In the Upstate New York conservative Republican household I grew up in, we did not use the N-word. My family did not champion the cause of integration, but when we saw the TV news clips of Bull Connor's dogs attacking black people on the streets of Birmingham, the naked racism shocked us all, and none of us approved of it or made excuses for it. The actions and words of black leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr., sometimes made my family uneasy, but we all still experienced his assassination as an epic tragedy and a racial injustice.
No one in my circle of high school friends used the N-word either. In a world of the latest Doors LP, the Ford Mustang, nuclear fission, the Apollo space program and fast food 15-cent hamburgers, the N-word sounded like a relic from the era before Hiroshima. The only kids at my high school who used the N-word were a few hicks from the sticks, and it was understood that their gears moved a bit slower than the fast times we were currently living in.
My Christian-fundamentalist family had regarded the N-word as gutter talk, on the same level as the F-word and its four-letter cousins, but as a young adult no longer living with that religious family, I soon added the F-word and other four-letter oaths to my working vocabulary, though I felt no great need to also take up the use of the N-word. My circle of friends rarely included anyone who used it regularly, and even watching Lenny Bruce's comedy bit about it didn't change my mind. I understood Lenny's point about the power of repression, but I just couldn't personally connect with the idea of over-using the N-word to defuse its power.
During the era when it came into common use among black musicians and singers, I still had no interest in using it myself, and I didn't feel deprived because I didn't use it. With the N-word, context matters, and I instinctively understood that it carries a much different weight when used by a white person than when used by a black person.
Beginning to reconnect it with the S-word, I was there at the moment when my grandfather learned that his wife's sister's husband had attended a local KKK recruiting drive back in the 1920s, and he reacted to this news about his already-deceased brother-in-law by saying, "I didn't know Lou was that stupid." The couples had socialized on a number of occasions over the decades, but somehow he had missed knowing something very basic about his brother-in-law. At that moment, I knew them both a bit better, and I respected my grandfather even more than I had before.
More on the S-word connection came my way soon after I joined the Southern Poverty Law Center, when their quarterly Intelligence Report began showing up in my mail box. After a few issues, I had a much clearer impression of the type who make up the core of racist gangs and groups -- mainly, the guys who like to hang out in bars and pick fights with people they don't know. On the dumb-dumber-dumbest scale, they usually fall pretty close to the est end, but all these losers have to do to give their sad shallow lives some depth of meaning is to tell themselves that they're fighting not simply because they enjoy violence, but for the higher purpose of defending the white race.
So then I recently heard about the white people who feel constrained when they can't use the N-word, and it took me a while to decode what they meant when they said they weren't racist, until I realized that they define racism as committing acts of violence against black people (or brown people, etc.). These kinder, gentler racists assume that all of us white people (which, according to at least one Fox News host, includes Jesus and Santa Claus), we understand that black people are inferior to whites, so what's the big deal about one of the superior types using a word that refers to the inferior ones?
How stupid is that? Now in the modern era of Spotify, Tesla, the GPS and the iPad, we have the benefit of recent scientific evidence to prove that race is an artificial human construct. The human animal does not have race genes, but simply genetic adaptations to time and place, and all humans share a common genetic ancestry that originated in Africa. So it has become increasingly clear to me that the white people who want use the N-word express their proximity to the S-word when they do, and the more they use it, the dumber they are. If you can find a notable exception, I'd love to hear about it, but I haven't seen one myself, and coming to the recent understanding of this equation has added a bit more 20-20 to my own hindsight.
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