Niggas vs. Black People
Stand-up comedy routine by Chris Rock
"Niggas vs. Black People" is a Chris Rock stand-up comedy routine appearing both on his 1996 HBO special Bring the Pain, and as track 12 on his 1997 album Roll with the New.
The routine is a twelve-minute monologue about behaviors that are a subset of the African-American community. He describes "niggas" as a cohort whose behavior is usually detrimental to the image of other black people. "Niggas", he says, glorify ignorance and sloth, and brag about fulfilling any minor responsibility. Rock rejects the view that this image of blacks is purely cultivated by the media and stereotypes, at one point saying, "When I go to the money machine tonight, alright, I ain't looking over my back for the media, I'm looking for niggas! Shit, Ted Koppel ain't never took shit from me. Niggas have, so, you think I've got three guns in my house 'cause the media outside?"
Inspiration
In a 2007 interview, Rock explained that the inspiration for the bit came from the song "Us" from the 1991 Ice Cube album Death Certificate.
Retirement
The controversy caused by Rock's constant use of the word "nigga" led him to remove the rant from his show. In a 2005 60 Minutes interview, Rock said, "By the way, I've never done that joke again, ever, and I probably never will.
“Niggas vs. Black People” enters the record as stand-up comedy routine by Chris Rock. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Niggas, Black and People can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 13, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7033130. The first chronological checks are 1996, 1997, 2007 and 1991.
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This entry incorporates text from “Niggas vs. Black People” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.