Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor has spent years studying race, language, and American history. Now, the daughter of comedy legend Richard Pryor is turning that lens inward.

In her new memoir, “Something We Said: Richard Pryor, a Notorious Word, and Me,” the Smith College history professor recounts a childhood experience that became a defining moment in her understanding of race and identity. Speaking with People, Stordeur Pryor revealed that when she was 12 years old, a heated argument with her white mother, Maxine Silverman, ended with Silverman calling her the N-word—a moment she describes as one of her earliest racial traumas.

"It was the first time someone I loved used that word against me," Stordeur Pryor told the publication, explaining that the incident fundamentally shifted the way she viewed herself as a biracial Black girl navigating two worlds. 

“It's funny, W. E. B. Du Bois talks about the double consciousness and I think there's even a double consciousness within my family, where they're 100% my family — I have memories of them from a child, from my 20s, from my 30s, at my wedding, etc. — and then there's this whole other element that I have one eye and ear open to all the time, a caution, that are operating in tandem with each other,” she shared.  

“Even with what my mom said, with the ways my mom mishandled — that's the light way of saying it — the racial dynamic in our relationship, she loved me. I've always known that my family has, but to be entirely honest, it's still not a conversation that I've been able to sink into and have with them perhaps on the level that I would like to,” she said.

Despite the painful memory, Stordeur Pryor says the experience does not erase the love she felt from her mother. Instead, she writes about the complicated reality that love and racism can coexist within families. She also notes that race was rarely discussed among her mother's relatives, leaving many difficult questions unspoken throughout her childhood.

Those complexities became the foundation for her memoir, which blends personal history with scholarship to examine the evolution and cultural weight of one of the most loaded words in the English language. As the daughter of Richard Pryor—whose groundbreaking comedy both popularized and later rejected the word after a transformative trip to Africa—Stordeur Pryor says she eventually realized it was impossible to tell the history of the slur without telling her family's story.

Now 59, Stordeur Pryor is a respected historian whose work focuses on race and citizenship in the United States. Through “Something We Said,” she invites readers to consider how language shapes identity, how family histories influence our understanding of race, and how difficult conversations can reveal deeper truths about love, belonging, and America itself.