This is Fresh Air. I'm Tanya Mosley. About a decade ago, my guest, Elizabeth Storder Pryor, was on the road as one of the country's leading scholars of the most charge, racial slur in American English, the N-word. A history professor at Smith College, Prior 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 reoccurring 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 70s 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.

I always thought, why didn't ever have a hero, a black hero, man.

I always wanted to go to movies and see a black hero.

I figured out maybe someday on television, I'll have it, man.

Like you see on television, they come out.

Da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da.

Look up in the sky.

It's a crow! It's a bat!

It's a bat. No, it's super.

T' da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-ha.

And yet, for all of Richard Pryor's influence on American comedy and music and culture,, Elizabeth, never told a single audience in her

academic circles that Pryor was her father. Her new book, Something We Said, Richard Pryor,

A Notorious Word and Me, is part memoir, part history of a word that her father late in his

career swore he never say again, and that his daughter has been trying

to understand ever since. Elizabeth, welcome to fresh air. Hi, thank you so much for having me.

You're a leading scholar in the N-word. Your father is probably one of the most famous people

ever to use the word in his stand-up.

And here you are living this life, not telling anyone that he was your father.

I actually want you to read an excerpt from the book the first time you told folks,

...