Historian Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor has spent much of her career tracing the N-word through slavery, Jim Crow, the civil rights movement and hip-hop. But what she didn’t tell her audiences was that her father, Richard Pryor, was the comedian who put the word at the center of American comedy in the 1970s.
“I was a scholar of the N-word — and so was he,” Pryor says of her father.
As the child of a white mother and a Black father, Pryor describes her own relationship to the N-word as a “super complicated” one. She remembers teaching a college class in which one of her white students used the word while quoting Blazing Saddles — a film her father co-wrote. Pryor froze: She had vowed never to use the word in her classroom, but suddenly there it was.
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