so much joy it hurts

Jan. 8, 2011 at 9:39am with 661 notes View comments

Reblogged from seoulbrother

“Nigger”

It’s that time of year again where we discuss the word “nigger.” Seems like it was just yesterday when Oprah popularized the daytime-TV-safe “n-word”—I’m surprised that it didn’t make Word of the Year, but then again, I’m not. No matter how much you try to sugarcoat it, “nigger” makes people uncomfortable. This time the discussion is pegged to NewSouth Books’ “nigger”-free version of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn.

It’s a happy time for me, having been called nigger by both men and women, white and black, in anger and in fun. It’s a time to recollect my favorites and dredge up the incidents I’ve burried in fear, pain and anger.

You know that quaint town where they shot that show Northern Exposure? My brother was called nigger in a diner and I was almost denied boarding at a B&B during a blizzard there. In the fifth grade, I was called nigger on the playground by an adult. I never told my parents. Once, I stood between this guy Andy and a touchdown. “Ha ha! Nigger!” he said. He didnt make it. Now he’s a bank manager. This one time, I was called nigger by a Chinese dude in South Korea. Oh, and so you don’t think this is just a thing of the past, for Black folks, ChatRoulette feels more like a new “nigger” delivery medium than a fun new blah blah world smaller.

“Nigger” is a stain, an obnoxious inbreeding of ignorance and abuse of power, an obvious over-the-top tell. We all know this. It is 2011… but… the word itself is OK. To be clear, It’s never okay to use “nigger” as a pejorative but it’s a good word and by “good word,” I mean a necessary word. To edit the word from our literature we actually decriminalize the climate and context in which it was used. We allow the romantic notion of The Good Ol’ Days to go unchecked. If we let that happen slavery gets reduced to young Anakin Skywalker pouting because he can’t get time off to compete in the Pod-races, bigotry becomes a rednecked, chew spittin’ caricature instead of the well dressed, even toned bank manager denying a loan and racism becomes something that used to happen. “Nigger” keeps that in check. It’s like a birth certificate for both America’s slavery and apartheid—proof that it happened.

We need to feel uncomfortable about “nigger” so we can learn from the mistakes that created, fed and nurtured it. We need “nigger.”

Now let’s move the fuck on. We got shit to do.