Don't Interfere with the N-word's Evolution

I heard that Michael Richards used the N-word a few weeks ago in an unapproved manner. Based on the reaction and his apology tour, you’d think he had killed someone. Now, I understand that there is a move afoot to ban the N-word altogether from the English language. It is too powerful and hurtful for its use to be tolerated.

I don’t think the movement makes any sense at all. Attaching a tabu to the word adds to its power. Using it a lot diminishes its power. When people of African descent use the N-word, they are co-opting it and robbing it of its utility as an insult. If they stop using it and acknowledge it as a magical word with much juju, then they are empowering it. The word “queer” is an example of a term that underwent extreme pejoration, that was then co-opted by the insulted category, and that has now moved into common parlance largely free of its pejorative baggage. Even a straight person can refer to a homosexual as “queer” without intending offense, and it would be a rare instance nowadays in my experience for offense to be taken solely because the Q-word was used.

The N-word could undergo the same kind of transformation if folks would let the process run its course. At present, only black folks can use the N-word with impunity. Eventually, non-black folks will be using it without giving offense because it will have been sapped of its power. No word has intrinsic power. Why would anyone let the use of the N-word get to them. I’m not black, so I probably just don’t get it, but I can’t think of a single thing that you could call me that would get me as riled up as the N-word seems to get some black folks. I have in my day been called “cracker”, “redneck”, “white trash” and all manner of terms by folks who aimed to hurt me, but none of these epithets had any sting. Of course, it is unpleasant to be on the receiving end of curses and insults, but no particular word has any power to harm me. I have to take black folks at their word when they say the N-word is hurtful, and it is for this reason that I do not use it.

I would like to understand how the N-word became so potent. Presumably, it is a corruption of Spanish or Portuguese “negro” for black and would have been mainly descriptive in its origins. Of course, it would have been applied mainly to folks in the lowest state of involuntary servitude, to folks who had been dehumanized. It is easy to see how the term would undergo pejoration under these circumstances. Where I grew up, the N-word was commonly used in a descriptive manner, and it would not have made sense to use it as an insult toward a black person without attaching some other appropriate cuss words. To refer to someone as being the N-word meant that the referent was black. It would make no sense at all to tell a black person that he was black, so I don’t recall anyone’s ever using the N-word as an insult all by its lonesome.

The social context for this usage was the inferior status of black folks where I grew up. They lived apart from whites and did not mix socially with them. Their opportunities were limited by blatant discrimination and a widely held belief among whites that black folks were inherently intellectually and morally inferior to whites. Accordingly, the N-word carried all that with it as part of its deeper connotation. I recall on some occasions that particularly low white families might be referred to as “white niggers”.

It is plain that the N-word still connotes social inferiority, but I reckon that there will come a day when it does not solely by virtue of linguistic evolution, unless the invocation of tabu interferes with the process. There will come a day when a white man will call a black man the N-word, with malice and intent to insult, and the black man will respond with a smirk and “Are you kidding me?”