Nigger: A Dispassionate Discourse

There are so many issues bound up in this movement that it's difficult to know just where to start. I guess I should start with myself.

When I first read N-Word on Trial Again, I went a little ballistic and wrote in a comment:

[comment title:] Which "N" word?

Nifty? Naught? Nice?

NIncompoop?

Numbskull?

The word is NIGGER!

Stop being a damned language prude and use it instead of this politically correct bullshit!

Yeah, Yeah, I know, the word is egregiously offensive, but censorsing yourself to avoid offending those targetted by hate speech terms admits of a heckler's veto and makes it difficult to engage in a dispassionate discussion about the underlying issues.

And if we're going to censor the word nigger because it is offensive, then we're going to have to censor everything. There is nothing that cannot be found offensive by someone, somewhere. Here's a clue, Earl! The Taliban outlawed paper bags as offensive to Islam. Two Dr. Seuss books and Where's Wally have been challenged by reactionary idiots!

You want to ban the word nigger? Supposing for the sake of this argument that you could; what about the words that would be used in its place? Jigaboo; jungle bunny, dahkie, sambo, ape, etc, etc.

A city council once tried to ban the word Wal-Mart because they got tired of hearing citizens bitch about the chain opening a store in their community, so the citizens started referring to "big box stores" instead, until the council banned that.

Screw the reactionary assholes on both sides of the debate. I am not responsible for their reaction -- or overreaction -- to something that offends their simpe-minded prejudices. Get off our case and stay the hell out of our minds and vocabulary.

I, for one, will not cavil at the use of the word nigger. I will use it its place because I am a writer of creative fiction and words are my tools. Moreover, I am a student of communication, and I know a single word can serve different functions. And lastly, I don't give a good Goddamn what you think about me because I do not fear to use hateful terms in discussing hate speech. Quite frankly, I don't know you and you don't count for fuck-all in my life.

That having been said, I will now turn to examining the two functions of the word nigger as pertains to this commentary, and some of the factors that make it so incendiary when it is used hatefully. Firstly, there is the use to which the word is commonly put, as a racist epithet. (Not racial, in my books, because I recognize only the human race.)

epithet n 1 an adjective or other descriptive word expressing a quality or attribute, esp. used with or as a name. 2 such a word as a term of abuse.

Nigger is a term of abuse, but it could also be used to express a quality or attibute if the term is interpreted to mean "slave". Why should it mean that? I once wrote at the LISNews message board the following comment:

I have come to the tentative conclusion that the word nigger was used originally, in the 18th century, to denote civil status. You had: Mister, Master, Missus, Miss, Nigger; where nigger meant either slave or "property of" depending on whether you called him by his first name or last name. You can see this in action, somewhat, in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. When a slave changed hands he went from being Nigger Jones to Nigger Smith. Alas, I have no way of determining how much the use of the word had changed by the mid-19th century, and once Lincoln signed the emanicpation proclamation, the word became null and void as a measure of civil status. However, I surmise the word was still being used to differentiate between the slave Jim and Jim the free dude and blacksmith. If that surmise holds true, then after the uncivil war when the Klan started riding, the term would have been used solely as an expression of hatemongering, rather than from being a holdover from a rapidly dieing culture.

Now, you might be asking why it should make a difference. At bottom, it doesn't really, but there's a nuance; the meaning behind the word. The word nigger as used by supremacists and racists does not mean negro, or African-American, or black. Blacks is simply the subgroup against which this particular term is applied, as kike is applied to Jews. All such hate terms mean the same thing at bottom, however: subhuman; not one of us.

The word slave essentially means a domestic animal; one dictionary definition being specifically: a human chattel. (The word chattel itself just means a moveable property, as opposed to, say, real estate.)

So, when you call someone a nigger, you are either saying that they are undeservedly a free person and they are really not fit to be more than property, or they are subhuman. Either way you are saying they are just a base and low animal.

Nothing could more deeply attack a person's sense of self, self-respect, and human dignity.

Of course, most black people don't have clue one about any of these points. And yet, nigger is the second of the three most generally reviled words in the English language. The first being fuck and the third being shit.

The second function of the word is the same as for every other word: it's a label that denotes an idea or concept.

In its second function, the word nigger is used for pedagogical or philosophical discourse, such as this one.

As a seeker after knowledge on a journey of spiritual growth, I do not use the word in its first function. The idea of treating a fellow human being in such a fashion repulses me. By the same token, I will not shy away from pedagogical or philosophical discourse, and I will use the right tool for the right job. So where I write the word nigger, it's because it belongs there.

Two more things. Words do not have any power in and of themselves; the only power they have is the power we give to them. If a word sets you off, it's because you allow the word to set you off. You give yourself over to the anger you feel. And you, and you alone, are responsible for your actions and reactions. Moreover, my use of a hateful epithet is not a reflection or judgement of you. It's a reflection of myself. I can justifiably call you a right-winger based on observations about your political leanings, but the reducing a human being to the level of a beast in one's mind is utterly indefensible. Should I do so, it is not necessarily an accurate reflection of how you live your life, but it does show that I hold certain segments of humanity in such contempt that I cannot possibly have any respect for any human being, including myself.

Moving right along, lets look at this asinine idea that you can ban a word. Aside from my statements quoted above, if you ban a word people will just use a different word to mean the same thing; the entire almighty nation of the United States was unable to stop the sale or transport of alcoholic beverages with a freaking constitutional amendment. How can anyone possible expect them to do any better with a word? Especially in light of free speech provisions that allow for cross burning, and in light of a Supreme Court ruling that basically says: If you can't say fuck, you can't say fuck the government.

Besides which, does anyone really think that banning a word will have any impact on attitudes that give rise to its use? Adults grow up to be hatemongers, supremacists, or just generally intolerant because they are socialized to be that way by the socio-cultural milieu in which they grow up. If you grow up in the projects or in hispanic neighbourhoods you're more likely to consider white folks as the oppressive "man", whereas if you grow up in the Bible Belt you're more likely to consider anybody who doesn't pray in your church as a hell-bound heathen.

This doesn't mean that I don't emphasize with the disaffected. I can see their point about wanting to change a system that disfranchises them from their very humanity let alone from their basic citizenship. And I can understand why they want something done about it this very instant. Martin Luther King Jr. illustrated that point quite clearly during the Civil Rights Movement:

Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon of hope to millions of slaves, who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity. But one hundred years later, the colored America is still not free. One hundred years later, the life of the colored American is still sadly crippled by the manacle of segregation and the chains of discrimination.
--Martin Luther King jr., I Have A Dream, Lincoln Memorial, March on Washington, 28 Aug 1963

. . . And this was not mere hyperbole. The last case of slavery to be tried in America was of the Dial brothers of Alabama, and which ended in a conviction, and they were tried in the mid-1950's.

The hurdle King faced was in simply overcoming the inertia of a massive and sluggish system, but he found a lever and a place to stand, and so moved a world founded on exclusion and injustice. And some of the black preachers he had hoped would support him frequently spoke out against him. King (or his movement) was feared even by some of those who stood to benefit by it. "Wait," they said, in letters to editors and sermons from the pulpit. "Wait! Don't be in such a rush. We'll get there by and by." To this King replied:

For years now I have heard the word "Wait!" It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This "Wait" has almost always meant "Never." [...]

Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging dark of segregation to say, "Wait." But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son who is asking: "Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?"; when you take a cross-country drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading "white" and "colored"; when your first name becomes "nigger," your middle name becomes "boy" (however old you are) and your last name becomes "John," and your wife and mother are never given the respected title "Mrs."; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you know forever fighting a degenerating sense of "nobodiness" then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience.
--Martin Luther King Jr, Letter from a Birmingham Jail, 16 Apr 1963

By all accounts, that world has slowly been re-encroaching on the lives of minorities in America. Drugs laws that are clearly biased against ethnicity; the closings of factories in the U.S. in favour of sweatshop labour, and now an anti-immigration movement that is likely to fuel racist sentiments against dark-complected peoples of all groups.

So I'm with Dr. King on this one. Screw waiting. All waiting will get you is a more firmly entrenched system of injustice. Kick back at that system until it bleeds daylight, damnit! Kick back at it starting now! But you've got to kick it in the right place! And in the right way. Otherwise all you'll end up with is tired legs and out of breath.

And what is the place to kick at this system? At the words that are used to express the middle-aged attitudes that were laid down by the time the intolerant was ten years old? Hell no! The intolerant of today is a write off! You can't change his attitudes; they won't change until he's died! Nor can you change yours, but you can at least adopt new attitudes for yourself. Attitudes that will baffle and confound the intolerant who calls you a nigger because your reaction to his hateful speech will be completely unexpected and eventually baiting you will stop being fun. And it's a sure way to reclaim the dignity of the word nigger too. It's a method that King writes about at great length in his autobiography, and I heartily urge you to read that work and adopt King's method.

The next time someone says you are a nigger, smile at him with warmth and human compassion, shrug your shoulders and say to him, "Yeah? So? Everybody has to be something. I'm a nigger, you're a honkey, we're both still people. Have a good day." And then off you go on your merry way.

It's call passive resistance, which is not inaction in the face of evil or injustice, it is simply a non-violent response to violence. This is the method that was developed by Jesus Christ himself, and used by Mahatma Gandhi, and King throughout the civil rights movement. Both men used this as a lever, and standing upon their dignity as human beings, they moved worlds of injustice, pettiness, and hatred.

We are masters in our nonviolent movement in disarming police forces; they don't know what to do, I've seen them so often. I remember in Birmingham, Alabama, when we were in that majestic struggle there we would move out of the 16th Street Baptist Church day after day; by the hundreds we would move out. And Bull Connor would tell them to send the dogs forth and they did come; but we just went before the dogs singing, "Ain't gonna let nobody turn me round." Bull Connor next would say, "Turn the fire hoses on." And as I said to you the other night, Bull Connor didn't know history. He knew a kind of physics that somehow didn't relate to the transphysics that we knew about. And that was the fact that there was a certain kind of fire that no water could put out. And we went before the fire hoses; we had known water. If we were Baptist or some other denomination, we had been immersed. If we were Methodist, and some others, we had been sprinkled, but we knew water.

That couldn't stop us. And we just went on before the dogs and we would look at them; and we'd go on before the water hoses and we would look at it, and we'd just go on singing "Over my head I see freedom in the air." And then we would be thrown in the paddy wagons, and sometimes we were stacked in there like sardines in a can. And they would throw us in, and old Bull would say, "Take them off," and they did; and we would just go in the paddy wagon singing, "We Shall Overcome." And every now and then we'd get in the jail, and we'd see the jailers looking through the windows being moved by our prayers, and being moved by our words and our songs. And there was a power there which Bull Connor couldn't adjust to; and so we ended up transforming Bull into a steer, and we won our struggle in Birmingham.
--Martin Luther King jr., I Have Been to the Mountaintop, Memphis, Tennessee, 03 Apr 1968