Richard Pryor A Notorious Word And Me From Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor

Part memoir by the daughter of the iconic comedian Richard Pryor, part exploration of the historical and contemporary use of the N-word, this hybrid book peels back the curtain on the life of Pryor and exposes the complex history and legacy of the most perplexing word in the American lexicon, a word he helped popularize.When a white student quoted a line from Blazing Saddles, blurting out the N-word in the middle of class, Professor Elizabeth Pryor froze. In that moment, she was shockingly confronted with not only the most notorious slur in the United States, but the line quoted by the student was one her father - the iconic comedian Richard Pryor - had written.The N-word is one of the most perplexing, controversial and misunderstood words in the American lexicon. After the incident in her classroom, Professor Pryor dove into her research to better understand the history of the word, and processed it with her students, eventually emerging as a leading scholar on the n-word as witnessed in her popular Ted Talk, "Why it's so hard to talk about the N-word."The more she learned, the more Elizabeth's own memories of the N-word rose to the surface. Growing up the Black and Jewish biracial daughter of a groundbreaking Black comedian - navigating the world her Jewish mother showed her and the Hollywood her father shared - meant the word was part of the most painful, but also tender moments of her life. Her reckoning with this word meant a reckoning with memories of her father, who skyrocketed to fame in the 1970's, making the n-word a hallmark of his act.SOMETHING WE SAID: Richard Pryor, a Notorious Word and Me is a hybrid: part memoir of the daughter of a legendary comedian, part exploration of the historical and contemporary use of the n-word, seamlessly braided together. Elizabeth not only peels back the curtain on life with Richard Pryor, a comedian Jerry Seinfeld has called the "Picasso of our profession," but also our country's legacy of racism and Black resilience.


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