Now I see she is in the news. Something about a racial discrimination lawsuit, and the question was posed to her whether she had used the "N" word. The answer was yes. The woman is 66 years old and grew up in the American South. Would anyone believe her if she had said no?
I have always been fascinated by the use of words. So what about the "N" word? Superficially, its origin is straightforward. Black. Same as negro. Same root as place names Niger and Nigeria. That reminds me of a Philadelphia city councilman who was introducing dignitaries visiting from Nigeria and referred to them as "our friends from Nigeria," except that he pronounced the first two syllables of that country's name like the racial slur: "nigger-ee-yah," accent on the "ee." I couldn't believe my ears.
So the "N" word means black. But it means so much more. It means, typically, that the user of the word regards black people as different. It says your people are different from mine, inherently inferior, and deserving of disdain or even hatred. That is a lot to pack into a single word.
Throughout human history we have identified others as being different from ourselves in various ways, including appearance and belief systems. Having thus characterized them as different, we have used those differences as a pretext for fighting wars against them, taking their land, and raping, brutalizing, killing, or enslaving them. By contrast, the modern era is a period of relative enlightenment, running counter to the patterns of behavior that have marked most of the story of our species.
But the contrast is less marked than we should hope. I am only a little more than a decade younger than Paula Deen, but I grew up in one of the nation's most segregated cities (Philadelphia), and racism was everywhere. And it was bidirectional. I experienced physical and verbal abuse because I was white. I was ignored and refused service in a diner because I hadn't realized it was in a black neighborhood where I was unwelcome. And there was plenty of use of the "N" word.
When I was in college there was one summer I worked in a genetics research lab during the day and drove a cab in the evenings. One evening I was driving down a street in North Philly being stared at by children playing on the sidewalks. It took a bit of thought to realize their faces bore expressions of wonderment because they had never seen a white person, except on TV. That is segregation.
We all know the "N" word's meaning varies with the user. When blacks use it themselves, it can be funny, teasing, playful. But it can also be scolding. I know better, as an outsider, than to try to sort out those nuances. It does, however, trouble me that sometimes it may reflect at least a little bit of self-hatred, a phenomenon all too common among members of minority groups struggling with opposite impulses to assimilate into a culture that often denigrates them while maintaining their distinct identity.
I had a friend in high school, now an attorney, who used a different "N" word. At the time I had little insight, but now I find it disturbing. It reflected some of that group self-hatred. Socioeconomically he was a member of the black middle class, but he lived smack in the middle of the urban ghetto. And he regarded the black urban underclass as different, in much the same way middle class whites did. He referred to them with obvious disdain. His "N" word was "the natives." In using that word he was labeling them as different, recognizing that their milieu was far removed from white middle class society, which was the stratum of America in which he saw himself belonging. The choice of word conjured up an image of African tribesmen, scantily clad, such as one might find on the pages of a contemporary issue of National Geographic.
Usually when I write an essay for this blog, I think I have some little topic of interest all figured out - at least to the point of being able to capture the important questions we should be asking about it and trying to answer. The "N" word is an awfully large subject for a brief essay. I have been reading Michael Burlingame's superb biography of Lincoln. It is definitely a "man and his times" sort of opus, and so there is much to learn about 19th-century America within its pages. The attitudes of white America toward blacks are shocking. The use of the "N" word is painfully ubiquitous. Burlingame pummels the reader with it in certain passages, perhaps because he knows the modern reader otherwise just won't "get" the difference between the way whites viewed blacks then and now.
There have been times when I've thought there was an awful lot of fuss being made over the "N" word. After all, blacks sometimes use it themselves. And what blacks want to be called has changed from generation to generation. There was a time when they had no problem with being called "colored." The organization NAACP captured the legitimacy of that word in its name. Then they preferred Negro, then black, and now African-American.
But there is no question that the fuss made over the "N" word is very real, and very important. It bears all of the intense hatred toward others who are different. It is a reflection of the deeply troubled history of relations between the races in a country whose founders were unable to abolish the great evil of African slavery, who instead wrote it into our Constitution. Jefferson knew it would later ring "like a firebell in the night" and tear the nation apart. A century and a half ago it did just that. The process of reconstruction, begun after the Civil War, continues today. And the "N" word gets in the way, every time it is used.
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