Niggas as appellatoin: not Ni**er

A slide by Dr Keith Wagner

Robin Kelly calls nigga a condition and collective identity, the character of inner city space, poverty, interracial violence;

'Evident in the use of the word ni**er in Bamboozled are its contradictory valences that mirror its evolution in our contemporary society as an expression that has been reimagined even as it remains historically charged.' (2005: 356)

...those of the Black inner city have embraced the term nigga as an expression of their own antiauthoritarian, masculinist bravado and group solidarity.

The film indeed features hyper-multilayered narrative. The ingredients (yes, or elements in plain sense) include media industry, race, sex, stereotype, anti-stereotype and stereotyping, as well as the paired polars of whiteness-blackness and paired process of (de)whitening-(de)blackening. Is the n word an effective practice against discrimination or an actual slavery mind? Or is the fact that 'a woman is a woman, a coon is a coon' some ontological metaphor? Spike Lee gives no answer. In fact, the real world (whether academic or not) allows little probing into the inner city by outsiders, except, maybe, the White.