In the years that followed, blacks began to win other, similar battles. By the 1940s, “sensitivities were sufficiently aroused for Joseph Conrad's The Nigger of the Narcissus (1897) to be removed from open shelves in school libraries; for Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings's The Yearling (1938) to be released in a ‘school edition’ that omitted two passages containing the word [nigger]; and for Agatha Christie's play Ten Little Niggers (1939) to be retitled for American consumption as Ten Little Indians (and then retitled again as And Then There Were None)”4
In the 1960s and the decades thereafter, campaigns against racial indecency gained unprecedented support in mounting countless challenges to racist cultural artifacts. Scores of landmarks on official maps, for example, once bore such names as Nigger Lake, Niggerhead Hill, and Old Nigger Creek. Nigger, as we have seen, can have many meanings. But in the context of naming landmarks—an endeavor monopolized until recently by white men—it is clear that the nigger memorialized on maps was not the nigger of irony or affection but the nigger of insult and contempt. Widespread anger at cartographic slurs prompted Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall to insist in 1963 that the Board on Geographic Names replace all references to Nigger with Negro.5
That same year, during court proceedings in Etowah County, Alabama, a prosecutor insisted upon addressing white witnesses by their last names and black witnesses by their first. At issue in the proceedings was the legality of arrests of civil rights protesters. The prosecutor began his cross-examination of one of the protesters by asking her name. She replied, “Miss Mary Hamilton.” Addressing her as “Mary,” he asked who had arrested her. She repeated her full name and added, “Please address me correctly.” The prosecutor nevertheless continued to call her simply Mary, and the judge directed her to answer the question. She refused, whereupon the judge held her in contempt of court and immediately imposed a jail sentence and a fine. His ruling, however, would not stand; the Supreme Court of the United States would later reverse it.6
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:
The title is EXTREMELY RACIST!!! As a black American, I am outraged and insulted. The term [HNIC] was used in the days of slavery when white foremen would designate a black person to oversee (that is to keep in check) other blacks. The title shows your ignorance and indifference to the black community. I vow NEVER to purchase or support your magazine in any way. I will also rally every single person I know to boycott your magazine.23
Another reader wrote:
I am a subscriber… who is really offended by the headline of the Gates article. I can accept that you did not mean offense; but if members of the black community express dismay at the use of language, it is appropriate to say: I am sorry. … I will refrain from using such language in the future.24
Craig Unger, then the editor of Boston Magazine, responded to the controversy by asserting:
The term HNIC is part of the vernacular of black writers and intellectuals. It denotes the phenomenon of the white establishment selecting one African-American to speak for the race. It was in that context that we used HNIC, and there was clearly no intent to offend. On the contrary, we are proud of our story, and we want nothing to overshadow it. Our use of the expression, however, has obviously upset some people, and I sincerely regret that.25
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.
Although many whites follow this convention, some rebel. Two noteworthy examples are Carl Van Vechten and Quentin Tarantino.
Van Vechten sparked controversy when, in 1926, he published Nigger Heaven, a novel about black life in Harlem. The title alone alienated many blacks, including some who knew the author personally. Van Vechten had, for example, selected some lines of poetry by his friend Countee Cullen to serve as the epigraph for his book, but when he told the poet about his proposed title, he turned, in Van Vechten's words, “white with rage.”29 And soon their friendship ended. At an antilynching rally in Harlem, a protester burned a copy of Nigger Heaven. And in Boston, the book was banned.
Van Vechten was well aware that the title would singe the sensibilities of many potential readers. Even his own father objected to it: “Your ‘Nigger Heaven’ is a title I don't like,” Charles Duane Van Vechten informed his son in 1925. “I have myself never spoken of a colored man as a ‘nigger.’ If you are trying to help the race, as I am assured you are, I think every word you write should be a respectful
one towards the blacks.”30 Yet the younger Van Vechten persisted, emblazoning upon his novel a title that still sparks resentment.
It should not be overlooked, however, that while many blacks condemned Nigger Heaven, others—including some of the most admired black intellectuals of the day— applauded it. Charles Chesnutt, the first black professional man of letters, praised Van Vechten in a letter, telling him that he hoped that the novel would “have the success which its brilliancy and obvious honesty deserve.” Walter White, himself a novelist as well as a leading official with the NAACP, expressed both admiration and regret that he had not thought of the title first. Paul Robeson sent Van Vechten a congratulatory telegram that stated, in part, “nigger heaven amazing in its absolute understanding and deep sympathy thanks for such a book.” Charles S. Johnson, editor of Opportunity, one of the key journals of the Harlem Renaissance, commented that he “wish[ed] a Negro had written it.” Along the same lines, novelist Nella Larsen mused, “Why, oh, why, couldn't we have done something as big as this for ourselves?”31
James Weldon Johnson, author of “Lift Evr'y Voice and Sing” (the “Negro National Anthem”), wrote an effusive review in which he declared that Van Vechten had paid colored people “the rare tribute of writing about them as people rather than as puppets.”32 Later, in his autobiography, Johnson would assert that “most of the Negroes who condemned Nigger Heaven did not read it; they were estopped by the title.” Looking toward the future, he would conjecture that “as the race progresses it will become less and less susceptible to hurts from such causes.”33 On this point he was clearly wrong, for as we have seen, even in this new century nigger retains its capacity to anger, inflame, and distract.
The white film director Quentin Tarantino has recently updated the racial politics triggered by Van Vechten's novel by writing film scripts in which nigger figures prominently. Tarantino's leading man in Jackie Brown, a black gun runner, casually uses the word throughout the film; in one sequence he hugs a black underling and, with apparent affection, calls him “my nigger,” only to murder him in cold blood a few minutes later. In True Romance, Tarantino orchestrates a confrontation between a white man and a Sicilian mobster. The man knows that the mobster is about to kill him, and in a final gesture of defiance, he laughingly tells him that since North African moors—“niggers”—conquered Sicily and had sex with Sicilian women, his ancestors must have been niggers. Further, the condemned man speculates that the Sicilian's grandmother “fucked a nigger” and that therefore the mobster himself is “part eggplant.” And in Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, a scene featuring a black hit man, his white partner, and a white friend of the black hit man has the professional assassins showing up unexpectedly at the home of the friend to dispose of a bloody car with a corpse inside. Exasperated, the white friend complains to his black hit-man buddy that “storing dead niggers ain't my fucking business.” It isn't so much the fact that he will be breaking the law by helping to conceal a murder that worries him; rather, it's the fear that his wife will divorce him if she comes home while the hit men are still in the house. This white man who talks of “dead-nigger storage” loves his wife and is absolutely terrified by the prospect of losing her. It is important to note that she is black.
Nigger: The Strange Career Of A Troublesome Word Page 9
