Overview
- Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor published Something We Said in late June and in interviews during early July said her white mother, Maxine Silverman, used the N-word at age 12 during a heated argument.
- Stordeur Pryor told multiple outlets that she raised the incident with her mother many times and that her mother never apologized for the slur.
- The memoir pairs the personal allegation with archival material about Richard Pryor, recollections of a 1979 Barbara Walters exchange, and the author’s framing of her experience through W. E. B. Du Bois’s idea of double consciousness.
- Stordeur Pryor is a 59-year-old history professor at Smith College and the third eldest of Richard Pryor’s seven children, and she says the book is meant to reckon with family memory, race, and parental shortcomings.
- Reporting to date rests on Stordeur Pryor’s account in the book and interviews, and the revelations are likely to prompt further public discussion about race, apology, and how celebrity families preserve or contest legacies.