kids to demean each other in this way. Of course they’ll never understand what we’re trying to accomplish, but that shouldn’t stop us from stepping up to the plate and showing some leadership.” He agreed with me, but he also wanted to remind me that these kids had no racist intent toward one another; they were all buddies. The N-word, he continued, meant something different to them—certainly different than if it came from the mouth of a white person. I understood fully. I’d heard this argument many times before. It was old hat. In fact, I was well-aware of Randall Kennedy’s controversial book— Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word and some of the questionable claims made by the Harvard professor. Here’s just one of those claims: “It (the N-word),” Kennedy says, “can be used right now to terrorize and demean people. It can also be used to say you’re my man, to show solidarity, to satirize racists and put them down.”1
Here’s where I still have trouble with this word. Just listen to Kennedy. If you’re at all like me, you might find the good professor’s claims that we are satirizing racists by using the N-word to be, well, odd not to mention flat-out irresponsible. Is it okay to be a little self-deprecating? I’d say yes, (I’ve done it plenty of times by telling my students that I’m Irish-American and supposed to be an accomplished drinker) but there’s a wee difference between poking fun at oneself as opposed to demeaning oneself with one of the filthiest words in the English language. My guess is that any racist, worth his weight in excrement, would be delighted to see his victims pick up this putrid torch and carry it forward. Moreover, wouldn’t the proliferation of the N-word among African Americans be a victory for the racist? Wouldn’t the victims be doing the bigot’s job for him? It sure looks that way to me, but maybe I’m missing something.
Kennedy needs to be told that the whole satirizing the perpetrator angle has been tried before. A group of Native Americans, attending the University of Northern Colorado, tried it back in 2002. Absolutely fed up with the racist names and mascots, used at various schools and with professional sports teams, that mocked their rich heritage (the Braves, the Chiefs, the Redskins, the Redmen, the Savages, the Indians and the Seminoles) the students decided to take action. When it came time to select a mascot for their intramural basketball team, they got together and struck back at the man. Struck hard. These enterprising young minds came up with the concept of a white guy, complete with a suit, a tie, a briefcase and a half-cocked grin. They called themselves The Fighting Whities.2 Their motto, “Everythang’s gonna be all white!”3 But they didn’t stop there. The students slapped their white man logo onto t-shirts and other products like mugs and buttons. They were the talk of campus, not to mention the nation. How’s that for turning the tables on the racists out there?
Now, you’d think that whitie would have sat down and pondered this turn of events—said to himself, Gee, it doesn’t feel so great being somebody’s lousy mascot. I feel humiliated. Now I understand what it’s like to be degraded and dehumanized. Gosh, I’d better do something about it. I know: I’ll apologize to all of my minority friends for the years my race has put others down, and then I’ll dedicate myself to… I’m going to stop here. You know darn well that didn’t happen. I know darn well that didn’t happen. I know first-hand, because I put the Fighting Whities logo and product line up on a Power Point every semester, and show it to my students, the vast majority of whom are white. You know what they do? They laugh. That’s right, they laugh. They’re anything but offended or humiliated; in fact, they love the concept of Hugh Beaumont stirring up excitement in a gym on a Friday night. A few of my students can’t wait to get home to order a t-shirt or a mug. In fact, so many whites felt this way back in 2002 that the Northern Colorado students were able to raise over $100,000, most of which they donated straight to the cause of minority scholarships. While it was nice to raise a little cash for those less fortunate (a small victory in itself, I suppose), their main objective failed—and that objective was to incense whites. Get them to hit the airwaves in order to stop this Fighting Whites nonsense. That simply did not happen.
Similarly, if Kennedy thinks that, by liberally using the N-word in comedy and in rap, blacks will help their poor white counterparts realize the full-sting of the word, he needs to pause, gaze out at The Charles and the John Hancock Building and take a deep breath. Truth of the matter is millions of whites are actually amused by the word n-gga, which sounds eerily similar to its er-ending cousin, thus making it difficult to differentiate between the two when they’re verbalized. Whites turn out in droves to enjoy black comedy routines that are replete with the word. They flock to black movies, and laugh as the characters liberally use this word. And whites drive CD sales, and are the champions of the mobile device download. (One estimate has 70% of rap being downloaded by whites)4. I put it to Kennedy that the N-word is having only a marginal effect on the white community. They’re not offended and, for heaven’s sake, many certainly do not feel satirized by it. If they did, rap music sales would be in the toilet, and these so-called artists and musicians would have to try their hands at jazz or country-western. As it turns out, whites continue to listen to rap at a very healthy clip, which has inspired the careers of several white rappers, such as Eminem, who is arguably one of the most successful rappers of them all.
Rather than attempting to satirize the racists of the world, I’d invite Professor Kennedy to have a conversation with Beni Dakar of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, who wrote the following observation concerning this word on November 27, 2006: “We [African Americans] cringe and become outraged when any white or non-black person uses the demeaning word [n-word]. Yet even those of us who dislike the word and never utter the n-word ourselves have an eerie tolerance and acceptance when African-Americans refer to each other this way.” Maybe Dakar wasn’t making a specific reference to Kennedy, but she could have been. No matter which way you look at the issue, this kind of internal dialogue among African Americans certainly couldn’t hurt an already desperate situation.
Some, I’m sure, will accuse me of sounding like another know-it-all, self-righteous white man who doesn’t understand the African-American culture. Maybe so, but I do have a pretty firm grasp on the term decency. So let me say this: the issue of blacks using the N-word in such an uninhibited manner is not representative of all African Americans. Let’s at least agree on that. This culture, which we celebrate during the month of February, is too big, too diverse, has come too far and is too rich in goodness to be defined exclusively by this issue. You can, however, accuse me of not understanding the N-word-using subgroup of the black culture that is too often defended (actively or tacitly) by black leaders—and, yes, that includes Professor Kennedy, in my humble opinion. That I’ll admit to. Moreover, I don’t understand the violent and lewd lyrics in rap, which are often replete with the N-word. Of course, I don’t understand the depraved racists in my own culture, who have repeatedly spewed forth this word in its purest, most evil form. But if you’re not satisfied with my limited and biased insight, just listen to Bill Cosby as he addresses a group of black leaders:
Let me tell you something, your dirty laundry (kids)gets out of school at 2:30 every day. It’s cursing and calling each other n——- as they’re walking up and down the street…They think they’re hip. They can’t read; they can’t write. They’re laughing and giggling and they’re going nowhere…I can’t even talk the way these people talk, ‘Why you ain’t,’ ‘Where you is’…and I blamed the kid until I heard the mother talk. And then I heard the father talk. Everybody knows it’s important to speak English except these knuckleheads. You can’t be a doctor with that kind of crap coming out of your mouth. 5
Cosby points out that the vile slurs used by racists, who once lynched blacks, are now favorites among many black adults, teens and even children:
When you put on a record and that record is yelling ‘n——- this and n——- that’ and you’ve got your little six-year-old, seven-year-old sitting in the back seat of the car, those children hear that. 6
Does Cosby care that
