Richard Pryor’s daughter Elizabeth is a scholar of the N-word
6/1/202644 min
Historian Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor has spent her career tracing the racial slur, the N-word, through slavery, Jim Crow, the civil rights movement, and hip hop. But what she didn't tell most of her students, even some of her colleagues, was that her father was the comedian who put the word at the center of American comedy – Richard Pryor. "I was a scholar of the N-word — and so was he,” she tells Tonya Mosley. Her new book, ‘Something We Said: Richard Pryor, a Notorious Word, and Me,’ is part memoir, part history of a word her father, late in his career, decided to never use again.
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First 90 secondsSpeaker 00:00
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Tonya Mosley· Host0:14
This is Fresh Air. I'm Tonya Mosley. About a decade ago, my guest, Elizabeth Storter Pryor, was on the road as one of the country's leading scholars of the most charged racial slur in American English, the N word. A history professor at Smith College, Pryor was giving lectures on the N word and the use of it during slavery, Jim Crow, the Civil Rights Movement, and the hip hop generation. But every night after the lectures ended, she'd have this weird reoccurring dream about her father saying something to her that she couldn't quite understand. Her father is the late Richard Pryor, the legendary comedian who in the '70s took this divisive word and made it the engine of his standup. Here he is in 1968 in his first comedy album with a bit about a Black superhero.
Speaker 21:04
And I always thought, "Why ain't there ever have a hero, a Black hero?" You know, I always wanted to go to the movies and see a Black hero. And I figured out maybe someday on television they'll have it, man. Like, you'll see on television, it'll come out. Da, da, da, da, da, da. Na, na, na, na, na, na. Na, na, na, na. Look up in the sky. [laughing] It's a crow.