The Worst Racial Slur, In Context
3rd March 2025
Thirty-odd yards ahead of me, a body lay on the sidewalk in a large puddle of blood. I joined a loose throng of locals, mostly adolescent males, walking towards the mishap. A burly black sergeant with a commanding air stood over the corpse of an Asian shopkeeper while several subordinates established a perimeter. It looked like the shopkeeper had been robbed, chased the felon outside, and was shot dead for his efforts. The big cop slowly scanned the young black males who had gathered to watch the unfolding drama. He seemed to pause here and there as if to memorise faces. Then he shook his head and snarled, “If I get my hands on the nigger who did this…”
He left the sentence unfinished, but the way he glowered at the youths in the crowd left no doubt about his intended meaning. We now live in an era when every instance of police brutality fast becomes a cause célèbre on TikTok. But back then, it was understood that cops would mete out street justice to those who committed heinous crimes like the one I’d stumbled upon. In a scene from the contemporaneous Joe Wambaugh series Police Story, a plainclothes detective at a crime scene gets on the police radio and calls for an ambulance. The uncooperative perp he has been questioning asks what the ambulance is for, to which the cop replies, “Because of the leg you broke getting into the squad car.”
Having no appointment to rush to, I studied the arriving auditors of unnatural death as they went about their business, photographing, measuring, dusting, and collecting evidence. The scene was, in its way, as hypnotic as the flashing lights—but it was not what I found unforgettable about that day (I’d seen dead bodies on sidewalks before, and would see them again). Rather, what stays with me even a half-century later is this: I grew up in the Brooklyn of Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing vintage, yet the first time I heard someone call someone else a nigger and really mean it, the word came out of the mouth of a black cop, who spat it at dozens of other young black men.