Blackstone Audio Inc. - The N word: [who can say it, who shouldnt, and why]

Copyright 2007 by Jabari Asim
All rights reserved

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Asim, Jabari, date.
The N word : who can say it, who shouldn't,
and why / Jabari Asim.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN -13: 978-0-618-19717-0
ISBN -10: 0-618-19717-6
1. United StatesRace relationsHistory.
2. RacismUnited StatesHistory. I. Title.
E 185. A 85 2007 305.896 073dc22 2006026872

Printed in the United States of America

Book design by Robert Overholtzer

MP 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To Liana, Force of Nature

I bow down in gratitude to all the generations of ancestors in my blood family. As a continuation of my ancestors, I gratefully accept their energy as it flows through me. I ask for their continued support, protection, and strength.

Endless gratitude also:

To my parents, Irving and Joyce Smith, for generously providing me with life, sustenance, and example.

To everyone whose contributions large and small helped animate this humble offering: my siblings, Dale, Seitu, Karen, Guy and Boyce; Susie Ward, Mark and Bridgette Arnett, Lonnae and Ralph Parker, Brian and Elanna Gilmore, Jamel and Tracey Richardson, Wil Hay-good, Johari Jabir, Fred and Lisa McKissack, Carla Broyles, Natalie Hopkinson, David Nicholson, my patient and supportive colleagues at Book World; Chris Lehmann, Jennifer Howard, and Mark Trainer, Joy Harris, Eamon Dolan, Lori Glazer, Sasheem Silkiss-Hero, Luise Erdmann, Janet Silver, and the rest of the team at Houghton Mifflin; Elaine Robnett-Moore, Charles and Paula Nabrit, James and Elsie Richardson, Richard and Ellen MacKenzie, the Reverend Mark Scott, Kevin Powell, Colin Channer, Rohan and Angela Preston, Bridget Warren and Todd Stewart, Sylvester and Victoria Brown, Ira Jones, Thich Nhat Hanh, and Leland Ware; Joseph, G'Ra, Nia, Jelani, and Gyasi.

To anyone whom limited space and memory have caused me to omit, please forgive me and know that I am thankful.

I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.

Abraham Lincoln, 1858

The white man was wrong, I was not a primitive, not even a half-man. I belonged to a race that had already been working in gold and silver two thousand years ago.

Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 1952

The failure of the Negro race, as a race, to achieve equality cannot be blamed wholly on white oppression. This is the excuse, the crutch, the piteous and finally pathetic defense of Negrophiles unable or willing to face reality. In other times and other places, sturdy, creative, and self-reliant minorities have carved out their own destiny; they have compelled acceptance on their own merit; they have demonstrated those qualities of leadership and resourcefulness and disciplined ambition that in the end cannot ever be denied. But the Negro race, as a race, has done none of this.

James J. Kilpatrick, 1962

W.E.B. Du Bois wasn't exactly prophetic when he famously observed that the problem of the twentieth century would be the problem of the "Color Line." It was 1903, after all, and the color line had been a growing problem ever since whites first confronted Native Americans centuries earlier. But Du Bois was indisputably accurate. Few were as aware of history's long reach as he, and perhaps even fewer felt the sting of the past as acutely. By the time of his writing, the Native American threat to white dominance had been emphatically eliminated, leaving only blacks between the conquerors of the New World and the bountiful destiny they envisioned.

The slaves' many talentscontributed under threat of deathhad once made African Americans crucial to white ambitions in North America. Even then, the white ruling class imagined a day when their captives' services would no longer be required. George Washington expressed a typical desire in a 1778 letter to his plantation manager. "To be plain," he wrote, "I wish to get quit of Negroes."

Presidents from Jefferson to Lincoln took Washington's wish a step further, entertaining fantasies of large-scale black exportation that ultimately went nowhere. In contrast, taking steps to ensure that the blacks in their midst would not become citizens of the Republic proved much easier. Early on, the Founding Fathers removed us from the Declaration of Independence, an act Ralph Ellison called a "failure of nerve." The Founders committed "the sin of American racial pride," Ellison wrote. "They designated one section of the American people to be the sacrificial victims for the benefit of the rest ... Indeed, they [blacks] were thrust beneath the threshold of social hierarchy and expected to stay there."

How whites from all levels of society worked to keep us therethrough a combination of custom, law, myth, and racial insultis the subject of this book.

Reflecting on this potent, destructive blend in 1903, Du Bois condemned whites' "personal disrespect and mockery, the ridicule and systematic humiliation, the distortion of fact and wanton license of fancy, the cynical ignoring of the better and the boisterous welcoming of the worse, the all-pervading desire to inculcate disdain for everything black, from Toussaint to the devil." Nearly four decades after his "Color Line" comment, Du Bois attributed the still-yawning divide between whites and blacks to that same white hostility, a virulent contempt that "depended not simply on economic exploitation but on a racial folklore grounded on centuries of instinct, habit and thought and implemented by the conditioned reflex of visible color." The N Word looks closely at that folklore tracing its path as it sustained the entwined ideas of white supremacy and black inferiority, supplemented the nation's ever-growing popular culture, and influenced the scope and direction of its legal system. It explores in depth various categories of literature, science, music, theater, and film, the legislative policies and judicial decisions designed to keep blacks in their place, and the language of racial insult that runs like an electric current through them all.

The decision to exclude blacks from the Declaration enabled race to emerge as "a new principle or motive in the drama of American democracy," Ellison persuasively observed. Race, in his view, "was to radiate a qualifying influence upon all of the nation's principles and become the source of a war of words that has continued to this day." The battle of wills, initially between planters and their human property, has gradually and painfully evolved into an increasingly harmonious albeit fitful coexistence between white and black Americans. At no time has it been a one-sided conflict: The N Word also takes note of the acts of defiance that I and many others regard as a form of counternarrative challenging the majority culture's myth of conquest and superiority. That myth, in effect, attempts to erase the real history of blacks in America and replace it with a fictional tale of futility and mediocrity. Blacks who have actively campaigned against the majority narrative have been, as it were, writing themselves into existence.

Although the fusillades traded over the years have diminished considerably, language continues to convey formidable and occasionally savage force. For much of the history of our fair Republic, the N word has been at the center of our most volatile exchanges. Because no discussion of American race relationsand no consideration of white supremacycan be complete without it, "nigger" appears early and often in these pages.