View from Australia: America v. A Word

By Jonathan Bradley

I've never heard America say "nigger" as much as I have in the past couple days.

(Then again, I'm white, so of course I haven't been exposed to its full distasteful force or frequency.)

Not to leap headlong in and join the nation's newfound bout of, um, linguistic unselfconsciousness, but it's disconcerting. Here's why: At some point circa the civil rights era, large portions of America decided that racism in the country had basically ended. Brown v Board of Education had ended legal segregation of schools in the '50s, and, during the '60s, Martin Luther King Jr. and President Lyndon Baines Johnson ended legal segregation in the South through the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. (Less well remembered were the efforts to end redlining and housing covenants in the North.) Forget the centuries of slavery followed by another century of oppression. Forget the vast gulf in assets, opportunity, and income that existed across the country, and the attitudes that didn't die out when President Johnson signed a bill. As far as many were concerned, 1965 — or some time there abouts — was year zero.

I believe that for a lot of people, this wasn't a particularly malicious opinion. The idea of equality — particularly as preserved by legal mechanisms and civic institutions, most obviously the Constitution and democratic society — is such an important part of the American mythos, that when the country could finally rid its code of all obvious legal inequities, many folks, mostly white ones, breathed a sigh of relief. America was finally functioning as it was supposed to: as a new world, a clean slate, where all men are created equal. If you couldn't get by on your own, it was your own fault. Perhaps some of these white people noticed that things were still tough for African Americans, but it was awkward to think about, particularly if they also felt things were tough for white folks like them as well. This perspective is summed up with a pithy line from Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts: "The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race." 

The result of the unspoken declaration that racism was finished was a suspicion that anyone who pointed out anything but the most obvious racism, like the ugly and overt kind the country wielded by the most vicious Southerners during the Civil Rights era, was breaking the national pact for their own individual ends. Accusing someone of racism not only meant accusing them of being an unAmerican monster, it also meant claiming to suffer from something America had eradicated. The logic, then, is that such accusations were a bid for "special treatment" — a devious request for a remedy to a wrong that no longer existed. This is how you get survey results showing that a large proportion of conservatives believe white people suffer as much from racism as black people do. 

This is the sort of impasse you get in America when the country's ideals run headlong into its reality.

But one of the last, and most sure, expressions of racism that a broad swathe of American society could agree was genuinely racist was the enunciation of one six letter word: Nigger. That ugly little epithet, freighted with the weight of slavery and segregation, evidence to all of the nation's original sin and — for black folks, at least — of memories of past and continued injustices, was firm, incontrovertible proof that its speaker was A Racist. There's something about the slur: the nasally first syllable, the harsh, rolling, rhotic "r" at the end, that conjures up, even for those who have never suffered its brunt, an image of ignorant redneck hatred. It was a reminder of America at its worst, and so America banished it.

This is not a column calling for that epithet's proud reintroduction into polite society. But I do want to point out how nervous that word tends to make America. In public discourse, it can usually not even be referenced as a word. The polite thing to do, if it must be brought up, is to refer to it, in stiff, unnatural and apologetic tones, as "the N word." Even when no people, abstract or otherwise, could be considered the subject of the word, even when it is only being brought up as an item of language, standard practice is: "the N word." I've seen writers spray f-words throughout an article, but still follow that letter "n" with demure asterisks.

This past Sunday, however, the Washington Post revealed that Republican presidential candidate and Texas Governor Rick Perry leased a hunting spot that locals used to know as "Niggerhead." Some people in that part of West Texas still do call it that. For some amount of time during Perry's use of the property, the name was displayed on a large slab of rock at the front gate. Perry says his father, who leased the property before him, painted over it as soon as he found out, then turned the offensive stone over so it could no longer be seen. Some people who have hunted there with Perry told the Post that the sign endured for much longer than Perry suggests, and the Governor showed little concern about it. 

What you think of this probably depends on how cynically disposed you are to Rick Perry. It's not certain whether he quickly removed an unpleasant relic of local racism, or whether he showed cavalier disregard for the hurt such a sign causes many of his fellow Americans. But, strangely, Americans appear to have gotten over their reticence of making mention of that word. Papers of record like the Post and the New York Times have unashamedly published it in black or white — and these are publications who usually twist themselves into bizarre linguistic contortions to avoid even the most vaguely explicit language. Blogs are printing it asterisk-free. Andrew Sullivan has collected missives from readers sharing other place names and industrial jargon based on it. Journalistically, it's the responsible thing to do — the language is the story here, so the last thing a writer should do is obscure the language. But it's a bit out of ordinary.

More disconcertingly, some conservatives seem to have discovered a fondness for "nigger," at least when its use is traditional. In his RedState post on the Perry story, Erick Erickson censors the name of the hunting ground, but many of his commenters don't see what the big deal is. It's not racist! they say. It's just what folks in the area know it as! It's an old logging term! Sailor jargon! Nothing racist about it at all! In fact, when Republican candidate Herman Cain, who is black, did say he found it pretty offensive, Republicans pushed back hard. Surely one of their own couldn't be peddling an accusation of racism!

Every now and then, America decides it should have "a national conversation about race." This is what it looks like when it does.

5 October 2011