Miami Dolphins players Richie Incognito and Jonathan Martin are seen in this Sept. 30 file photo. Martin left the team after alleged bullying by Incognito, who later admitted to sending a text message using the N-word. (Bill Feig, AP file)
Is there a double standard on the N-word? Is it socially acceptable for blacks to use the term while it’s unacceptable for whites? Though a recent court case in New York suggests the idea has no legal standing, it’s the court of public opinion (and the football gridiron) where the issue finds itself playing out again in recent weeks.
That the word is loaded and potentially divisive isn’t in doubt. Social critic Ta-Nehisi Coates argued recently in The New York Times, “If you could choose one word to represent the centuries of bondage, the decades of terrorism, the long days of mass rape, the totality of white violence that birthed the black race in America, it would be ‘nigger.’ ”
And so it is that many arbiters of language and social sensitivity have been trying for decades to erase the N-word from common usage. A brief (and wholly incomplete) list of examples from the past couple years:
* Texas Gov. Rick Perry came under fire during the 2012 presidential campaign for a rock bearing the name “Niggerhead” that had previously appeared at the entrance of a hunting camp on his family’s ranch. The family painted over the name, but Perry was criticized for not doing so sooner.
* In Utah last year, a group tried (unsuccessfully, so far) to change the name of Negro Bill Canyon, which until the ’60s was called Nigger Bill Canyon. The progression of the name shows the change in attitudes over time.
Nate Beeler, The Columbus Dispatch
* In 2011, an Auburn professor published a 2011 version of Mark Twain’s classic “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” with the word “nigger” changed in all cases to “slave.” Professor Alan Gribben was concerned that the N-word was causing schools to avoid teaching the book to students, but he was strongly criticized for “sanitizing” the classic novel.
NFL umpire Roy Ellison was suspended for one game earlier this season for his comments to Washington Redskins player Trent Williams, who reportedly upset Ellison by repeatedly using the N-word on the field. (Rick Osentoski, AP file)
In just the last few weeks we’ve had the following: Richie Incognito, a white player for the Miami Dolphins, tags a black teammate, Jonathan Martin, with that epithet and black players defend the white guy because he’s an “honorary” brother; Matt Barnes of the Los Angeles Clippers tweets the word in criticizing his teammates and says people who have a problem with that should “get used to it;” Trent Williams, a black player for Washington, DC’s professional football team (speaking of racial slurs) is accused of using the word against Roy Ellison, a black referee, a charge Williams denies.
Lamenting the reaction to those events, Pitts writes:
The mushrooming controversies prompt two African-American NBA analysts, Charles Barkley and Michael Wilbon, to defend their usage of the N-word. And it’s not just the jockocracy, either. Last week in The New York Times, celebrated social critic Ta-Nehisi Coates, who is African American, made the old “context” argument; i.e., it’s OK if we say it, but it’s not OK if you say it. In defending the N-word as an “in-word” Coates noted how some women will jokingly call other women by a misogynistic term or some gay people will laughingly use a homophobic slur in talking with or about one another.
Yielding the floor to Coates, here’s the relevant passage from his New York Times op-ed, which the quote above also came from:
A separate and unequal standard for black people is always wrong. And the desire to ban the word “nigger” is not anti-racism, it is finishing school. When Matt Barnes used the word “niggas” he was being inappropriate. When Richie Incognito and Riley Cooper used “nigger,” they were being violent and offensive. That we have trouble distinguishing the two evidences our discomfort with the great chasm between black and white America.
Pitts and Coates both make solid, reasoned arguments, but the case is clearly far from settled. Here’s a closing argument from columnist James E. Causey, writing in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel about the movie “12 Years a Slave”:
The irony … is how the N-word was used freely by whites to torment generations of African-Americans, but today that same word or a variation of it has become a term of endearment by many of the descendants of the very people who once had no choice but to endure hearing it.
What do you think? Is there a double standard on the N-word? And should the word be buried?
Send us a letter to the editor at openforum@denverpost.com (150 words or fewer, and please include your full name, city and a phone number where we can reach you). We’ll consider your comments for publication in an upcoming edition of The Denver Post.