Nigger: The Strange Career Of A Troublesome Word Page 10
Spike Lee, among others, has taken exception to Tarantino's playfulness with nigger. When it was noted in response that some of his own films also make extensive use of nigger, the director replied that as an African American, he had “more of a right to use [the N-word].”34 Lee himself has not articulated the basis for that asserted “right,” but at least three theories are plausible. One is that the long and ugly history of white racist subordination of African Americans should in and of itself disqualify whites from using nigger. A second holds that equity earned through oppression grants cultural ownership rights: having been made to suffer by being called “nigger” all these years, this theory goes, blacks should now be able to monopolize the slur's peculiar cultural capital.35 A third theory is that whites lack a sufficiently intimate knowledge of black culture to use the word nigger properly.
All three of these theories are dramatized in Lee's film Bamboozled, a farce about a black scriptwriter who, in order to keep his job, creates a television-network variety show featuring all of the stereotypical characteristics through which blacks have been comically defamed: blackface, bugging eyes, extravagant buffoonery, the omnipresent grin. Lee takes care to make the worst of Bamboozled's many villains an obnoxious, presumptuous, ignorant white man—Dunwitty—who deems himself sufficiently “black” to boast to his African American subordinates that he knows more about “niggers” than they do.36
The great failing of these theories is that, taken seriously, they would cast a protectionist pall over popular culture that would likely benefit certain minority entrepreneurs only at the net expense of society overall. Excellence in culture thrives, like excellence elsewhere, in a setting open to competition—and that includes competition concerning how best to dramatize the N-word. Thus, instead of cordoning off racially defined areas of the culture and allowing them to be tilled only by persons of the “right” race, we should work toward enlarging the common ground of American culture, a field that is open to all comers regardless of their origin. Despite Spike Lee's protests to the contrary, Quentin Tarantino is talented and has the goods to prove it. That is not to say that he should be exempt from criticism, but Lee's racial critique of his fellow director is off the mark. It is almost wholly ad hominem. It focuses on the character of Tarantino's race rather than the character of his work—brilliant work that allows the word nigger to be heard in a rich panoply of contexts and intonations.
In 1997 in Ypsilanti, Michigan, a computer technician named Delphine Abraham decided to look up the definition of nigger in the tenth edition of Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary.37 This is what she found:
1: a black person—usu. taken to be offensive 2: a member of any dark-skinned race—usu. taken to be offensive 3: a member of a socially disadvantaged class of persons ˜s… all the people who feel left out of the political process— Ron Dellums
usage Nigger in senses 1 and 2 can be found in the works of such writers of the past as Joseph Conrad, Mark Twain, and Charles Dickens, but it now ranks as perhaps the most offensive and inflammatory racial slur in English. Its use by and among blacks is not always intended or taken as offensive, but, except in sense 3, it is otherwise a word expressive of racial hatred and bigotry.
Abraham recorded what she subsequently felt and did:
I felt that the first two definitions labeled me and anyone else who happened to be Black or have dark skin a nigger. Outraged, I called Merriam-Webster in Springfield, Massachusetts. I reached the company's president and publisher, John Morse, who was polite but really didn't seem to understand my concerns. Not getting a response that satisfied me, I told him before hanging up, “Something should be done about this, and I think I'm going to start a petition drive to have the word removed or redefined.”
Just by speaking locally, I gathered more than 2,000 signatures within the first month. I was interviewed by the Associated Press news service, on radio talk shows, and even on CNN. Newsgroups on the Internet joined the campaign. Syndicated newspaper columnists weighed in. The NAACP, through its president and CEO, Kweisi Mfume, suggested organizing a boycott if Merriam-Webster did not review the definition.
Most people believe, as I do, that the N-word needs a more accurate first definition reflecting that it is a derogatory term used to dehumanize or oppress a group or race of people.38
The question is, should Abrahams, Mfume, or anyone else have felt insulted by Merriam-Webster's definition?
No.
The definition notes that the term is usually taken to be offensive and then states, for good measure, that the N-word “now ranks as perhaps the most offensive and inflammatory racial slur in English.” Abrahams claimed that the Merriam-Webster definition labeled as a nigger anyone who happened to be black. But that view is unreasonable given the totality of the definition offered by the dictionary. In defining nigger, moreover, Webster's 10th does not vary from its typical practice. For instance, in defining honky, the dictionary posits: “usu. disparaging: a white person.”
In response to Abraham's petition drive, representatives of Merriam-Webster tried to depoliticize the matter by portraying the dictionary as a mechanical, autonomous linguistic mirror. To this end, the marketing director repeatedly averred that “a dictionary is a scholarly reference, not a political tool. As long as the word is in use, it is our responsibility as dictionary publishers to put the word into the dictionary.”39 Similarly, the company president, John R. Morse, portrayed his editors as mere technicians lacking independent powers of their own. Dictionary makers, Morse maintained, “do not invent the words that go into the dictionary, and they don't decide what meanings they will have.”40 Morse simultaneously undermined his own point, however, by noting that “offensive words… appear only in hardcover college-level dictionaries, which are edited expressly for adults. Slurs and other offensive words are not included in dictionaries intended for children. Nor are they published in any smaller, abridged dictionaries, such as paperbacks.” With respect to these other dictionaries, the managers of Merriam-Webster had decided, for various reasons, to excise the N-word. Whether or not this decision was a sound one is, for the moment, irrelevant. The important thing to recognize is that dictionary makers do, in fact, exercise judgment, notwithstanding Morse's evasive denial.
Deciding whether to note or how to define a deeply controversial word is an inescapably “political” act, and claims to the contrary are either naive or disingenuous. The issue, then, is not whether editors shape the substance of their dictionaries. Of course they do. The issue is the substance of the choices made. Some of Merriam-Webster's critics have condemned the editors’ decision to include any reference at all to nigger. “If the word is not there [in the dictionary], you can't use it,” one protester asserted in favor of deleting the N-word alto-gether.41 That tack, however, is glaringly wrongheaded. Many terms that are absent from dictionaries are nonetheless pervasive in popular usage. Moreover, so long as racist sentiments exist, they will find linguistic means of expression, even if some avenues are blocked. There are, after all, numerous ways of insulting people.
In sum, the campaign against Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary was misguided. The dictionary defined the term adequately, and the dictionary's editors were correct in including the N-word despite the embarrassment and hurt feelings the term inflicts. Nigger should have a place in any serious dictionary. The word is simply too important to ignore.
A second, and achingly poignant, example of mistaken protest is the widespread repudiation of Huckleberry Finn, now one of the most beleaguered texts in American literature. Monthly, it seems, someone attacks Mark Twain's most famous book on the grounds that it is racist. The novel's most energetic foe, John H. Wallace, calls it “the most grotesque example of racist trash ever written.”42 For many of Huckleberry Finn's enemies, the most upsetting and best proof of the book's racism is the fact that nigger appears in the text some 215 times. At one point, for example, Huck's aunt Sally asks him why he is so late arriving at her house:
“We blowed a cylinder head.” “Good gracious! Anybody hurt?” “No'm. Killed a nigger.”
“Well, it's lucky; because sometimes people do get hurt.”43
Wallace asserts that this exchange, within the context of the novel as a whole, strives to make the point that blacks are not human beings.44That interpretation, however, is ludicrous, a frightening exhibition of how thought becomes stunted in the absence of any sense of irony. Twain is not willfully buttressing racism here; he is seeking ruthlessly to unveil and ridicule it. By putting nigger in white characters’ mouths, the author is not branding blacks, but rather branding the whites.
There was a time when Twain's own use of nigger signaled contempt. As a young man inculcated with white-supremacist beliefs and sentiments, he viewed blacks as inferior and spoke of them as such.45 As he matured and traveled and became more cosmopolitan, however, Twain underwent a dramatic metamorphosis. He grew to hate slavery and the brutality of Jim Crow and began to express his antiracist perspective satirically through his writings. Huckleberry Finn is the best fictive example of Twain's triumph over his upbringing. In it he creates a loving relationship between Huck and Jim, the runaway slave, all the while sardonically impugning the pretensions of white racial superiority. Among Twain's nonfiction, a striking example of his revolt against bigotry is his piece “Only a Nigger,” in which he speaks in the voice of an apologist for a lynching:
Ah, well! Too bad, to be sure! A little blunder in the administration of justice by southern mob-law: but nothing to speak of. Only “a nigger” killed by mistake—that is all.… But mistakes will happen, even in the conduct of the best regulated and most high-toned mobs, and surely there is no good reason why Southern gentlemen should worry themselves with useless regrets, so long as only an innocent “nigger” is hanged, or roasted or [] to death now and then.… What are the lives of a few “niggers” in comparison with the impetuous instincts of a proud and fiery race? Keep ready the halter, therefore, o chivalry of Memphis! Keep the lash knotted; keep the brand and the faggots in waiting, for prompt work with the next “nigger” who may be suspected of any damnable crime!46
Wallace, I suppose, would read this as an endorsement of lynching. But obviously it is intended to be just the opposite. The same holds true for Huckleberry Finn, which Twain designed to subvert, not to reinforce, racism.
I am not ruling out criticism of the novel. Perceptive commentators have questioned its literary merits.47 It is undoubtedly true, moreover, that regardless of Twain's intentions, Huckleberry Finn (like any work of art) can be handled in a way that is not only stupid but downright destructive of the educational and emotional well-being of students. To take a contemporary example, the producers of Mississippi Burning intended their film to carry an antiracist message, but that did not prevent it from contributing inspiration to a wayward youth who, in 1990, burned crosses outside the residence of a black family in St. Paul, Minnesota, in an effort to frighten them into moving. 48
Such concerns, however, are different from the one I am addressing. I am addressing the contention that the presence of nigger alone is sufficient to taint Huckleberry Finn or any other text. I am addressing those who contend that nigger has no proper place in American culture and who thus desire to erase the N-word totally, without qualification, from the cultural landscape. I am addressing parents who, in numerous locales, have demanded the removal of Huckleberry Finn from syllabi solely on the basis of the presence of the N-word—without having read the novel themselves, without having investigated the way in which it is being explored in class, and without considering the possibilities opened up by the close study of a text that confronts so dramatically the ugliness of slavery and racism. I am addressing eradicationists who, on grounds of racial indecency, would presumably want to bowdlerize or censor poems such as Carl Sandburg's “Nigger Lover,” stories such as Theodore Dreiser's “Nigger Jeff,” Claude McKay's “Nigger Lover,” or Henry Dumas’ “Double Nigger,” plays such as Ed Bullins’ “The Electronic Nigger,” and novels such as Gil Scott-Heron's The Nigger Factory.
A third category of misguided protest involves cases in which insulted parties demand excessive punishment. Consider what happened in 1993 at Central Michigan University (CMU).
Keith Dambrot was in his third year as the school's varsity men's basketball coach.49 CMU also designated him as an “assistant professor;” presumably his subject was basketball. At halftime during a game against Miami University of Ohio, Dambrot tried to focus and inspire his team, made up of eleven blacks and three whites. He asked his players for permission to use with them a term that they often used with one another: the N-word. They nodded their assent, at which point Coach Dambrot said, “We need to be tougher, harder-nosed, and play harder.… We need to have more niggers on the team.”50 He then admiringly referred to one white member of the team as a nigger and went around the locker room categorizing the other players, by name, as either niggers or half-niggers. The niggers were the players who were doing their jobs well. The half-niggers or non-niggers were the ones who needed to work harder. Coach Dambrot later explained that he had used the term nigger “for instructional purposes with the permission of my African American players, and I used the term in the sense in which it is used by my African American players … to connote a person who is fearless, mentally strong, and tough.”51
Despite the halftime pep talk, Central Michigan lost the game. But that was merely the beginning of Coach Dambrot's problems.
Word soon spread on campus about Coach Dambrot's locker-room speech. He must have become aware of this, and realized that some observers might take offense, because he asked the university's athletic director to speak to the members of the team about the incident. None of them voiced any objection to what the coach had said. Nonetheless, the athletic director told Dambrot that regardless of his intentions, his use of nigger had been “extremely inappropriate.”52 The director then warned the coach that if he used the term again, he would be fired.
Soon thereafter, a student who had previously quit the basketball team complained about the coach's language to the university's affirmative-action officer. This administrator, a white woman, demanded that the coach be punished. She insisted that a formal reprimand be placed in his personnel file, that he be suspended without pay for five days, and that during his suspension he arrange for a sensitivity trainer to meet with the team to explain why the use of nigger was always inappropriate. She further specified that attendance at this sensitivity-training session should be made mandatory, that Coach Dambrot should “help assure that the team is not hostile to the training,” and that he should “convey his support of this training session to the players and the staff.”53
The coach did not resist, hoping that the incident would blow over quietly. His hopes, however, were shortly to be dashed. Publicity triggered two demonstrations at which eighty to a hundred protesters expressed their disapproval of the coach's purported “racism.” The president of the university responded by announcing that the coach had been disciplined, declaring that “the term [nigger] is inappropriate under any circumstances,” and avowing that he was “deeply sorry about the hurt, anger, [and] embarrassment its use ha[d] caused individuals as well as the entire university community.”54 By that time, though, critics of the university, including state legislators, were calling for harsher punishment, which was soon forthcoming
On April 12, 1993, the university administration fired Coach Dambrot on the grounds that “public reaction to the incident [had] created an environment that makes it impossible for the university to conduct a viable basketball program under [his] leadership.”55
Dambrot then sued the university, claiming that his discharge constituted a violation of his First Amendment rights. In a gesture of solidarity, members of the basketball team also sued the university, claiming that its speech code violated their First Amendment rights. The students prevailed—judges invalidated CMU's speech code—but not so their coach: judges ruled
that the First Amendment did not bar the university from firing him. As interpreted by the Supreme Court, the First Amendment protects (to some extent) speech that touches upon matters of public concern. Therefore, if the coach had been talking to his team at halftime about, say, the racist history of the term nigger, his comments probably would have been protected. But in the view of the judges, Dambrot's speech did not touch upon a matter of public concern and was therefore fully vulnerable to the university's censure.