Jabari Asim's The N Word: Who Can Say It, Who Shouldn't, and Why and Randall Kennedy's Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word
Darryl
THE N WORD WHO CAN SAY IT, WHO SHOULDN'T, AND WHY by Jabari Asim Houghton Mifflin, 2007 239 pp $26 NIGGER: THE STRANGE CAREER OF A TROUBLESOME WORD by Randall Kennedy Vintage, 2003 208 pp...
...Kennedy is a well-known legal scholar and a law professor at Harvard...
...There can be truth to both perspectives, but where Kennedy's argument fails is that the cultural manifestations he's celebrating do not deepen public awareness in ways that help us move ahead...
...language, however, always has and always will reflect the world we live in...
...Yet the subject contained within the subject is immeasurable: racism American-style...
...It's no coincidence, moreover, that the N word as entertainment is usually accompanied by sexist and other offensive language...
...It's because it's a vicious word and "just a word" (not be1 1 4 n DISSENT / Winter 2008 BOOKS cause it's been cleansed) that in today's ahistorical flux, it's found a roost in inner city America...
...Kennedy's book traces the same history, briefly, less emphatically...
...Thus, Kennedy isn't celebrating overcoming the weight of the past...
...Its first written usage on New World soil may have been in the diary of John Rolfe in 1619, noting the arrival of the first African slaves in British North America...
...For truly the N word (as it has been known for several decades now) is the privileged American racial epithet...
...We live in a historically schizophrenic period...
...In a better world that might be the end of the story, but not in ours...
...Asim laments aspects of today's cultural shift in which "bad" now means "good," roughness is strength, and thuggishness is sexy...
...Whites are increasingly referring to each other as niggers, and indeed the term both as an insult and as a term of affection is being affixed to people of all sorts...
...Kennedy oversimplifies...
...He lingers over the N word's place in arguments over jurisprudence, citing discrimination lawsuits in which "nigger" was offered by the plaintiffs as evidence...
...By the mid-twentieth century, in public, at least, the word was less than fully acceptable...
...legally, it's just another word, and, culturally, it's what you make it...
...Outlandish...
...There is much to be gained by allowing people of all backgrounds to yank nigger away from the white supremacists, to subvert its ugliest denotation, and to convert the N word from a negative to a positive appellation...
...Charting the 1700s, Asim pays special attention to Thomas Jefferson's 1785 Notes from the State of Virginia, a text that, coming from a man of Jefferson's renown, "established a model of rationalized racism...
...Harlem Renaissance writer Zora Neale Hurston teased (and angered) fellow black artists by dubbing them "the niggerati...
...We do need higher standards of public etiquette, but these arguments are proxies for more difficult discussion and mask anxiety over the significance of race in a supposedly "post-civil rights" era, marked by unacceptably high levels of segregation, especially in public education...
...Finally, this is an important subject because this trivial word is more than a word, and because, between them, Asim and Kennedy represent two different philosophical approaches to history...
...As a linguistic landmark, nigger is being renovated...
...DISSENT / Winter 2008 n 115...
...A surrogate for feelings of oppression, denial, and self-abnegation, it's concurrently an agent of ambivalence...
...Historically, the word is white supremacist...
...Blacks use the term with novel [friendly] ease to refer to other blacks...
...It was a convenient weapon used by Southern politicians, whenever they needed to stir anti-black sentiment...
...and its influence still today on the public imagination...
...Improper speech, it remained in popular usage— like a bad habit that very few people are reprimanded for...
...Too much hip-hop merely flings the word about in a flippant manner that dulls the listener into a narcotic state...
...He is particularly enamored of a quote from Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes: "A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged . . . [instead] the skin of a living thought that may vary in color and content according to the circumstances and time in which it is used...
...For Asim, history is relevant, prescient, and manifest in the present...
...For much of the history of our fair republic, the N word has been at the center of our most volatile exchanges [to the degree that] no discussion of American race relations can be complete without it," writes Asim...
...Asim shows us a word that encapsulates the mythology of race...
...I would not blame readers if they inadvertently chuckled over this passage, and that may be an aspect of Kennedy's point...
...He's welcoming a diminished appreciation for history— historical amnesia...
...Asim's book is also an account of social anomalies: use of the word within the black community, which Asim shows is nothing new...
...Its actual meaning in any circumstance always depends on its surrounding circumstances...
...Taking pains to show the word's ubiquity throughout the 1800s and early 1900s, and noting the ways in which the word and image still grip us, he writes, "Its remarkable durability, coupled with Americans' historical willingness to find uses for this epithet in nearly every facet of their everyday lives—from the geographical to the philosophical to the culinary—may also illustrate the extent to which racial unease continues to permeate our culture...
...Negroes often reproached one another as 'dirty black naygurs' an insult usually reserved for especially dark Negroes, lower-class blacks, or newly arrived immigrants...
...The N word's story is tortuous, but not always predictable...
...Kennedy nods approvingly to a section of today's young population, fans of Quentin Tarantino, rough-edged urban humor, and what's known as "gangsta rap" that has made the N word a staple of its lexicon, purportedly reflecting (some would say exploiting and encouraging) authentic ghetto talk...
...And that can include lesser histories, such as the story of a word...
...Twenty negars," wrote Rolfe...
...These anxieties will usually express themselves in debates over public decorum, as in, say, the Don Imus controversy...
...I ask Dissent readers to bear with me, keeping in mind that "popular culture" is called that because millions of Americans absorb it...
...The (pseudo) scientific racism that marked the 1800s—harebrained theories of human intelligence as determined by cranium dimensions—was occasionally dubbed by its practitioners "niggerology...
...THE N WORD WHO CAN SAY IT, WHO SHOULDN'T, AND WHY by Jabari Asim Houghton Mifflin, 2007 239 pp $26 NIGGER: THE STRANGE CAREER OF A TROUBLESOME WORD by Randall Kennedy Vintage, 2003 208 pp $12.95 paper THE SUBJECT is small—a word...
...IT IS DIFFICULT to read The N Word without recalling Randall Kennedy's much less politically correct 2002 volume—less politically correct both in terms of its title and its arguments...
...From off-color comedians to Snoop Doggy Dogg, he celebrates it all...
...Whereas Asim's approach is historical, Kennedy's is legalistic...
...He quotes an editorial in the Freedman's Journal, the nation's first black newspaper, circa the mid-1800s, lamenting "the adoption of racist epithets by blacks themselves...
...Two black intellectuals, both middle-aged, both, one assumes, having considerable experience with racism in their personal and professional lives, have come to wildly divergent conclusions...
...By the late 1960s and 1970s, public opinion denounced it, finally perceiving that the word—and, what's worse, the image behind the word—is not only uncivilized, it's uncivil...
...And then he moves on...
...It excludes...
...IAM AWARE that this entire discussion appears— and it in some respects is—sophomoric...
...its inception on American soil (by some accounts there was a time when the word was "neutral," but by all accounts that had changed even by the early days of the republic...
...The N word as potentially liberatory...
...Its familiarity has outlived that of other racial epithets once commonplace...
...its various codifications in law...
...He usually sympathizes with the plaintiffs, but hurriedly adds the caveat that "nigger can mean many different things, depending upon, among other variables, intonation, the location of the interaction and the relationship between the speaker and those to whom he is speaking...
...One can support freedom of speech in private and, particularly, in artistic expression, but still hope to see the public uphold certain standards of appropriate speech—less as a principle of law than of civics...
...The confusion is especially apparent in arguments having to do with racism...
...He's celebrating an ahistorical attitude that discourages deeper reflection about either past or present...
...On one level, it's an open-and-shut case, but the question of our contemporary unease segues naturally to Kennedy's book...
...The N word itself may not appear in the section in which Jefferson discourses on race, but the word has at its foundation an image, and Jefferson's sexually tempestuous, uncreative, and genetically inferior American Negro "conveniently codified truths held to be self-evident by most white Americans at the end of the eighteenth century...
...Blared at the public in music accompanied by a heavy beat a word "once treated exclusively DISSENT / Winter 2008 • 1 13 BOOKS as a gauge of racial tension or social inequality [now threatens to become] a potentially lucrative marketing gimmick...
...For him, the big lesson— its use by whites against blacks, blacks among other blacks, and occasionally by blacks against whites—is, "The N word itself is not self-defining...
...DARRYL LORENZO WELLINGTON is a poet and culture critic living in Charleston, South Carolina...
...It isn't always a good idea to reduce vast social dimensions to a pithy cognomen—all the great "isms" are finally irreducible—but there are special cases, and when Jabari Asim asks us to examine American racism (particularly racism against black Americans) through the lens of a single word, it's remarkable how much history he squeezes into the text...
...It's easier to debate whether libertinism in language is racist than to address the Big Dilemma: the extent to which racial disparities of the past are culpable for racialized class disparities today and what kinds of correctives may be appropriate...
...It's easier to argue language than to argue the world we live in...
...Kennedy then opines on the merits of the case and whether the language on trial was derogatory, nonderogatory, or relevant at all...
...Positioning himself as a free-speech advocate, Kennedy mocks people he calls "regulationists and eradicationists," who, he says, "contend that nigger has no proper place in American culture and thus desire to erase the N word totally" (for example, parents who object to Huckleberry Finn...
...It's easy to dismiss gangsta rap and other pop culture manifestations as too silly to warrant extended discussion...
...Our befuddlement over appropriate language mirrors a general befuddlement over the route by which American society has passed from legalized segregation to economic resegregation, without ever having clearly established its ethics vis-a-vis race, class, and economics...
...its "renovated" uses remain in essence hard...
...Or so says this fan of pop culture...
...Americans are known for their historical amnesia, but if we succumb to it, the significance of history is up for grabs...
...Confusion over the N word pinpoints the importance of preserving and conveying the past in ways that are relevant in the present...
...At the same time, it's "just a word" that plays conveniently into the hands of sections of the public more interested in hipness, entertainment, comedy...
...It so sums up the essence of the racial stereotype that it can be used as a slur against any group being portrayed as lazy, shiftless, and stupid—including, by the way, white Americans...
...I will spare readers a blow-by-blow account of the N word's maleficence...
...The dialogue over a slew of social ills would benefit from a strong tonic of historical and chronological clarity, whether that entails adapting the lessons of Vietnam to the situation in Iraq or reaffirming the real intent of Brown v. Board of Education, which was the creation of a fully integrated society...
...at the same time, it expresses no particular politics, no agenda, no course of action...
...Sure, if liberation is flirting with danger and if, finally, anything goes...
...for Kennedy, history is a straitjacket, a limitation, and an obstruction...
...It's violent...
...His harshest judgment is, "In condemning public officials who use derogatory language, we would do well to remember how complex people can be...
...It expresses the angst of the underprivileged...
...In the civil 1 1 2 n DISSENT / Winter 2008 BOOKS rights era, President Lyndon Johnson passed sweeping civil rights legislation, but Johnson habitually used the N word and racially derogatory language in private...
...Kennedy's book is amusing, but Asim's book provides in a concise 239 pages a basichistory lesson that reminds us what "nigger" is: a vicious stereotype...
...It sits at the heart of the American consciousness like the evil twin of "liberty" or "justice...
...Kennedy, on the other hand, is "with it...
...Asim is a syndicated columnist, a former editor at the Washington Post Book World, and currently the editor in chief of the NAACP's Crisis magazine...
...Kennedy also mentions LBJ's notoriously coarse language, but doesn't necessarily sanction him...
...Simple naïve...
...This leads to extended debates over such earth-shattering issues as, "Who can say the N word and who can't" or "Why can't a white radio shock jock talk ghettostyle if black rappers do...
...It's a hard word to begin with...
Vol. 55 • January 2008 • No. 1
