Nigger: The Strange Career Of A Troublesome Word (12 page)

In Mississippi in
1964
, during a
successful
gubernatorial campaign, Paul Johnson repeatedly joked that the acronym NAACP stood for “Niggers, Apes, Alligators, Coons, and Possums.”
⁷
Such an electoral outcome would be inconceivable today in any state. No serious politician, not even a David Duke, could casually and unapologetically refer to “niggers” and hope to win an election.
Nigger
has been belatedly but effectively stigmatized—an important, positive development in American culture.

Progress, however, begets new problems, and our subject is no exception. The very conditions that have helped to stigmatize
nigger
have also been conducive to the emergence of certain troubling tendencies. Among these latter are unjustified deception, overeagerness to detect insult, the repression of
good
uses of
nigger
, and the overly harsh punishment of those who use the N-word imprudently or even wrongly.

The stigmatization of
nigger
has unavoidably created an atmosphere in which people may be tempted to make false charges in order to exploit feelings of sympathy, guilt, and anger. The most notorious instance of such deception involved an allegation made by a black teenager named Tawana Brawley, who claimed that several white men had abducted her, raped her, and scrawled
nigger
on her body with feces. Her charges have now been fully discredited, though some still profess to believe her story.
⁸
Brawley, however, was not alone in seeking
to exploit goodwill through a hoax. In
1995
Tisha Anderson, a black woman, and William Lee, her white boyfriend, insisted that they had received hateful messages (“Niggers don't belong here”) and been victimized by vandals who had scrawled racist slurs on the walls and steps of their apartment building (“Niggers live here”). It was all a lie:
they
were the ones who had defaced the building, in an attempt to escape their lease.
⁹
In another case, Persey Harris III filed charges against the owner of a restaurant, asserting that the man had come after him with a stick while shouting racial epithets. Harris later confessed that he had lied and explained that he had been trying to create the predicate for a civil lawsuit.
¹⁰
A Maryland woman, Sonia James, charged that thugs had flooded her home, slashed her furniture, and spray-painted racial slurs on her walls. Insurance companies covered her claims, the police set up a station near her house, and many people, after hearing of the alleged hate crime, sent gifts of money, food, and clothes. In actuality, the vandal was James herself.
¹¹

In yet another case, Sabrina Collins, a black freshman at Emory University, claimed that someone had targeted her with death threats and racist graffiti. Her alleged ordeal became national news. At one point it was reported that she had been so traumatized by racist mistreatment that she had curled up into a fetal position and ceased speaking. Subsequently, however, it became clear that Collins herself had committed the acts in question. That a college student would perpetrate such a hoax was bad enough, but worse still was the reaction voiced by Otis Smith, the president of the Atlanta
branch of the NAACP, who dismissed as largely irrelevant the finding that Collins had lied. Echoing Tawana Brawley's apologists, he maintained that to him, it did not matter “whether [Collins] did it or not.”
¹²
Rather, what concerned Smith was “all the pressure these black students are under at these predominantly white schools.”
¹³
If the hoax served to highlight that issue, he suggested, then he had no problem with Collins's means of publicity. It is difficult to imagine anything that could be more discrediting to a civic leader than the remarks attributed to Smith. Not only do they exhibit an egregious indifference to truthfulness in public discussion; they also indicate an inability to distinguish between a coherent political strategy and a pathetic escapade that was probably nothing more than a desperate plea for help.

Of all the things that have hurt the campaign against
nigger-as-
insult, unjustifiable lying and silly defenses have inflicted the most damage. But worrisome, too, are the badly mistaken attacks undertaken against people who never should have been seen as enemies.

One infamous round of wrongheaded protest was directed against David Howard, the white director of a municipal agency in Washington, D.C. Howard unwittingly entered the fray when he told members of his staff that in light of budgetary constraints, he would have to be “niggardly” with the money at his disposal. Apparently believing that
niggardly
(which means miserly or stingy) was related to
nigger
, a couple of Howard's black subordinates began a whispering campaign that blossomed into a public outcry. Howard resigned. The
mayor of Washington, Anthony Williams, immediately accepted his resignation, declaring that Howard had shown poor judgment.

For several days afterward this incident became a focus of discussion in forums high and low. Some observers voiced indignation at Howard's language and refused to be mollified by explanations of the etymological difference between
nigger
and
niggardly
. “Do you really think,” asked one Washingtonian, “[that Howard] didn't notice he had to pass ‘nigger’ before he could get to the ‘dly’?”
¹⁴
In print, too, a few commentators maintained that Howard had shown poor judgment, a lapse for which he could justly be sanctioned. Julianne Malveaux, for example, wrote, “I have a bunch of dictionaries and I understand that ‘niggardly’ and ‘niggling’ are not the same as the N-word. But I am still annoyed, amazed, outdone [by Howard].… He understands that perhaps there are other ways to indicate a tightness in a budget—that one might say ‘parsimonious,’ ‘frugal,’ or ‘miserly.’ No matter how many times teutonics attempts to trump ebonics, the fact is that the n-words—be it the N-word or ‘niggardly’—rankle.”
¹⁵
Others declined to attack Howard but suggested that
niggardly
and other, similar words prone to be misunderstood might be best avoided.
¹⁶
“Would the openly gay Howard not flinch, not even a little bit,” columnist Debra Dickerson asked, “if a superior found a reason to mention tossing a ‘faggot’ on the fire or going outside to smoke a fag? Two more perfectly harmless and obscure words—but why go there?”
¹⁷
Refusing to be bound by the dictionary definition of
niggardly
, Courtland Milloy of the
Washington Post
asserted that “when the subject of
race is at hand… the only dictionary that counts is the one that gives meaning to human experience.” Milloy placed a question mark over “any white person who says ‘niggardly’… when [that person] could have said miserly.”
¹⁸

Many other commentators, however, took the opposite view, and sharply criticized the way Howard had been treated. Julian Bond, the chairman of the board of directors of the NAACP, remarked facetiously that “the Mayor has been niggardly in his judgment on this issue.”
¹⁹
Writing in the Raleigh, North Carolina,
News and Observer
, Barry Saunders averred that the episode demonstrated the malevolent influence of “people whose antennae are always up, seeking out an affront where none exists so they can respond out of all proportion.”
²⁰
Similarly dismissive was the columnist Tony Snow, who pronounced Howard the victim of a “linguistic lynching.” According to Snow, “David Howard got fired because some people in public employ were morons who a) didn't know the meaning of ‘niggardly,’ b) didn't know how to use a dictionary to discover the word's meaning and c) actually demanded that he apologize for their ignorance.”
²¹

Eventually Mayor Williams, who has been criticized as insufficiently “black” by many Washingtonians, offered Howard another position in the D.C. government and admitted that he had been wrong to accept his resignation without first educating himself fully about what had transpired. By then, though, the damage had been done. By fearfully deferring to excessive and uninformed outrage, the mayor had lowered his own standing in public opinion.

What happened in Washington will forever shadow the history
of
niggardly
and serve as a benchmark of hypersensitivity. Around the same time, however, an even more alarming incident involving
niggardly
occurred at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where a professor used the word during a lecture in a class he was teaching on Chaucer. A black student who was upset by the similarity between
niggardly
and
nigger
approached the professor after class to express her concerns. He apparently thanked her for sharing her perceptions with him and proceeded to explain the origin of
niggardly
and hence its distance from the N-word. In the next session the professor once again referred to
niggardly
and then defined it for the class. Notwithstanding the clarification, the same black student who had previously spoken with the professor stormed out of the classroom, crying. According to one news report, she referred to her experience in the Chaucer class as evidence of the need for a stringent speech code that would apply to all members of the faculty, regardless of the intent behind their “offensive” words.
²²

A misplaced protest notable for the distinguished character of its antagonists erupted in the pages of
Boston Magazine
in May
1998
, following the publication of a long, largely complimentary article by Cheryl Bentsen about Henry Louis Gates Jr., the chair of the Department of Afro-American Studies at Harvard University. Gates is a controversial figure about whom it is virtually impossible to write without getting involved in the disputes that surround his celebrity. In this instance, however, disputation arose not from Bentsen's profile itself but from the title given to it by the editors of the magazine. The cover of the April issue featured the phrase
“Head Negro in Charge,” a softened version of a term well known in black circles: “Head Nigger in Charge,” or HNIC. Scores of readers objected, including one who declared in an agitated letter to the editor:

Craig Unger, then the editor of
Boston Magazine
, responded to the controversy by asserting:

Many critics of the “HNIC” title proceeded as if their offended sensibilities alone should settle the matter—as if their sense of outrage necessarily made the act they objected to a bad act warranting an apology. Repeatedly, people voiced anger at
Boston Magazine
without troubling to state what justified their anger. Natalie Anderson's letter to the editor, for example, charged that the title of the article was “EXTREMELY RACIST,” but it neglected to explain what was so racist about it. True, “HNIC” has historically denoted a black person who is in command of a given situation only thanks to the backing of whites.
²⁶
But clearly the editors of
Boston Magazine
were aware of that meaning and simply wished to add a provocative and ironic twist to a largely admiring profile of a prominent black figure by suggesting that despite massive changes in race relations, whites still retain the power to select who among blacks will be accorded the mantle of leadership—a point that has been made by numerous black intellectuals, including Gates himself.

In truth, the anger directed at
Boston Magazine
had to do not so much with the content of the disparaged title as with its provenance—that is, the fact that the phrase had been co-opted
by the magazine's white editors. For many people,
nigger
and its cognates take on completely different complexions depending on the speaker's race. Had the “HNIC” profile and title appeared in
Essence, Emerge, Ebony
, or some other black-owned publication, there would have been no controversy. But
Boston Magazine
is white-owned and marketed mainly to whites, situating “HNIC” in a context that, for some observers, raised several difficulties: the embarrassment of discussing certain racial topics before a predominantly white audience; fear of, and anger about, a white entrepreneur intruding into black cultural territory; and the suspicion that whatever the setting, whites derive racist pleasure out of hearing, saying, or even alluding to “nigger.” For these reasons, even blacks who use
nigger
themselves adamantly insist that it is wrong for whites to do so.
²⁷
On the album containing his “I hate niggers” skit, for example, Chris Rock also presents a sketch in which a white man approaches him after a performance and appreciatively repeats some of what Rock has just said onstage. The next sound heard is that of the white man being punched.
²⁸
Rock's message is clear: white people cannot rightly say about blacks some of the things that blacks themselves say about blacks. Just as a son is privileged to address his mother in ways that outsiders cannot (at least not in the son's presence), so, too, is a member of a race privileged to address his racial kin in ways proscribed to others.