Richard Pryor’s Daughter Recalls Moment Her White Mother Called Her The N-Word During Heated Childhood Argument

Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor, Richard Pryor

Richard Pryor’s Daughter Recalls Moment Her White Mother Called Her The N-Word During Heated Childhood Argument

Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor, Richard Pryor’s daughter and a history professor whose work focuses on race, is opening up about her new memoir, Something We Said: Richard Pryor, a Notorious Word, and Me.

One of the book’s most difficult moments centers on an argument she had with her mother, Maxine Silverman, that reportedly ended with Maxine using the n-word against her when she was just 12 years old. Despite the pain of that moment and how it shifted their relationship going forward, Elizabeth says the incident never erased the love between them, even though her mom mishandled the racial dynamics of their 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,” Elizabeth told PEOPLE.

The book also highlights a gentler side of her mother: her habit of saving newspaper clippings, Jet magazines, Christmas cards and notes documenting #RichardPryor’s career and his relationship with his daughter — an unofficial archive Elizabeth now draws on for her research and writing. She says she’d rather approach conversations about race with curiosity than confrontation, and she connects her own experience to W.E.B. Du Bois’s idea of “double consciousness,” describing a kind of dual awareness she carries even around family she loves deeply. Something We Said is out now.