PSA: When Is It OK to Use the N-Word?

Here’s a simple test to help you figure out if (and when) you can say the n-word:

1) Are you white? If so, this is easy: Never. Never say it. Don’t say it along with a rap song you like. Don’t say it if you’re quoting someone else saying it. Hard ‘r’ or ‘a’ ending — doesn’t matter. Don’t say it under ANY circumstances. Not with your friends. Don’t even say it if you’re alone. There is no situation that will ever, ever call for its use.

2) Are you a person of color? You should probably ask someone else you trust. As a white dude, I don’t think I’m remotely qualified to comment on what you should/shouldn’t say and I’m not about to go around telling you what to do. There’s a multitude of factors to consider and the only advice I can give is that if you’re unsure, best to err on the side of caution and not say it.

With that in mind, I want to address what I can address and that’s white people.

What’s wrong with you? How is it 2021 and we’re still having a debate about this? Ridiculous.

A few years back, Bill Maher (who I used to enjoy but has seemingly lost his mind in the last four years) got into a LOT of trouble when he referred to himself as a “house n*****”. The reaction was swift. There were rumors that his show would be canceled. Maher was known for “pushing boundaries” — white code for saying things that his position of privilege allows him to say that others cannot. In response to the outrage, he did the thing that several white men have done to atone: he had a bunch of Black people on his show to scold him and apologize to. In 2017, this was considered “just”. One of his guests was Ice Cube (who has also seemingly lost his mind in recent years). Cube made some excellent points and I think it’s worth watching what both he and Symone Sanders have to say about it.

Confession time. I used to be a person who thought the whole n-word thing was overblown, unfair, and absurd. The idea that a word could “belong” to a group of people or that a word could be banned from use, in any context, by another group, was patently ridiculous. To be clear, I was not a person who used it casually. But if I were quoting someone using it or bringing the word up for discussion, I avoided the euphemistic “n-word” and just went for it.

I’ve always detested euphemisms. They seemed like unnecessary niceties that attempt to avoid offending hypersensitive people. Why say “fudge” when you mean “fuck”? Aren’t you saying it anyway? The only reason euphemisms work is because people know the word you intend to say. So when you say “fudge,” the other person thinks “fuck”. All you are avoiding is saying it out loud. Seems silly to me.

My ignorant white ass lumped the n-word into that same group of curses. But the n-word isn’t a curse word. It’s completely different. It’s a word of hate, of lynch mobs and oppression, of bondage and segregation. It is a word that represents the absolute worst parts of America and humanity in general. When I heard Ice Cube talk about it and say that it was “like a knife” when he heard white people say it, in any circumstance, it shattered my view of the word.

Do I need to go through the list of white excuses? I have Black friends. I have Black family members. Two of my best friends growing up were Pakistani Muslims. I can’t be racist.

Bullshit.

That’s the thing about white privilege. It normalizes racist behavior and thoughts. For years, the n-word was just another word that I couldn’t say, no different from any other swear. When we teach children about racism, that’s the context we provide. That the word is simply verboten. In really progressive environments, maybe there will be a lesson (in February, of course) about slavery and the civil rights movement from the 60s. They’ll show pictures of stereotypical racists shouting the word while foaming at the mouth.

Yes, of course, it’s a word of hate. That much is obvious. But it is also a word of white supremacy. And that’s the context that is never covered or discussed. It’s easy to look at a bunch of goobers marching around in white sheets holding torches and burning crosses and see their racism. But what about the mom who talks to her son’s Black friend differently from how she talks to his white friends? Why does she always bring up rap? He doesn’t even like it.

Storytime! One of the first jobs I had out of college was working as a paraprofessional at a charter school in Adams, MA. It was an incredible experience, both positively and negatively. Like a lot of charter schools, it had a specific focus: arts and technology (the A and the T in BART). The idea was that the school could provide a place for students who weren’t excelling in traditional classroom structures. It was offered as an alternative choice to parents of kids who were “gifted”. Those types of students made up about 60% of the student body. The other 40% were kids who had been sent there as a last resort. Kids who were failing their classes or in trouble with the law and needed a change of scenery. That’s the nice way of putting it. In reality, BART became a dumping ground (of sorts) for schools within the district that wanted to get rid of troublesome kids.

Now, to understand the racial issues that will emerge in this story, you need to know a few things about where this story takes place. In Berkshire County, MA, there are very rural parts (white) and very urban areas (Blackish) and there isn’t a ton of mixing. Adams, where the school was located, was 98% white. Pittsfield, where several of the students came from, was only 87% white. Still largely white, of course. But when you’re used to seeing one (or less) Black person a day, seeing three or four seems like a lot. At BART, these different groups got mashed together.

There was one class in particular that routinely got out of control. The teacher was an old white man who did not understand the population he was working with. And while I won’t say outright that he was racist, the students certainly thought he was. In my observations, he absolutely treated the students of color different from the white kids. They were kicked out of class for minor indiscretions and routinely shut down during discussions. There was a group of four Black boys that I worked closely with. They were your typical teenagers and aside from how they dressed and spoke, behaved pretty much like the white kids. Keep in mind this is back in 2006 so things were very different when it came to social justice and race relations. BLM was still a decade away.

Anyways, one day in class, the boys were talking about hanging out at Shawn’s (not his real name) house afterschool. A white kid, let’s call him Jim, was perplexed by their conversation. He kept interrupting Shawn to confirm with him, with great bewilderment, that he lived in a house and not an apartment. Apparently, Jim had never met or heard of a Black person owning a house. Shawn’s friends thought this was hilarious, the racism of it all. Jim interpreted this laughter as acceptance so he kept going with the line of questioning. I could see that Shawn was getting upset. I tried several times to steer them back to their task. But Jim was so desperate to have gained the acceptance of his “cool” Black classmates that he persisted. Eventually, Shawn let Jim know that if he said one more thing about it, he would stab him with a pencil.

Guess what happened? Jim pushed it once more by asking about what kind of house it was and how rundown it was and sure enough, the gentle, normally hilarious Shawn (he was my favorite of all the boys I worked with) grabbed his pencil and stabbed Jim in the ear. He didn’t say anything while he did it. It was an almost casual act. He’d warned him. I’d tried to intervene (but in a class where the teacher does not give a shit and 70% of the kids are on IEPs, I couldn’t be everywhere at once). I was shocked. Jim’s earlobe started bleeding and he left the room to go to the nurse. Shawn broke down into hysterical tears and ran into the hallway. I went to be with him. He was devastated. He knew his actions were way over the line. He was scared, angry, and shaking with emotion.

I was 23 and very inexperienced. Looking back, I would do a lot of things differently. I was ignorant of what was really happening in that classroom. What seemed like harmless ribbing that had gotten out of control was really a hateful act of racial violence, long before whitey got stabbed with a pencil. There were so many layers of complex cultural racism and I missed all of it. Jim did too. The Black boys did not. And while I wonder if they could have articulated what was happening precisely, having grown up in western Massachusetts I’m sure they were well acquainted with casual racism.

There was quite a bit of fallout from the incident. Jim’s parents wanted Shawn to be arrested and kicked out of school. Some of the teachers were happy to have one less “troublesome” kid to deal with and didn’t care if he disappeared. The way the administration handled the situation was one of the reasons I left the school after only a year. The administration was all-white. So was the faculty. So was the entire special education department. I wonder that if there had been one person of color somewhere along the chain if things would have ended differently for Shawn. He was 17 and without an advocate (his parents were not involved in much of his life). You can guess where the story goes from there.

This is the disconnect that white supremacy and privilege creates, fosters, and maintains within our country. Jim had no idea that he was being a racist asshole. He was “just” teasing his classmate about his home. The other Black kids laughed along. Shawn was the one who was out-of-control and reacted violently. This is a troupe that is played out again and again in our country. A white person uses their “free speech” to demean, degrade, and dehumanize a Black person, pushing them to a point where there is no recourse but violence.

I can hear the white people reading this saying “there’s never an excuse for violence. It’s just words.” Well, respectfully, fuck you. For white people, it’s just a word. But for people of color, it is a lot more than that. It’s a knife to the heart. It’s an act of violence against their personhood and humanity. It seeks to reduce Black folks as less-than-human and it hearkens back to a time when the power structure ensured that they were. I have no problem with violence meeting violence. Don’t want to get hit? Don’t call a Black person the n-word. Simple.

It reminds me of a viral video from a few months ago. It features a white kid using the -gga version of the word in a convenience store to a Black man. The white man thinks he’s good, that he’s in the n-word club because he lives in a given neighborhood. Despite being warned by just about everyone in the store to stop, he continues to use it like he’s “fam”. He ain’t and he wins a hilarious prize: an earth-shattering pop in the face with a can of iced tea.

Listen to the pain in the Black man’s voice as he yells at the white dude to “call me another fucking n*****”. What else could he have done? Walk away? Pretend like he wasn’t assaulted? At what point does a person’s right to say horrible, ignorant things end and a person’s right to humanity begin? The n-word is a good place to start and, as an American and white person, I am fine with that being the standard. It’s easy, you might say a privilege, for a white person to be like “oh sticks and stones”. But that assumes all of this takes place in a vacuum where everyone is equal. It doesn’t. Show me the white equivalent of Emmitt Till. Show me a thousand more examples of how Blacks have oppressed whites with violence, murder, and segregation. Add in a few centuries of servitude and cultural displacement and we can start to talk. You can’t so don’t try.

This is one of the aims of white supremacy: to blind white folks to their racism and normalize it so that when there is a reaction to racist behavior, it is the victim of the racism who looks insane. I’m sure that white dude used the n-word countless times before. He seems very comfortable with it. Maybe he did in front of Black people who didn’t say anything. Maybe even a few who did. Supremacy taught this white guy that he was “down” and it was fine to take something that did not belong to him. As Cube said, it’s their word now and they aren’t giving it back.

At the end of the day, how hard is it to avoid saying one word? Whether or not you think you have the “right” to use it or not is irrelevant. Our fellow citizens have asked for people to not use that word. Again and again and again. It doesn’t matter the context. Is it too much to ask that we respect their wishes and just erase the word from our vocabulary?

I agree, it’s a strange and unusual situation for a word to hold so much power and have such complex rules attached to it. But not nearly as strange and unusual as keeping people in bondage, selling and trading them like chattel, and creating complex social structures to ensure their lowered status. Maybe you don’t think you are racist and so when you say it in a non-specific way (like quoting the name of a character from Mark Twain) that it’s harmless and proper. This debate was recently reignited when a NY Times reporter was fired for, among other things, using the n-word with students several times while on a trip to Peru in 2019. He initially attempted to defend his use of the word, saying he did not intend it to be used in a hateful way.

Here’s the thing: there is no way for a white person to use that word without being hateful. And just because that might not make sense to you does not mean it isn’t true. I don’t understand how the sun works. I know there are hydrogen atoms fusing together to form helium and the end result of that is heat radiation which warms our planet. But that’s about it. An astrophysicist could probably spend days explaining it to me but it doesn’t change that the sun is big and bright and hot as hell. Not understanding or agreeing with a particular thing does not absolve a person of its existence. If anything, my ignorance should force me to listen and learn from the scientist, not shout them down and refuse to learn. This is the same approach we need as white people when it comes to the n-word.

I am forever sorry for having been so cavalier and ignorant with my flippant and “rebellious” use of the word in the past. I did not understand or see the whole picture. I still don’t. Supremacy has blinded many of us white folks to what reality is. That’s part of its function. There’s good news though! We can learn and evolve. The first step is listening to what our fellow Americans of color have to say about things. For decades they alerted us to the injustice they faced at the hands of police officers. Now that we have cameras everywhere and with us all the time, we can finally see it with our own eyes. Perhaps we could have listened from the start and avoided a lot of trauma and destruction.

The fight against oppression and injustice begins with listening and considering a world beyond your own experience. I still have a shitload to learn about things, so don’t think I’m here holding myself up as a paragon of wokeness. I’m not. But I am willing and eager to listen to my fellow citizens, to believe them, and to adjust my own behavior when asked. It’s literally the least I can do. So the next time you wonder if it’s OK to say the n-word, maybe just don’t. I promise you won’t lose anything. And your fellow Americans will be better for it.

It really is that simple.