.
.png?h=c12e0b96&itok=5DLPGmQb#)
