I Can't Believe I Have to Write About This Again
There’s a bizarre hill that people, primarily white people, have been choosing to die on lately. It’s two hills actually, two peaks in the same mountain chain. The first one is whether or not white people can use the n-word in any context. The second one is about the relationship between the founding of this country, slavery, and its benefits. Let’s dive into the first one first.
Below is a clip that surfaced over the weekend of Joe Rogan using the n-word again and again. He also made a few racist comments. The video is tough to watch so feel free to skip it.
There really isn’t any legitimate defense of his comments. Even if you accept that in every instance he was quoting someone else saying the word, his joke about how he “walked into the planet of the apes” has no non-racial explanation. So let’s just agree that he, at some point, was being a racist asshole. But this goes beyond the libertarians and conservatives. Ana Kasparian, a host of the extremely progressive The Young Turks program, came out with a bizarre and defiant tweet:
People took her at her word and compiled a video of her using the n-word again and again, oftentimes without quoting someone directly, which was her initial position.
All of this misses the point entirely and it’s super easy to solve. If you aren’t Black, don’t say it. Not saying something is the easiest thing you can do. It literally requires no effort. Just don’t say it. Don’t say it in lyrics. Don’t say it quoting someone. Just say “n-word” and move on. It’s so easy to do! They even have the same number of syllables! I don’t understand why so many people have a hard time with this! Our fellow citizens, people who were enslaved and mistreated for centuries by white men, have asked that we do ONE DAMN THING for them and it’s to not say that word. That’s it. And yet, for some damn reason, we can’t seem to do it. It’s both baffling and the most American thing ever.
Let’s head to the other peak: slavery. There have been a number of misinformed and disingenuous defenses of slavery. Some seek to minimize its long-term impacts. Others argue that slavery didn’t really benefit the US economically. That notion is completely ridiculous but let’s explore it anyway. The long-term impacts of systemic racism in the US are well-documented and I’ve written about it before so I won’t belabor that point any further. Instead, let’s turn a critical eye to the idea that slavery wasn’t a big part of the founding of America.
One of the underlying premises of The 1619 Project is that the founding of America wasn’t in 1776 as we’ve all been taught but instead in 1619 when the first group of slaves stepped foot upon the land. This has caused a number of uproars from people who believe and seek to maintain the white supremacist view of our nation. Frankly, you can make an argument that there were many dates that can be held up as the founding of the US.
Was it when the first shot of the revolutionary war was fired? What about when the Constitution was ratified? Choosing the date of the Declaration of Independence might make sense but consider these facts: for starters, there were no emails or telephones at the time so it took months for the message to get to England. Second, independence was declared on July 2nd. Even John Adams thought July 2nd (and not the 4th) would be known as our nation’s birthday. He wrote to his wife, "The Second Day of July 1776, will be the most memorable Epocha, in the History of America". Not quite Johnny Boy.
It is easy to see how supremacy would reject the 1619 date. It shifts too much “credit” to Black ancestors. If we challenge the myths of our founding, we also challenge the notion of supremacy itself, that people could be so invested in a racist system that they would declare “all men are created equal” and leave out anyone who wasn’t white and male. To credit slavery for having an important (some might say THE most important) influence on our nation’s founding flies in the face of everything we’ve been told to believe.
So this is where the notion that slavery didn’t benefit the US that much comes in. Consider this. If we accept the idea that slavery helped the United States become one of the wealthiest nations on earth then surely we owe some degree of credit to the Blacks who did all the work. This also hints at owing reparations to their descendants but that’s a conversation for another day. The best way to attack this line of thinking is to diminish the gains got from slavery.
I think that Nicole Hannah-Jones is accurate in her rebuttal. Why would we continue a practice, that millions of people around the world objected to, for hundreds of years, if it wasn’t successful? It flies in the face of logic. Imagine how much more profitable companies would be if they didn’t have to provide pay or benefits to their employees? Granted, slaveowners provided food and shelter to their workers but let’s not kid ourselves about the quality of those conditions.
Rather than simply accept the contributions of the men and women who were tragically brought, against their will, to our shores and forced into a life of servitude by our white ancestors, it would seem many people would prefer to turn a blind eye to our collective history. The endgame for many of these book burnings and anti-CRT laws isn’t to simply prevent kids from learning about these incidents, it is to bury and destroy the legacy of the Black lives impacted by chattel slavery. We owe a tremendous debt to our enslaved countrymen (even though they weren’t considered to be such at the time). Being unable to acknowledge that says far more about a person’s inner racism than it does about the subject of that history.
We face a choice, as we have for centuries about what collective actions we can take to right the wrongs of the past. If we continue to deny and bury the past, the problems we have allowed to fester will continue to do so. If we, as white people, can find the courage to actually address our shameful history in meaningful and impactful ways, we can create a better, strong nation for all of us to enjoy.
And once more for the white people: DON’T SAY THE N-WORD. I can’t believe I have to keep saying that.