Feb. 8, 2006 — - No matter how adoring some of his supporters, it's difficult to imagine that Martin Luther King Jr. would have enjoyed hearing someone say, "Martin is my nigga."
Those who have defended the use of the N-word -- rap and hip-hop artists in particular -- have said that the word's different spellings indicate its different meanings. "Nigga" or "niggaz" is supposed to be the more conciliatory version and refers to a friend or buddy. The "er" spelling is more sinister and calls up slavery, segregation and racism.
Some say King would not have used -- and would not have endorsed any use -- of the word whatsoever. That's why an episode of "The Boondocks" -- the Cartoon Network's animated show based on Aaron McGruder's syndicated comic strip -- shown Jan. 15, the day before the country observed Martin Luther King Day, generated some outrage. "I think Aaron McGruder did something with Martin's character without really thinking about or understanding who Martin Luther King was," said William Jelani Cobb, professor of history at Spelman College in Atlanta. "To portray him as a depressed old man, calling people niggers ... it was offensive. Martin was a philosopher.
[...] "If people knew the true meaning of that word, its roots and how it was used," said Larry Watson, professor of sociology and music at Boston College. "Anyone who knew the story of Emmett Till," he said, referring to the 14-year-old black teen who was lynched in Mississippi for whistling at a white woman and whose killing helped ignite the civil rights movement, "would never use that word. It was used when white slave owners were caught having sex with their female slaves and they would be charged with bestiality because they considered black women animals, less than human. ... If everyone knew this, I don't see how anybody could use that word."
Besides the influence of hip-hop, popular use of the N-word also may be rooted in a generation gap between those who lived through the civil rights and black power movements and the beneficiaries of both those movements. The hip-hop generation has never been denied a seat on the bus, service in a restaurant or a job because of their skin color as a matter of policy or law. Many children of hip-hop have never been repeatedly called the "er" version of the N-word and may be more familiar with the "friendly" use of the word than its historical legacy. "They have no historical reference on which to base the meaning behind the word," said Mark Chapman, professor of African-American studies at Fordham University. "I have a daughter, and she knows not to use the word and how I would feel and what would happen to her if she was ever caught using the word."
Some have argued that people determine what a word symbolizes or means and that turning the N-word into a compliment is a way of taking control and stripping racists of their power.
When asked about the controversial Martin Luther King episode and the use of the N-word before the episode aired, McGruder argued that the racial epithet is just a word, and that African-Americans should move beyond a racial slur and tackle other, more serious issues.
"This isn't the nigga show," McGruder said. "Nigga, nigga, nigga, nigga, nigga, nigga. I just wish we would expand the dialogue and evolve past the same conversation that we've had over the past 30 years about race in our country. ... I just hope to expand the dialogue and hope the show will challenge people to think about things they wouldn't normally think about, or think about it in a very different way."
Entertainers like comedian Chris Rock have used the racial slur in their routines in attempts to neutralize the word while criticizing African-Americans for self-destructive tendencies.
Still, despite the best intentions, critics argue that using the N-word, particularly in entertainment, does more harm than good and gives others -- whites and minorities alike -- the impression that it's no longer offensive in every context......
As Robinson notes, today many blacks, especially younger ones, use the N word with casual ease, speaking of others, speaking to others, using it proudly as a description. For them (spelling sophistry aside, because it sounds the same either way), maybe they really can think of it purely as content neutral.
For many older blacks (myself included, so it seems), the word has negative connotations not only because whites used it as a pejorative, but because other blacks used it as a pejorative as well. When my mother or grandmother or great-grandmother referred to someone's behavior as "niggerish", they were talking about unspeakably bad behavior, something they didn't want me to emulate. Because, after all, we live in a society with white people, and whites have the power. The idea was that each and every black person represented the entire race to each and every white person, and once you lost their respect by acting "niggerish", you would likely never get a chance to repair that damage. It's terribly unfair, of course; putting the burdens of an entire race on one moment's bad behavior is totally nonsensical.
And yet, in some ways, also true.
Purely a side note: You have no idea the mental hoops I had to get through just to type the damn word for this entry (and a discussion I'm having elsewhere). I fully expected my grandmother and greatgrandmother to rise from their graves, march to Chicago, and slap the black off my face. In their houses, they used the word to describe behavior I was never ever EVER to emulate; I was never allowed to use the word at all, because they felt I was then too young to understand the particular type of disrespect for other blacks being conveyed by that word, and I was certainly too young to use the word to describe the behavior of adults when I was still just a child. (I don't know if that would have changed later; they were both dead by the time I was 25, and by then I had been very very VERY well trained never to use the word in their presence.)
I do understand what people mean when they talk about reclaiming the word, I really do. Generally speaking. I will also admit that most of the time, I sit in the camp that says, "Some words really don't need to be reclaimed; they just need to go away." But then, I'm (just barely) young enough that people trying to reclaim the terms "queer" and "dyke" just get a shrug from me. I wouldn't use them, but they don't bother me, depending on who is using them and how. I truly don't know if this is the same thing, if those words were ever quite as profoundly negative, as profoundly directed as the N word.
"Richard Pryor used the N-word all the time in his routines," said Chapman. "Then he went to Africa and he said, 'I will never use that word again.' Imagine if we could get some of the rappers to go to Africa -- like Nelly, Ja Rule and Kanye West, one of the more enlightened of the bunch. Imagine what effect they could have if they visited Africa and came back and said, 'I won't use the N-word again.'"
Leaving aside the fact that Mr Chapman would appear not to like "the bunch" very much ... it is an interesting concept, isn't it? I suspect it would set off a ferocious linguistic battle, of all things. One group of people saying that those who refused to use that particular variant of the N word were setting themselves above the others, or maybe were old-fashioned, out of it. The other group, because of the nature of their position, would need to take the rhetorical high ground and mostly refuse to respond to the baiting ... a tactic which notably does not work in public discourse in this country. It would also take some seriously fancy dancing for them to articulate this position in a way that didn't completely alienate them from their audience.
I wonder which side would win out, eventually? ... I suspect that I know the answer to that question, though.
And in a related Media Relations entry:
.....He's being harsh about all the rest of us. He's saying that, for all the good that King did, and for all the wonderful things he said, his philosophy no longer seems to speak to Black America the way that it once did. That society has changed in such a way that we might very well no longer allow him to speak to us at all. And that, frankly, is a sad commentary about us and not about Dr. King....
