I’ve invoked the distinction between “referencing” and “using” the N-word in this space before. “Use” denotes directing the word at a person in an attempt to insult or demean her. “Reference” denotes quoting or citing the word for the purpose of discussing it or a text that contains it. In this excerpt from this week’s episode, Barnard and Columbia sociologist Jonathan Rieder describes an incident in which the word led to the cancelation of his class, “Culture in America.” It should be obvious from his account that Jon was referencing the word, not using it. Moreover, according to Jon, most of his students seemed to understand exactly what he was doing, and most of them seemed to have no problem with it. But it only took the complaints of a few unreasonably upset students for the university administration to take Jon’s class away from him.
What happened to Jon is not about the power of the N-word, though it is about power. Despite its unique status in American life and history, “nigger” is just a word. It’s meaningless without context. Treating it, whenever it comes out of the mouth of a white person, as an assault on the humanity of any black person who happens to hear it gives institutional authorities license to inflict penalties on the speaker that are all out of proportion with the so-called offense. It allows those authorities to hold up the penalties as evidence that their university fosters a “welcoming” and “safe” environment, where no one will ever have to encounter any ideas that challenge their beliefs about sensitive topics.
But “welcoming” and “safe” for whom? A professor who is punished in the way Jon has been punished will certainly think twice next time he teaches that course, if he’s ever allowed to teach it again. He may start to watch his mouth, taking care not to present ideas that may result in harsher penalties. Students who may well want to have these challenging discussions may never get the opportunity, and they may not even realize that they’re being deprived of it. Such an environment is indeed quite safe, at least for the university administrators in question. Never mind that it leaves the institution, its faculty, and the students unable to engage in the honest and probing intellectual exchanges that define the very mission of the university.
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JONATHAN RIEDER: My course was canceled, “Culture in America,” after a brouhaha over an inadvertent quoting of the word “nigga'” ...
JOHN MCWHORTER: Jon, I have to interrupt you briefly. Glenn, you realize that the word he just used quite unjustifiably is going to be considered the most interesting thing about this entire goddamn conversation. What is our policy on that here? Because you know we're gonna hear about that.
GLENN LOURY: Within context and without any invidious intent, if the word is appropriate to the communication that's trying to be engaged in—and it was in that case, because the word had quotation marks around it when he spoke it. He was referring to the word. He wasn't using the word, if you see what I mean.
JOHN MCWHORTER: And I stand by that, too
It can't be that he cannot refer to a word because he's white.
JOHN MCWHORTER: And I heartily agree.
That's just nuts. It's nuts.
JOHN MCWHORTER: It's insane. And we are not gonna pretend that that isn't true. So I just want it to be clear, given the response. So continue, Jon.
What are the stakes when a grizzled old white guy like you—excuse me—but who has deep insight into the kind of socio-cultural matrix that you're trying to get students to be aware of runs afoul of the sensibility of the nineteen-year-olds who have feelings about the way that you deal with with these issues?
JOHN MCWHORTER: And the nineteen-year-olds are supported by people much older than them who are set to support them in the way they handle their feelings.
It's not a counseling session. The enterprise is not therapeutic.
JONATHAN RIEDER: After I made the quote, the first student who spoke, it was an African American who said, “Yes, I get it. Eminem gets to redefine the identity that matters as those who've struggled, because he turns on another black interlocutor and says his name is Clarence. His parents have a real good marriage and he went to a private school. He wins over the African American audience.”
JOHN MCWHORTER: Oh, this was in 8 Mile.
JONATHAN RIEDER: In 8 Mile, yeah. So that's the scene I'm quoting to make the point about the fluidity of identities and how you can start with a default identity that you're black or you're white and then discover the humanity. So the first African American had no trouble. The second person was an Afro-Latina who said, “That's how it was in my Washington Heights high school. There were three whites left in the school, and we thought they were from Mars. We got to know them and realized they were like us.”
And the third student said, “Professor, that's racist.” And so I said to the person, “I really admire you challenging me. That is what free speech and academic liberal arts education should be about. Anybody who wants to continue the talk, come meet with me.” So three students stayed afterwards and I said, “I can continue this as long as you want, I care about this so much.”
They went immediately to the chair of my department. The chair said, “You have a right to feel safe in the classroom. You should go to the provost.” So you've got three students in a lecture class of 40 who've got this illiberal sentiment—or maybe one felt actually wounded, I don't think the other two did—but that couldn't have gotten through the gauntlet of organizational life if someone had sat down, the adults, and said, “I understand these are difficult issues. I know Professor Rieder. He has cared about race and racism his whole life. You should go talk to him.”
And so I said later to the chair, “Did you ever think to tell the students, ‘Why don't you come talk to Rieder’?” She said, “I wouldn't do that. I told them to go to the grievance people because they have a right to feel safe.”
JOHN MCWHORTER: This definition of “safe” is always interesting, because nobody would've used it that way, even I think as recently as 15 years ago. And the idea is that you've suffered this kind of trauma and so there's this evolving definition of trauma. And it's not illogical or immoral or silly in itself to extend the definition of trauma. There're things that one is expected to think of as trauma today that back in the day you were expected to just get over. So for example, date rape. I don't think that it's wrong that we have come to define that as trauma, rather than a woman saying, “I was out with this guy who was all hands.” That's progress.
But the question is whether it's progress to say that it's trauma for the N-word to be referred to by a white man in a classroom. And I think that we're being strong-armed into pretending to think that that makes sense by this cadre of people, where the power that they have is that if you call them on the triviality and theatricality of this, you're called a dirty name in wide open spaces, and if possible, your courses are taken away from you. You might even lose your job. Most people aren't up for that.
But this really needs to stop. I mean, safety is one thing. Morality and manners change. But here I frankly think that you were being bullied by people in the name of a spiky and fragile ideology, and what allowed that to happen to you mostly was spectators cowering in fear, and that is not the way things are supposed to be.
JONATHAN RIEDER: I don't make an analogy between the threats of political correctness and social justice warriors and white supremacists on the right. But ...
But?!
JONATHAN RIEDER: Here's the parallel. We discovered how fragile guardrails of democracy are because we assume civic culture, American exceptionalism leads to progressive historiography, we'll have a democracy. And then it turns out Trump says, “Well, let's try this!” And then it turns out the guardrails of democracy are tissue paper and not concrete. The same is true of the guardrails of liberal arts education. We see how quickly under this new ideology colleges and universities concerned with branding, their fear of being told you're not good on diversity issues, can lead to the unraveling of important values of free speech, and I think it really hurts what real diversity is.
Don’ Say “_______”
Admittedly the term, heretofore referred to, if at all, as the ‘it’ word, is freighted by a long history of narrow, derogatory usage, in certain circles, leaving little room for ambiguity or contextual nuance, to the effect of being proscribed in polite society, of itself taken to be offensive regardless of context. Nonetheless, in other circles, especially in the vernacular of a certain minority, it enjoys colloquial utility enhanced by a broad range of situational nuance, to such an extent that it is one of the most commonly spoken words, after ‘fuck’, in the American language. Ironically, the term most emblematic in White usage of debasement has come in Black usage to symbolize the essence of hominess, an integral element of soul food. At the same time, it is indicative of the seemingly unbridgeable divide between the races, while the entitlement to its usage or the proscription thereof serves to illustrate and to solidify those boundaries.
Those supportive of trans-rights maintain that identity is first a subjective reality that society is obliged to recognize, as opposed to those who cling to the quaint notion of biological reality. Similarly one might maintain a claim to personal freedom of racial identity, whether a binary, either or choice, or a right to racial indeterminacy—that one may choose to maintain a fragmented identity, expressing behavioral characteristics beyond those defined by strictly segregated stereotypes corresponding to those assigned at birth.
While the argument can be indulged that sex, as defined in terms of DNA is an immutable fact, irrespective of one’s self-identification, hormonal manipulations, or pluming adjustments, the same may not be categorically said of one’s ‘race’ as the term is commonly understood. Some would argue that race is but a social construct while others—some of the same as would see sex defined by DNA—argue that race is first genetically defined, is real beyond social perception. Ironically, it is from the former that come the loudest insistence of racial solidity, while the latter emphasize the fluidity of racial boundaries, speaking of variations within breeding populations as contrasting to those between isolated populations and the rapid deterioration of distinctions when those barriers are removed.
While the physical nature of race enjoys a degree of consensual clarity among scientists engaged more directly in the biological underpinnings of that which is addressed within the citadels of the social sciences, proscriptions against cross-racial usage of racially indicative words and tropes seem muddled, seeming to make common cause with traditional segregationists. But, if I might borrow an arrow from the quiver of the latter, “one drop your black.”; a fortiori, any ‘white’ person tracing their linage far enough back, while under no requirement to surrender their passport, should be free to self-identify, to appropriate, to employ cross-racial tropes, is entitled to do blackface standup. Or to play Othello.
Having descended from a long line of ignorant savages, I am cognizant of the extent to which we are inclined to hold to any small emblem of civilized distinction, only begrudgingly sharing that which, from our blinkered perspective, we take to be of limited resource. And that descendancy including rural Southern whites competing with Negroes within the same niche as laborers, field hands, small land owners or sharecroppers, sharing the same Bible but not the same church—living cheek by jowl, one and the other, while striving to maintain a porous barricade against the reciprocal flow of genetic information and cultural appropriation.
To the extent that civilization advances as a dialectical ratcheting up of social concepts, there is a tendency to hold fast to recently acquired assumptions, especially if hypothetical assumptions are seen as socially effective in the eradication of previous, traditionally held positions subsequently recognized as developmentally restrictive prejudices. The problem arises that in dialectic progression the new becomes the traditional orthodoxy to be defended as a new chapter in the continuation of the last war. In promoting the restitutive enablement of black integrity, social academics, activists, and fellow travelers are prone to hold fast to ridged portrayals of blacks as a unitary group corresponding to an overarching stereotype of racial identity, leaving little room for nuance, let alone a vision of individuals free of categorical restrictions to the pursuit of their interests in an open, pluralistic society.
There is a drift toward euphemistic replacement of words and a narrowing and specificity of word usage concordant with modes of thinking in categorical terms, exclusive of ambiguity, in order to eliminate exceptions to useful generalizations. Such constitutes an effective tool for those who would shape the cultural fabric to their own ends. That which is unique to the particular is inadmissible to the generalization. Admittedly particulars are the datapoints of generalizations, but generalizations, that which may be said of all within the category, having been established, particulars cease to be unique, are but supportive data points. Generalizations are powerful inversely to their exceptions, which, in the interest of effective application, must be ignored, eliminated, or discredited. And with words: define the word, define the thought; define the possibility of what may be said, of what thoughts may be capable of being formed from those words, limited to thoughts consistent with the integrity of the generalization. Generalizations, powerful tools in themselves, may, with others, and with selected, illustrative particularities, be bundled together to form an authoritative nexus, currently of note, in service to the cause of social justice.
Afternote: Plucked from the ether, the following: “‘The Nigger of the Narcissus’ is one of Conrad's lesser-known novels. This is the first and last time the title will be fully spelled out in this article.”
How is it only Negros can say 'nigger'? See my post.