When a white student quoted a line from Blazing Saddles, blurting out the N-word in the middle of class, Professor Elizabeth Pryor froze. In that moment, she was shockingly confronted with not only the most notorious slur in the United States, but the line quoted by the student was one her father – the iconic comedian Richard Pryor – had written. After the incident, Elizabeth dove into research to better understand the history of the word, and discussed it with her students and in her Ted Talk, “Why it’s so hard to talk about the N-word”, which has been viewed over 2 million times. During her research, Elizabeth’s own memories of the N-word rose to the surface, and she found that a reckoning with this word meant a reckoning with memories of her father, Richard Pryor, who skyrocketed to fame in the 1970’s, making the N-word a hallmark of his act.
Elizabeth Pryor now teaches a class titled “Richard Pryor’s America,” and her videos about the class have become hugely popular on her Instagram, @pryorhistories