by Randall Kennedy, author of "Interracial Intimacies"

It's "the nuclear bomb of racial epithets," a word that whites have employed to wound and degrade African Americans for three centuries. Paradoxically, among many black people it has become a term of affection and even empowerment. The word, of course, is nigger, and in this candid, lucidly argued book this distinguished legal scholar traces its origins, maps its multifarious connotations, and explores the controversies that rage around it.