LogFAQs > #962654978

I suppose the idea behind this new idea that the problem isnt just using the N-word as an insult, but uttering it in any context, including quoting someone else is that the old approach was insufficiently antiracist. But it is a strange kind of antiracism that requires all of us to make believe that Black people cannot understand the simple distinction between an epithet and a citation of one. Missing that distinction, or pretending to, is at best coarse. And we are being instructed to carry on as if this coarse approach is a kind of sophistication.

Plus, the assumption that Black people are necessarily as insulted by the mention as by the use implies a considerable fragility on our part. An implication that I reject and resent. If all someone has to do to ruin your day is say a word even in the process of decrying it your claim on being a strong person becomes shaky. I made the same point last week in a somewhat different context, and I realize that some are affronted by my calling their fortitude into question, but I am mystified by how comfortable so many of us are in giving white people this power over us.

But then I may be missing the point. Maybe its that if a white person just mentioning the N-word is adjudged as lexical violence, subject to pitiless prosecution in the court of public opinion, then we have a kind of power ourselves. The tables seem turned. But there are other ways to exert power or effectuate Black uplift. Why include, alongside the power of exerting genuine achievement and brilliance from Susan Collins being named as the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston to the literary genius of Colson Whitehead a pretense of not understanding the difference between using an epithet and mentioning it?

Because a pretense it is. We only exert this power by performing delicacy. I simply cannot believe that so many bright, confident people are meaningfully injured by hearing someone refer to a slur. Obviously, its never been OK to direct the N-word at someone to demean them, but Black observers just 20 years ago were often fine with someone not Black uttering the word in discourse; the response among their equivalents today would seem to be an add-on, a new look.
If all this falling to pieces served some larger purpose, perhaps there would be room for classifying it as a useful new standard. If people thought, for example, that it would help make Congress pass a reparations bill or force the Supreme Courts right-leaning majority to rethink the Voting Rights Act, then theyd be making some kind of sense.

But none of that will happen, and this real life is all we have. Hypersensitivity for its own sake is self-destructive. It exerts a drag on the momentum of engaging in actual political activism, and even in our imbibing the wonders of this existence that we are all granted a spell of.
Yet an opinion like this one often attracts the tart critique that it is, in essence, a blanket condonation for use of the N-word. But that critique itself ignores the use/mention distinction, daring someone to call it out. If Im condoning anything, it is, specifically, the mention, within bounds of civility, of the N-word: in college classrooms, when reading material from different eras; in reporting, giving news accounts of people saying it; and in private discussions between Planned Parenthood staff members recounting what donors say to them in private.

Im open to the idea that some people genuinely dont quite see the difference between using and mentioning the N-word. But we have to have this debate and return some nuance to our collective view not pretend the difference doesnt exist. I look at this differently than India Arie, but Ill note that she acknowledges that Rogans mentions of the N-word werent racist, just, in her view, insensitive.

To those who would object and say they just dont want to hear the word, no matter what, the constructive response would be to point out that not so long ago, far fewer people felt that way about mention versus use of this word, and to await, engage and evaluate their response to that. Maybe one might even decide that their subsequent response is one we agree with. But acquaintance with the straightforward use/mention difference is, or should be, a badge of membership in a modern society. Anyone whos willing to process Black people referring to one another with the N-word, as a term of endearment or a form of word empowerment (and many, including me, are, even if we dont use it this way ourselves) understands that a spoken or written instance of the N-word can mean more than one thing. As such, they should be able to appreciate, if not embrace, that quoting a savory rap lyric or comedians routine that includes the word or just referring to the word to note its prior application is not the same thing as deploying it as an insult.
Our current nervous social contract on this word requires us to act as if there is no such difference. But all of us, Black, white and otherwise, can see past this. The sky wont fall if we admit it. Its time to stop putting people in the stocks for mentioning the N-word when theyve done nothing history will judge as wrong.