The Word Too Vile to Say

CHICAGO — Shush. The “N-word.” They say I shouldn’t say it. Shouldn’t write it. Dare not let it roll from my tongue. For it is much too vile to say, they say. Too laden with hatred and historical degradation. Too painful a reminder of the racial sins of a nation.

The N-word. From the Latin word “niger” (long I vowel sound) for the color black.

Shush. Let it die, some say.

I say, “How can they ever take it back?”

The N-word. Uttered with contempt. Verbal dagger of white supremacist ideology, spoken even in this nation’s most sacred halls by “men of God,” Founding Fathers, great men held in high regard — Jefferson, Lincoln, LBJ, sources say.

The N-word. As American as baseball, hotdogs and apple pie. As American as “freedom,” “justice” and “liberty.”

The N-word. For 400 years. Its roots planted firmly in the soils of slavery, its intent to assault the psyche of a people, to assign them — us — as objects of racist machinations. Except only by perverted imaginations are we of black or brown skin inferior.

And though the N-word is older than this nation, and by inflections and its interjection meant to inflict irreparable harm, some say, the time has now come to cast it aside. To instill pride. To let the N-word finally die.

And yet, it lives. It whistles like the wind from the lips of people, black like me, without reservation. Drips from the mouths of rappers and hip hop artists across the nation. Dangles from the tongues of the educated black middle class:

“What up, my N?”

“Where you been, my N?”

“You know… That N from around the way…”

“N this…” “N that…”

And yet, emanating, even from our own brown lips today, the word still offends. So our wounds cannot mend, some say. So what to do then about the N-word?

As a 55-year-old black man, I have earned the right. I have the cultural capital. I carry the racial collateral.

As a journalist, it is my constitutionally protected free speech. Among my rhetorical tools — as writer, poet, storyteller — journalistic scribe of history. No word lost for me. Not even the N-word, even if it is not necessarily my trigger.

And yet, I am not ignorant to the centuries-old pain of this filter.

The N-word. Unceremoniously bestowed. Among the last American English words likely heard by Emmett Till. It has inspired bloodthirsty, racist mobs to maim and kill.

The N-word.

It still crackles today in public spaces. Or in secret, where there can be no legislation of the heart and private conversations.

So why shouldn’t it also be mine — ours, if we so choose — to embrace? To redefine, or reconstruct by context, culture and space — what this word means to us when spoken by us? Only by us.

I am less concerned about being called one. More concerned about being treated like one. For it is not what “they” call you that so deeply scars, but what you answer to.

And in my estimation, there exist today words more insidious to the state of black America than the N-word. They are the B-word: bit–; the H-words: ho and hood-rat; the T-word: “THOT” (that ho over there.) Vile words that too many black men call our sisters, mothers, daughters, and to which too many of them answer.

Words that defile a nation. That help shape and define a new history of self-inflicted devastation — though not without the impact of our historical degradation. Words that roll off the tongue nowadays without hesitation. Dehumanizing words of our own creation.

And the N-word less detrimental by my own valuation.

Email: Author@johnwfountain.com
Website: http://www.johnwfountain.com