Why Blacks Should Stop Using the N-Word

In an attempt to dole out advice on the n-word, popular talk radio host Dr. Laura Schlessinger recently slipped into a rant using it.

When a caller — a distraught African-American woman who called in to be advised on how to handle racist jokes and comments hurled at her by her white in-laws and neighbors — asked Schlessinger if it’s okay to use the n-word, Dr. Laura needed advice before she advised.

"It depends how it’s said. ...Black guys talking to each other seem to think it’s OK," Schlessinger told the caller.

Whether used as an expletive or term of endearment, what is it about this word that captures the rage and shame of the American public?

In 2006, we blamed Michael Richards, who played the lovable and goofy character Kramer on the TV sit-com Seinfeld for using the n-word. Richards' racist rant was heard nationwide and shocked not only his fans and audience that night at the Laugh Factory in West Hollywood — it also shocked Americans back to an ugly era in U.S. history.

Two years later in 2008, we heard the Rev. Jessie Jackson use the n-word to refer to Obama. This from a man who was part of a cadre of African-Americans leaders who once staged a mock funeral at the 98th annual NAACP’s convention in Detroit the year prior to bury the n-word forever.

Why is it that using an epithet like the n-word — which was once hurled at African Americans in this country and banned from polite conversation — is now broadly accepted in our society and culture today?

Since the n-word was popularized by young African Americans’ use of it in hip hop, the bantering and bickering over this word has stopped being focused on who's hurt by its use. Instead, debate today centers on who has the right to use the word, which is why Richards and Schlssinger were publicly pulverized for what they said, and Jackson wasn’t.

But our culture’s present-day cavalier use of the n-word speaks less about our right to free speech and more about how we as Americans — both white and black — have become anesthetized to the destructive power of this epithet.

Many African Americans — not just the hip-hop generation — argue that reclaiming the n-word serves as an act of group agency and as a form of resistance. Therefore, the argument goes, only they should have license to use it.

However, the notion that it's acceptable for African Americans to refer to each other using the n-word while considering it racist for others to use sets up a clear double standard. To me, the notion that one ethnic group has property rights to a term is a reductio ad absurdum argument, since language is a public enterprise.

African-Americans’ appropriation of the n-word doesn't obliterate the word's historical baggage. The n-word is firmly embedded in the lexicon of racist language that was and still is used to disparage African Americans. Just because some African Americans use the term doesn't negate our long history of self-hatred.

Today, though, you'll hear people suggest that the meaning of the n-word lies in how one spells it. By dropping the "er" ending and replacing it with either an "a" or "ah" ending, the term — some argue — morphs into one of endearment. But many slaveholders pronounced the n-word with the "a" ending, and in the 1920s many African Americans used the "a" ending as a pejorative term to denote class differences among themselves.

In 2003, the NAACP convinced Merriam-Webster lexicographers to change the definition of the n-word in the dictionary to no longer mean African Americans but instead to be defined as a racial slur. The battle to change the n-word in the American lexicon was a long and arduous one, if ultimately successful. But our culture’s revisionist use of the n-word makes it even harder to purge the word's sting from the American psyche.

Why? Because language is a representation of culture. Language perpetuates assumptions about race, gender and sexual orientation we consciously and unconsciously articulate in our everyday conversations and pass down through future generations.

After Richards went on his offensive tirade, some activists argued that to repent, he should spend time volunteering in a predominately African-American community. If he'd done that, though, he would find there that too many of us keep the n-word alive, as well.

What's needed here is a history lesson. Reclaiming racist words like the n-word doesn't eliminate its ugly historical baggage — or the power dynamics between whites and blacks in this country. All it does is paper over the past, pretending that we can overlook the historical injustice of slavery. It numbs Americans to the use and abuse of power in this country — undermining the daily struggle of those Americans who daily endeavor to improve race relations.

Photo Credit: magerleagues