"The Artificial Nigger" is a short story by Flannery O'Connor. It was published in 1955 in her short story collection A Good Man Is Hard to Find. The title refers to statues popular in the Jim Crow-era Southern United States, depicting grotesque minstrelsy characters. Like most of her other works, the story reflects O'Connor's Roman Catholic beliefs and acts as a parable. The dialogue in the first section, with repeated use of the "N-word (disambiguation)," identify the racism of the older character when he says there are no more African Americans in that town "since we ran that one out twelve years ago". (Page 102 of Harcourt Brace edition 1983).