Wrongthink and Word Choice

Hey,

I don’t really want to talk about the n-word. But here we are.  

I’m old enough to remember when rap and hip-hop burst onto the scene. Ever since, there’s been a robust debate about why it is okay for black performers—and ultimately, black citizens—to use the term but not anybody else.  

That debate hasn’t really disappeared, and the same cliches define it. The argument for a black cultural monopoly on the word remains that doing so will “take away its power.” Just as homosexuals sought to reclaim the word “queer,” blacks used the n-word to rob it of its ability to dehumanize. As Randall Kennedy wrote in 2000, many African Americans have “transformed it from a sign of shame to be avoided if possible into a sign of pride to be worn assertively.” By the time Kennedy wrote Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word, this was the dominant interpretation and defense of the widespread use of the n-word by blacks in music and everyday life.

Now I’ve got to tell you, it makes me nervous just typing out the title of a book written by one of the nation’s foremost legal scholars, a tenured professor at Harvard Law School and, in case you didn’t know, an African American.

It must make the administrators of Amazon nervous, too, because if you search for the n-word in the title on Amazon, no results show up, even though it’s hardly the only book with that word in the title. (Amazon does return search results for exact titles.) I have to wonder what Randall Kennedy thinks about that.

The reason it makes me nervous should be obvious, even if you hadn’t heard about what happened over at the journalistic asylum popularly known as the New York Times. It’s a loathsome word and I have no desire to traffic in it. I’d rather the term just disappeared from cultural discourse—white and black—but that’s not my call. More to the point, if I wasn’t a co-owner of this publication, I probably wouldn’t risk even writing out the title of a scholarly work.

Which brings me to my point. Has this cultural strategy led to the word being robbed of its power?

Obviously not.

To be sure, the nature of its power has changed. But is society better off?

Here’s Jonathan Chait’s summary of what happened at the Times:

In 2019, New York Times reporter Donald McNeil Jr., working as a tour guide for high-school students traveling to Peru (a service apparently offered by the paper), got into an argument with several of them. The debate centered around whether one of the students’ classmates deserved to have been suspended over a video that surfaced of her, as a 12-year-old, saying the N-word. McNeil, according to a statement released by the Times, asked about the context of the word — was she rapping, or quoting a book title, or using the word as a slur?

McNeil’s distinction apparently made little headway with his interlocutors, who accused him of using the term himself. Two weeks ago, the Daily Beast reported on their allegations. At first, Times editor Dean Baquet argued that McNeil’s action was regrettable but that he deserved “another chance” to learn from the mistake. But after 150 Times staffers wrote to express their outrage, McNeil resigned.

McNeil issued a groveling apology for his crime of wrongthink, which was no doubt required for him to receive a more generous severance package. Accompanying his forced confession, the Times’ leadership issued an email explaining the decision to fire McNeil that included this statement: “We do not tolerate racist language regardless of intent.”

This is, quite simply, insane. A LexisNexis search reveals that the Times itself has mentioned Randall Kennedy’s book 15 times in the past. A lengthy essay, on the front page of the Arts and Ideas section of the Times, written by David Kirkpatrick, gave it very friendly treatment.  

One has to wonder if Kirkpatrick, who is white, ever used the term when discussing what he was working on with his white editors. Did the copy editors ever say the word out loud? At an editorial meeting, did anyone ask Kirkpatrick, “What are you working on?” How did he answer?

If the new policy at the Times is that any use of the n-word, even long ago, is a fireable offense regardless of intent, why have there been no purges? According to LexisNexis, the epithet has made 1,648 appearances in the pages of the Times since 1980. Surely, it’s time to do a wholesale house cleaning.

I want to be clear: I am not defending the use of the word, regardless of intent. The point is that intent has to matter.

If intent doesn’t matter, the n-word hasn’t been robbed of its power; it’s been imbued with eldritch powers it never had before. Last September, a professor at USC was suspended because he explained the pronunciation of a very common Chinese “pause word” that sounds like the n-word—to graduate students. Students complained:

“The way we heard it in class was indicative of a much more hurtful word with tremendous implications for the Black community,” wrote the students, who identified themselves as Black M.B.A. Candidates c/o 2022. “There are over 10,000 characters in the Chinese written language and to use this phrase, a clear synonym with this derogatory N-Word term, is hurtful and unacceptable to our USC Marshall community. The negligence and disregard displayed by our professor was very clear in today’s class.”

Not to belabor things, but the professor didn’t use a “synonym” for the racial epithet, he used a homonym. But you get the point. When homonyms of evil words are evil, too, we’re no longer talking like rational human beings. We’re practitioners of sorcery.

I am all for stigmatizing non-black people for using the term as a racial epithet. But if you can’t even use the term in a conversation about why the term is unacceptable, we’re through the looking glass into a realm where people believe in word-magic.

The Trump amendment.

But this is just one tiny facet in the disco ball of dysfunction currently lighting up the political landscape with asininity, to the backbeat of free speech talk driving the masses into paroxysms of St. Vitus’ dance lunacy.

The president’s lawyers take the position that the president of the United States can say whatever he wants—even if it contributes to lawless violence—because he’s protected by the First Amendment. According to this theory, the president could indeed shout the n-word all day long, and Congress would be barred from even considering such behavior in an impeachment proceeding. Bruce Castor even insinuates that it is a violation of the First Amendment for politicians to apologize for saying extreme things.

This is insane. The New York Times is very wrong in how it has treated McNeil, but it has every right to do it. Just as social media companies have every right to police the speech they allow on their platforms. Likewise, we all have every right to act on our disapproval of such decisions. Hate Facebook? Get off of Facebook. Hate what the New York Times has become? Stop reading it. Holding people accountable for their speech is part of free speech.

But, as I wrote today, there is a gargantuan asymmetry between how we treat speech in every other realm of life and how Donald Trump’s defenders treat his speech, both in the specific case of impeachment and throughout his presidency.

A president of a shoe company would be fired if he behaved the way Donald Trump did over the course of his presidency. If a football coach went into the Super Bowl telling fans, “If the final score shows that we lost, it will only be because the game was rigged. Make yourselves heard. Fight! Stop the steal!,” he would be fired well before kickoff. If he wasn’t fired for some reason and the fans stormed the field at his urging, killing some security guards in the process, then he’d certainly be fired after that. The NFL commissioner and the owners wouldn’t care if the coach was guilty of criminal incitement. They wouldn’t wait to hear the verdict of the district attorney. He’d never work in football again.

If a president’s words can never be used against him, then we’ve defined presidential duties down to the level of barbarism. If the president solicits a bribe with words, and it’s caught on tape, does any sane person actually believe that his speech is protected by the First Amendment? Bill Clinton was impeached for perjury. Why? His lies were just words, and words are protected by the First Amendment. If a mob boss says to his button man, “Johnny Two-Times has got to go. I don’t want to see him again,” he can’t hide behind his First Amendment right to solicit murder at his murder trial.  

If we are going to get out of this hot mess, there has to be a middle ground between the superstitious inanity of the New York Times’ speech-policing and the pernicious absurdity of Trump world. The Times wants to criminalize language regardless of context—figuratively speaking—and Trump’s lawyers want to absolve crimes—or high crimes and misdemeanors—involving words, regardless of context.

Can’t we all just be frickin’ grown-ups and expect everyone else to behave like adults, too? Is that really such an outlandish request?

Apparently so.