Here, expectations of politesse drift into melodramatic persecution disguised as civic concern. However, it is too delicate a business to decree that whites cannot even use the n-word when referring to it. As Jews may observe kosher laws, so too, America can observe a historically minded brand of politesse under which whites step away from a term that blacks use in a different meaning. The resulting "We can but you can't" situation is peculiar and fragile, but then, so is much of how human societies handle the ticklish synergy between past and present. Yet all will agree that nevertheless, whites should not be able to hurl the word around with impunity. I have heard one prominent black intellectual openly admit that he uses the n-word in private, which I took as poignantly vivid indication that the horse is out of the barn. Laura episode like Earl Ofari Hutchison's - that the responsibility for her transgression lies with blacks - are off-base as a call for action. Calls for black people to stop calling one another nigger are like calls to boycott the color orange and takes on the Dr. We know this because a white person isn't allowed to say nigga any more than nigger - upon which we are right where we started.Īnd yet we have to live with this very delicate state of affairs. It's just code for repeating that only black people can mean it the good way. Laura whose take on it all is "What's that all about?" And no number of books will make it otherwise.Īll books like this do is stimulate "forums," the highlight of which is usually a sly black man between about age 17 and 30 getting warm props from the audience for suggesting that there is a difference between nigga (affectionate) and nigger (mean). But among the others, Jabari Asim's The N-Word: Who Can Say It, Who Shouldn't, and Why actually embodies the black cultural sentiment on the word most vividly. Randall Kennedy's Nigger of 2003 is the best remembered because of its major publicity and the memorability of its title. The earnest books written in hopes of making it otherwise regarding the n-word have had, we can now admit after a decade, no real effect. No nation is a population of anthropologists, linguists and historians. It's an even older story among blacks than is often known: The affectionate use of the n-word was well established a century ago and before, and coon was used then in the exact same way ( ace boon coon meant "good friend").Īll fine, but the idea that Americans will ever understand this nationwide is fantasy. That's an old story among human beings: A Russian word for "guy" is muzhik, which started as meaning "peasant." Italians back in the day could use wop in the same self-referentially affectionate way. From both of these impulses, it evolved into a term of joshingly teasing affection. Blacks recruited the word partly as a reclamation and partly out of an inferiority complex born of oppression. She, like most Americans, doesn't get why black people can but white people can't. Laura Schlessinger was complaining about in her "eruption" on her radio show. It is a more delicate business, however, to decree that black people can sling the n-word all over the place while white people are burned in effigy for saying it. But even they would never dream of having a character actually utter the n-word the closest they have come is coyly ending an episode cold just as a character was about to do so. Matt Stone and Trey Parker have their cardboard cut-out scamps in South Park dwell on every imaginable form of scatology. Yet all societies have taboos, and the way we now treat the n-word is, in broad view, merely a sign that American taboos have shifted from the sexual to the racial. Today a non-black person calling a black one the n-word is treated as morally equivalent to photos of naked children being discovered in one's desk drawer. It's a delicate business to declare a racial slur taboo. John McWhorter is a lecturer at Columbia University and a contributing editor to The New Republic. The NAACP tried to symbolically bury the n-word in 2007.
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