In fact, you couldn't even be sure that everything you had assumed to be an expression of your black, unfettered self — the humor, the song, the behind-the-back pass — had been freely chosen by you. At best, these things were a refuge; at worst, a trap. Following this maddening logic, the only thing you could choose as your own was withdrawal into a smaller and smaller coil of rage, until being black meant only the knowledge of your own powerlessness, of your own defeat. And the final irony: Should you refuse this defeat and lash out at your captors, they would have a name for that, too, a name that could cage you just as good. Paranoid. Militant. Violent. Nigger.

When people act like niggers, no matter who they are, the only thing to do is treat them like a nigger.

Yes, my eyes are closed to your light. I am a beast, a nigger. But I can be saved. You are sham niggers, you, maniacs, fiends, misers. Merchant, you are a nigger; Judge, you are a nigger; General, you are a nigger; Emperor, old itch, you are a nigger: you have drank of the untaxed liquor of Satan’s still.

In looking up the word in Webster’s dictionary I found the term “nigger” very descriptive: “a vulgar, offensive term of hostility and contempt for the black man.” I can’t think of anything that defines better and more accurately what our position toward the nigger should be than what the dictionary said. If we are going to be for racial integrity and racial purity... we must take a hostile position toward the nigger. We must give him nothing but contempt.

As James Baldwin says, You can only be destroyed by believing that you really are what the white world considers a nigger

In my own country for nearly a century I have been nothing but a nigger.

I realised that a nigger is not a person so much as a form of behavior.

He's a nigger! He's a nigger! He's a nigger!

There's no one way to be black. I'm black the way I know how to be. You have no idea who I am. I am black. I'm raising black men. Don't you ever think you can look at me and address me with such disdain.

All that they seem to say is 'nigger, nigger, nigger'.

They're going to arrest me for calling a black man a nigger?

Um...in point of fact there are plenty of people who use the word “nigger” because that is the word they use, not because they imagine it has any negative racial connotations. That’s precisely why I chose that word as my illustration.

My foes have called me bum, hoodlum, criminal. Some have even called me nigger. I imagine now they'll at least have to call me Dr. Nigger.

A colored is a very frightened-to-death Afro-American. A Negro is one that makes it in the system, and he wants to be white. A nigger, he's loud and boisterous, wants to be seen. Nobody likes a nigger. A black man has pride. He wants to build, he wants to make his race mean something. Wants to have a culture and art forms. And he's not prejudiced. I am a black American man. Now you go ahead and print it.