The N-Word is worse than the N-Word

Let’s talk about colored people.  Or does the phrase offend you?  Well, how about “people of color”?  That’s okay, right?  But isn’t that essentially the same words in reverse order? Why is one good and the other bad?  How about NAACP…National Association for the Advancement of Colored People?   Is “colored people” okay there but not in the first sentence?

This came to mind as I read last month’s report about college students criminally charged for hate crimes against their roommate. 

The story mentioned white roommates displaying a Confederate flag, which itself is free speech.  And it mentioned they had a picture of Elvis, though I am unclear on the relevance.  Then the story stated the students wrote “the N-Word” on a white board (irony not lost).

Only later did the story mention a battery occurred.  The focus instead went to “the N-Word” as if that spoken word was more harmful than the physical act of battery.

This is where we inadvertently take a racial epithet and make it more powerful.  The N-Word is, of course, nigger.  It derives from niger, Latin for black.  It is evidently okay to use in the name of a country (Nigeria) or river (Niger).  In Spanish, it is negro, which in America became associated with African members of the human race.

“Black” is not offensive but Latin for black is so offensive it cannot be spoken.  There are many racial epithets that are offensive on their face, simian words being an example.  But “nigger” is offensive not because of anything within the word itself but because of a hateful intent applied to how the word is used. 

The problem is that ignorant and hateful people will always add a negative inflection to any word for people of African descent.  Thus, niger gave way to negro, once good enough for presidents to say but later offensive, so we said colored people.  As noted, can’t say that any more.  Next, Afro-Americans.  When African American became preferred, each prior phrase was impermissible.

Ultimately, none of these phrases are intrinsically offensive.  We, as a society, run in shock and fear as soon as bigots co-opt each new term.  When we take such flight, we empower their evil.  And this is opposite of what needs to be done.

We use “N-Word” as a way to say there is a word for black humans that is so horrible we dare not speak or print the actual word (unless we are a black person in which case the word curiously becomes acceptable).  Instead, we would be better off using the word nigger commonly.  We could disempower the evil by rendering the word harmless through excess use of this Latin derivative.

This was best explained 50 years ago by the great social critic and comedian Lenny Bruce.  He said, “If President Kennedy would just go on television, and say, ‘I would like to introduce you to all the niggers in my cabinet,’ and if he’d just say ‘nigger nigger nigger’ to every nigger he saw, until nigger didn’t mean didn’t mean anything anymore, then you could never make some six-year-old black kid cry because somebody called him a nigger at school.”

Lenny Bruce was ahead of his time, and probably ahead of our own time, too.

What we really should do is to ban the phrase “The N-Word” itself.  Because when we enshrine evil into a word…when for example we say “He used the ‘N-Word’”…we invite those who seek to cause pain.  We then give bigots a power that they cannot attain on their own.

People may be uncomfortable using the word nigger in hopes of individually disempowering the word.  And that too is okay.  But understand that each and every time one of us utters the phrase “The N-Word”, we are actually doing more harm than good.  In doing so, we perpetuate the culture that wants to divide humans into separate groups and define us by our assignment.  We inadvertently become perpetuators of the racism we seek to extinguish.

If you can say N-Word, you may as well say nigger, for everybody knows what you are saying.

Perhaps just say “racial epithet.”

The N-Word is not the first down this path:  There was a time you could not speak the “D-Word.”  Horribly offensive.  The D-Word was a curse word, used to shock or hurt.  It was condemned by the Catholic Church and was censored.

It was only through our common and repeated use that the D-Word lost its power to hurt and to harm.  If someone tried to shock you by using the D-Word today, you might say “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.”