Essay 3021

From The Chicago Tribune…

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Attempting to put a racial slur in its place

By Rebecca L. Ford

The N Word: Who Can Say It, Who Shouldn’t, and Why
By Jabari Asim
Houghton Mifflin, 278 pages, $26

As hard as it might be for some to believe in this era of MTV, BET and VH1, neither rappers, hip-hop musicians nor stand-up comics invented the n-word. The first recorded use of the word in North America was in Jamestown in 1619, according to “The N Word: Who Can Say It, Who Shouldn’t, and Why,” Jabari Asim’s insightful new cultural survey of the history of the word that has hurt and haunted the country for 400 years and counting.

For most of its long and painful life, the word “nigger” has been the blood-soaked weapon of racists, whether in pinstripes, poodle skirts, or sheets. It was never a term of endearment, as some of its proponents claim it to be in the clubs and street corners of today. It was vile and destructive, sparking lynchings and scarring souls. Decent Americans never allowed the word to pass their lips, at least not outside the privacy of their homes.

But these are confusing cultural times, especially when it comes to the use of this word. It seems everyone is using it, from black rappers to suburban white kids, who are the majority of rap-music buyers.

With this book, Asim, deputy editor of The Washington Post’s Book World and syndicated columnist on popular culture, hopes to put the word back in what he sees as its rightful place: locked away behind closed doors.

Presciently timed, “The N Word” is no polemic. It is a lesson in American history and a reasoned argument for self-censorship. The book traces the labyrinthine path of the word through American popular culture. Asim follows a thread that links the Jamestown reference to the present. This common cord connects Thomas Jefferson and George Jefferson, Mark Twain and Malcolm X, Uncle Tom and Sweet Sweetback to the comics and rappers who use the word today for fun and profit.

Asim isn’t arguing for the word to be banned. He regards the right of free speech as sacred, even when that speech is toxic. But he does want the entertainers who throw the word around so casually and the young people who admire and emulate them to understand the role it has played and continues to play in American life.

“For much of the history of our fair Republic, the N word has been at the center of our most volatile exchanges,” he writes. While other derogatory epithets for blacks “have been largely replaced by such ostensibly innocuous terms as ‘inner-city,’ ‘urban,’ and ‘culturally disadvantaged,’” the n-word “endures, helping to perpetuate and reinforce the durable, insidious taint of presumed African-American inferiority.” Within this context, “The N Word” also discusses blacks’ adoption of the epithet to describe themselves, an increasingly popular habit among younger African-Americans. “Are they in fact removing the word’s power to harm,” he asks, “or merely succumbing to an immense, inscrutable, and bizarre failure of the imagination?”

There are a few places in polite society where the n-word is acceptable, Asim writes: the realms of art, scholarship and journalism, because these fields require critical engagement of the word. But in his view, it has no positive role to play beyond those worlds:

“My concern is with the public square, where I believe the N word and other profane expressions have no rightful place. … But my obligations to others regarding civility and decency end at my doorstep. … Conversely, if you are white, [how] you refer to me … when you’re at home is of little consequence to me.”

Asim is not stationing himself as the constable of political correctness. He is “willing to acknowledge a distinction between private speech and public behavior.” Still, Asim longs for the n-word to disappear, especially from the vocabulary of young blacks:

“I imagine a way of life derived from our purest, wisest, fiercely loving selves. I dream of a world where [the word] no longer roams, confined instead to the fetid white fantasy land where he was born.”

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Rebecca L. Ford is a Chicago lawyer.