In Conversation with Dr. Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor (History, Smith College), author of "Something We Said: Richard Pryor, a Notorious Word, and Me" (Simon & Schuster, 2026)
Join us in conversation with Dr. Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor (History, Smith College), author of Something We Said: Richard Pryor, a Notorious Word, and Me (Simon & Schuster, 2026).
From the publisher's website of Dr. Pryor's Something We Said: Richard Pryor, a Notorious Word, and Me (Simon & Schuster, 2026):
"Part memoir by the daughter of the iconic comedian Richard Pryor, part exploration of the historical and contemporary use of the N-word, this hybrid book peels back the curtain on the life of Pryor and interrogates the most perplexing word in the American lexicon, a word he helped popularize.
"The N-word is one of the most perplexing, controversial and misunderstood words in the American lexicon. It’s a word that Elizabeth Pryor has not only contemplated, it’s one that she has taught and observed up close. When a white student quoted her father and blurted out the N-word in the middle of a class she was teaching, Professor Pryor’s worlds collided. In that moment, she was forced to confront the history of the notorious slur in the United States, and her complicated relationship with her father Richard Pryor, who made the word a trademark of his comedy in the 1970s.
"As she dives into her research, her own memories of the N-word come flooding back in unprocessed memories that she hadn’t thought about for decades. In reckoning with those memories, Elizabeth goes on a more public journey of discovery of the messy and sometimes surprising legacies of racism in the United States. A braided narrative that seamlessly integrates the history of the N-word with Elizabeth’s own story of growing up the Black Jewish daughter of Richard Pryor, Something We Said follows Elizabeth as she becomes a leading scholar and teacher of the very word her father put on the pop culture map."
"A moving reflection on family, belonging, and language’s power to wound and heal." —Kirkus Review
"In SOMETHING WE SAID, Liz Pryor does what I assumed was the impossible, and that's conjure distinct and unexplored pathways to explore a word that's both my favorite and America's least and most honest, through a dexterous and deeply vulnerable symphony of memoir, critique, and celebrity micro biography of said word's most famous user." —Damon Young, New York Times Bestselling Author of What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Blacker: A Memoir in Essays
“Half memoir and half racial history, Elizabeth Pryor explores how the n-word shaped both the public and private worlds of her father, Richard Pryor, and how it defined her own sense of identity as his biracial daughter. . . . Moving, courageous, and intellectually rich, this is a work that reminds us we are far from finished reckoning with the word that has both haunted and defined American life.” —Michael Eric Dyson, New York Times bestselling author of Tears We Cannot Stop
Dr. Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor is Professor of History at Smith College. She "specializes in 19th-century U.S. history and race. Her first book, Colored Travelers: Mobility and the Fight for Citizenship before the Civil War (U. of North Carolina Press, 2016), is a social history of black activists who, long before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus, fought against segregation on public vehicles. Pryor argues that their protest elevated the cars, compartments and cabins of public transportation to the frontlines for the battle over equal rights in the 19th century. Her essay, “The Etymology of [the N-word]: Resistance, Language, and the Politics of Freedom in the Antebellum North,” won the Ralph D. Gray Prize for the best article of 2016 in the Journal of the Early Republic. Her next project, inspired by the article as well as her teaching at Smith College, is a historical and pedagogical study of the n-word framed, in part, by her experience as a biracial woman in the United States.
"In the classroom, Pryor is interested in questions of citizenship, race and racism and the history of U.S. slavery, looking carefully at how enslaved people's histories are remembered and who remembers them. Her classes are designed to help students make connections between the anti-blackness of the past and in the present. She is a recipient of a 2011 student-government teaching award and, in 2016, the Sherrerd Prize for Distinguished Teaching at Smith."
Find a conversation on NPR's Fresh Air between Dr. Pryor and Tonya Mosley about the new book here.