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Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor

Biography

Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor

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 latest 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.

Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor

Books by Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor

Something We Said: Richard Pryor, a Notorious Word and Me
by Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor - African American Interest, Biography, Cultural Studies, Memoir, Nonfiction

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. 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.