Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor in Person

Join us on Wednesday, June 10, as Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor presents her new book, Something We Said: Richard Pryor, a Notorious Word, and Me. She will be joined in conversaton by Jennifer DeClue.

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.

Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor is a professor of history at Smith College where she teaches courses on race, slavery, and one on her father, comedic legend Richard Pryor. She is the award-winning author of the article “The Etymology of [N-Word]: Resistance, Language, and the Politics of Freedom in the Antebellum North” and a 2016 monograph entitled Colored Travelers: Mobility and the Fight for Citizenship before the Civil War. Her viral TED Talk on why it’s hard to talk about the n-word inspired her forthcoming book—a hybrid memoir and historical exploration of the n-word. She grew up in Los Angeles and now lives in Massachusetts with her husband Jerry Stordeur.

Jennifer DeClue is Associate Professor in The Program for the Study of Women, Gender & Sexuality at Smith College. She is a queer studies scholar who specializes in black feminism, queer of color critique, film, and popular culture. She earned her doctorate in American Studies and Ethnicity from the University of Southern California and has been teaching at Smith since 2015. Her work has been published in the critical anthologies: No Tea, No Shade: New Writings in Black Queer Studies, Sisters in the Life: A History of Out African American Lesbian Media-Making, and Spectatorship: Shifting Theories of Gender, Sexuality, and Media. Her black feminist analysis of art, culture, and sexuality can be found in The Black Scholar, Palimpsest, TSQ, and GLQ. Her book Visitation: The Conjure Work of Black Feminist Avant-Garde Cinema was published with Duke University Press in 2022 and won Duke University Press’s Scholars of Color First Book Award. Jennifer has been awarded several academic fellowships to support her research including being selected as a Scholar-in-Residence at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, an American Association of University Women Fellow, and a Visiting Professor Fellow with the Slavery North Initiative. Jennifer also attended the Sewanee Writer’s Conference, where she worked with Jaquira Diaz and Aisha Sabatini Sloan on her current book, Visitor, or Narratives from the Hidden History of Northern Slavery.

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