The unsayable black word is back in the US

At the end of that corking movie The Dam Busters, the rousing theme of which was part of the background music to the Fifties and Sixties, the hero (played by Richard Todd) is about to leave on his heroic mission when he is told by his batman that his black labrador has been run over by a passing car. It's a gruff British moment in the old Ealing Studios tradition, and the salt-of-the-earth batman is, in keeping with this, a man of few words. "Nigger's dead, sir," is what he says.

Gone are the days when a dog could be called Nigger. (For one thing, what would you shout if the brute was running towards the traffic, or if you wanted to bring it to heel?) And, most people would probably be inclined to say, a good thing, too. The word is unpardonably blunt and vulgar, and it was long used in a cruel fashion to remind its victims of their lowly place. You never hear it now, unless you are listening either to a diseased fascist or - some would say paradoxically - to a "who gives a sh*t" African-American rap songster. And even the latter crowd tends to de-toxify the original by at least spelling it nigga.

This is all on the verge of changing, if a black Harvard professor and a reputable New York liberal publisher get their way. Randall Kennedy's book Nigger is about to hit the book stores and, if all goes to plan, break America's single greatest taboo. Professor Kennedy takes his tune, as it were, from those same rappers - and their white as well as black admirers - who use terms like "nigger brother? for affection and solidarity. He thinks it is time to demystify the word, which he describes as "America's paradigmatic ethnic slur?. I think I can feel a huge row coming on.

Only a year ago in Washington, a white civil servant lost his job for using the word niggardly in connection with the city budget and its expenditures. The mayor, a lightskinned black liberal named Anthony Williams, freely allowed that the offence taken at the usage was the fault of those of his employees whose vocabulary wasn't big enough. But he none the less accepted the proffered resignation because, well, there are some lines that are uncrossable even when they aren't really there.

Every few months some sporting celebrity or public figure gets into trouble for using the word off the record, as it were, and has to pretend to be sorry and volunteer for "sensitivity training". The most recent example is that of Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia, who blurted out "the N-word", as some people still call it, in a public speech. (Since Byrd, one of Washington's leading pork-barrel Democrats, began his political career as a member of the Ku Klux Klan, I, for one, was surprised that anyone was surprised.)

Professor Kennedy's idea - at least the idea of his title - is not, strictly speaking, a new one. In 1964, black comedian Dick Gregory wrote an autobiography and entitled it Nigger. He told his mother that, every time she heard the word, she could think of it as an advertisement for

her son's book. (Mr Gregory is a funny guy. He used to open by saying to audiences: "Yeah, sure I know the South. I spent 10 years there one night.") But comedians are forgiven much. Mel Brooks makes free use of the term, in a carefully antiracist context, in his movie Blazing Saddles. Lenny Bruce had a favourite act, where he would point to faces in the crowd and say: "How many kikes we got here tonight? OK, how many spics? Dagos? Wops? Chinks?? People got the point. But even the daring Bruce, if there were black faces, would often say "boogie?. The film of his life restricts itself to this expression. Nigger is a hate word; a fighting word; a last-ditch word, and the American courts have sometimes ruled that its utterance counts not just as an incitementto violence but as an act of violence.

Professor Kennedy is a teacher at Harvard's Law School, and his book is an examination of the case law. If it had any other title, it would be just another attempt by Pantheon Books, and celebrated black editor Erroll McDonald, to expand the frontiers of discussion. But both of them felt it would be mealy-mouthed to dodge the issue and so, with a modest subtitle, Nigger it is. (The subtitle, The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word, is almost unbelievably coy and must be the result of some awful committee-meeting at the parent company of Random House.)

Already, a whole posse of black academics and journalists has joined the fray, saying that this will make the ghastly word respectable and usable, and will bring it back into circulation with a new, glossy imprimatur.

I think the risk of that is somewhere between slight and non-existent. No serious person will dream of employing the term casually as a result of such a book, and those making the fuss are those who suspect - wrongly - that millions of white people have been biting their lips and yearning to shout out the word all these years.

With luck, the main victim will be prissiness (those book stores that won't sell Joseph Conrad's The Nigger of the Narcissus or even Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn because they print the word in its historical context). And the other victim will be hypocrisy (those smarmy lawyers in the OJ Simpson trial who argued that the jury would be unduly influenced even if a witness was correctly reported as using the word). In other words, if you are capable of being shocked by the casual appearance of Nigger in a popular British war movie, then you must be capable of visualising a time when the potency of Nigger will be gone, and when Nigger really will be dead.