"Negus"

I used a word for years without knowing what it truly meant to me.

I'm not proud of that. But I'm not going to dress it up either. I heard it in music. I heard it in the streets. I used it on people and people used it on me. I understood the context — or I thought I did — but I never understood the word itself. Not all the way down to where it started.

There are two versions that most people know.

The derogatory version. The weapon. The thing used across centuries to take something from a person every single time it landed. That one I understood by osmosis. Every Black child on British soil understands that one early. History teaches it without even trying.

And then the reclaimed version. The vernacular. The one that can be warmth or acknowledgment or shorthand between two people who share something unspoken — something the word alone can't fully carry but somehow does. That one I also thought I understood. I knew the code.

What I didn't know was the root.

Realisation came when I listened to Kendrick Lamar. To Pimp a Butterfly. "I." And he doesn't use the word as punchline or performance or controversy bait. He traces it. Gives you the etymology. N-E-G-U-S. Negus. An Ethiopic title. Means king. Means emperor. An empowering word that went through the machinery of dehumanisation and came out the other end stripped of everything it ever meant.

Someone took a word that named royalty, turned it into a slur, and then made the royal use the slur on himself.

That's a specific kind of brutality. Elegant in its design. Invisible to the person it was done to. And the only counter-move is to know what they erased.

But here's the part that took me longer to work out. The part closer to home than etymology.

Within our own community — within the culture — there's a distinction we make that people on the outside can't see because they look at us and see one flat thing. They project. They flatten. But from inside, we know the difference between being Black and being a nigger. And it is not a racial distinction. It's a mentality. A mode of moving through the world.

I was once the person who would look at another man on the street and in two seconds we'd be beefing. No reason. Nothing happened. Just proximity and unchecked ego and energy that doesn't know where to go so it goes sideways. That's a nigger mentality. Not a skin colour. A condition. The unexamined life running itself into walls. I thought i was looking but deep down, i was looking in the eyes of another, akin to myself. i hated what i saw in them because what i seen was the reflection of myself.

I'm not saying this from above anyone. I'm saying it because I was it.

And when the shift came it wasn't dramatic. But one part of it was simple.

I stopped accepting gifts I didn't want.

If someone uses that word on me with venom — with intent to reduce me — that is their gift. Their energy wrapped up and extended in my direction. I'm not signing for it. If you give someone a present and they reject it, whose present is it? It's still yours. You're still holding it. So keep it. Keep that in your heart. I don't want it in mine.

Now when that word comes at me like a weapon, I understand exactly where it's coming from. I understand what the person wielding it doesn't know. The violence doesn't land the way it's meant to anymore. Not when I know the root. Not when I know what had to be done to make a word meaning king into a word meaning nothing.

Every nigger is a star.

Finally, that's etymology finally finding its way home.