Richard Pryor’s daughter Elizabeth is a scholar of the N-word

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About a decade ago, my guest, Elizabeth Storter Pryor, was on the road as one of the country's leading scholars of the most charged racial slur in American English, the N-Word. A history professor at Smith College, Pryor was giving lectures on the N-Word and the use of it during slavery, Jim Crow, the civil rights movement, and the hip hop generation. But every night, after the lectures ended, she'd have this weird recurring dream about her father saying something to her that she couldn't quite understand. Her father is the late Richard Pryor, the legendary comedian who in the seventies took this divisive word and made it the engine of his stand-up. Here he is in 1968 and his first comedy album with a bit about a black superhero.

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