Who Always Gets Asked by White Folks Why They Can't Use the "N Word"

[jlh]

This Is Dedicated to That One Black Kid, comic by Keith Knight
Monday: who lives in that tiny ass town off the highway, in the middle of nowhere
Tuesday: who was not into hip hop in high school
Wednesday: who gets used as the reason why someone isn't a racist
Thursday: with hair people want to touch all the time
Friday: who gets told they're not REALLY black

Here's my philosophy on freedom of speech: You have the right to say whatever you want, and the responsibility to deal with other people's reactions. So if you're white and you want to say the N word, you know, go ahead. Just don't be surprised when people get upset about it. In my experience on LJ, it seems like some people mean "freedom of speech" as: I should be able to say whatever I want without anyone getting upset. Man, no one gets that. No one.

There are a lot of words like that, as we learned a week ago, words that have a secret history, words of oppression, words that seep with hatred. We want to reclaim them, to cleanse them, to adopt them for our own uses. But as long as there are some people still using them in their original hateful ways, we can't be completely successful. I can call myself a "tragic mulatto" but only in the most post-modern ironic way. ("Comedian" Rush Limbaugh, meanwhile, has been calling us "halfrican-americans" for a while with apparent impunity.) I wonder why people don't use the word "quadroon" more often, but I suppose "octoroon" gets the bigger laugh. It feels like a losing battle, or maybe one that I don't even want to win. Easier to move on to the new, clean word, "with no mistakes in it yet."

But the old words have a way of circling back, of never leaving, and of still hurting when they do. It seems to me, just to behave like a human being, we should try our best to be aware of those words and avoid using them so as to avoid bringing all that hurt into a conversation that's usually about something else entirely. There are words I don't use, words that describe other groups, because I've been told by people in those groups that they're stained with hate. It really isn't that tough, when what you want to do with your speech is communicate and bring people together.

Comments

[folk.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I end up conflicted on this one, although my thoughts have mainly been thought through via the use of "fag" in the gay community. The dynamics are different, as they are in any non-visible minority group, and there are a whole bunch of issues about identifying, pride and stuff.

My friend rustnroses and I went to see Hairspray-the-musical-movie the other week, and I was thinking about whether it's okay for white folk (because, srsly, the guys who did the musical and movie? Really rather white) to use words like "negro" and "nigger" (a) in historical context, and (b) by unsympathetic characters to show how unsympathetic they are. (Look, not only is Velma against fat people, she's a RACIST!)

Personally, I will use loaded words, but I'm careful as hell about the context -- and, thinking about it, it's almsot always to mock people who would use them to hurt or unthinkingly.

As an aside, "quadroon" and "octoroon" for me always come in seafaring novels, which also have doubloons in them, and I kept imagining people as four- and eight-sided coins, which was a bit odd.

[jlh.livejournal.com]

I don't think actually that Negro is a really offensive word, just an old one. When I hear Negro in old movies or read it in old texts, I'm not offended, because that word wasn't used in insult, and was always used by black folks themselves—Dr King used it all the time. Black came in for a reason, and AA is just so damn long and now people are assigning a different meaning to "black" and to AA (that is, that "black" only refers to the decendents of slaves) and it's all very too much to think about.

Also I find it funny when black folks of a certain age use it to mean "fool" as in "What in hell were you thinking, Negro?"

[sistermagpie.livejournal.com]

This kind of gets into just how complicated language is. My first thought was to ask why a white person particularly needs to use the world--I mean, I've honestly never felt the need to use it except in situations where it actually wasn't a problem. For instance, if I was talking about the word itself.

But then, I think it still really is more complicated--as the person above mentioned with the word fag. There probably are situations where if you were talking to a gay person and that word was appropriate for what you were talking about it would be non-offensive. I assume that "hag" and "fag-hag" kind of fall into that category.

There is actually only one expression that I've ever even been tempted to use that had the word nigger in it, and that was in response to hearing it used in a funny way, which was "Nigger, please." I don't use it because--hello? It's got the word nigger in it. But it's the one expression where the meaning seemed less racially charged, if that makes sense. Like in that article about Phoenix Rising where the writer said she saw tee-shirts that said, "Severus, please" and thought it was the HP version of "Nigger, please."

Anyway, long way of saying that it's hardly just this word or racially charged words that have different meanings depending on who's saying them and in what context, and it's kind of silly to ask why you're not "allowed" to say them as if it all comes down to this one group making rules. You *are* allowed to say them. You don't say them because they're insulting when you say them. That's not the fault of other people, really, it's just the way it is. (I do love the South Park episode on this too, though, which kind of gets into the same idea.)

[jlh.livejournal.com]

I like "bitch, please" because it really is equal opportunity. Cracker also works though I probably wouldn't use it.

Mostly though I think people don't like to be told that they shouldn't do something. It makes them all grouchy. Plus sticks and stones, which isn't true anyway.

[illogicalvulcan.livejournal.com]

I'm a touch late to the party to be responding in any sort of depth, but I wanted to thank you for writing these essays. They've really made me think. (Which sounds more lame than it did in my head, but, hey...)