Whiteness & the Bare Minimum
Instead of asking why white people shouldn’t say the n-word, ask why they want to use it at all
Of all the flimsy “free speech” hills to die on, white people arguing that it’s reasonable for them to use the n-word is surely the worst. Not only does it frame something that shouldn't be up for debate as a valid intellectual discussion—it tries to make victims out of those least victimized.
Earlier this month, for example, complaints that The New York Times reporter Don McNeil used the n-word during a 2019 Times-sponsored trip with high schoolers went public. (The students also reported that McNeil made other racist and sexist comments.) An internal investigation found that McNeil used the slur “in the context of a conversation about racist language,” and he wasn’t fired. After criticism from colleagues, however, McNeil decided to leave his longtime post at the publication.
Then this week, Slate podcast host Mike Pesca was indefinitely suspended after arguing—in a Slack discussion about McNeil’s behavior—that white people should sometimes be able to use the n-word. (Pesca has used the slur himself several times over the years in defense of the same idea.)
Given the history and horror of this particular term, social or professional consequences for those who use or defend it should be unsurprising—mundane, even. Instead, McNeil and Pesca have been characterized as victims of a “woke mob” eager to “assault” and quash “intellectual debate.”
Putting aside how foul it is to treat the most violent slur in American history as a matter of simple debate—those who maintain this is about ‘context’ or ‘intent’ are determined to overcomplicate something that’s actually quite simple: Instead of asking why white people shouldn’t say the n-word, let’s ask why this many white people want to use it at all? Of all the words—why this one?
After all, this slur isn’t simply said, it’s wielded. And if you’re not wielding it as a directed weapon, you’re saying it to be deliberately provocative. In either case, it’s a conscious demonstration of power.
So if you find yourself arguing that a white person can sometimes use the slur depending on context or intent, spare me the cancel culture hysterics or pontification about language and freedom. Just admit it plainly: the n-word, a term meant to diminish and dehumanize, is more important to you than the safety and comfort of Black people.
As Slate’s Joel Anderson said in response to Pesca’s suspension: “For Black employees, it’s an extremely small ask to not hear that particular slur and not have debate about whether it’s OK for white employees to use that particular slur.”
And if basic human decency isn’t reason enough to simply not say a word, what about the ‘civility’ that conservatives are always calling for?
New York Times columnist Bret Stephens, for example, was so eager to publish a column defending the use of the n-word that when the Times declined to run it, he gave it to the New York Post.
Stephens, who frequently complains about the decline of collegiality, writes in the column that he finds the “firings [and] public humiliations” around those who use the n-word troubling. But Stephens is known for reporting colleagues that criticize him on social media, and when a professor made a barely-noticed Twitter joke calling the columnist a ‘bedbug’, Stephens found that word so offensive he attempted to get the man fired.
Are we to believe that ‘bedbug’ is a firing offense but the n-word is just discourse? Does the civility and collegiality Stephens writes about so often not extend to his Black colleagues?
What’s clear is that those who would defend McNeil and Pesca are more concerned about the careers and reputations of individual white men than the broad chilling effect that racism has on entire industries. Why would Black reporters, editors or support staff want to work at a publication where their humanity is so casually up for debate?
The white outrage here isn’t a concern about free speech; it’s fury that there might be consequences for bad behavior. Even more, it’s indignation over being asked to consider whiteness. Because these pundits and writers know that this is not an argument about a word—it’s about the power of those who use it.
That same resentment is why there’s an uproar over Disney’s decision to have warning labels on old episodes of The Muppets; why people like Ben Shapiro are mad that cartoons would contain frank discussions about race and racism; and why conservatives have glommed on to a former Smith librarian who says she was discriminated against because she wasn’t allowed to rap a presentation (!!) and had to attend an anti-racism training.
Simply acknowledging that racism exists—and that whiteness plays a role—is too much for these people to bear.
In a letter from the former librarian, for example, MC Jodi Shaw writes about her extreme discomfort that diversity training facilitators asked everyone to talk about their racial identity. And this month, when New York City parents were asked to reflect on their whiteness as part of an anti-bias curriculum, there was immediate criticism of the lesson being “hostile” to white people.
But being asked to think about your whiteness—how it skews the power you have, the way you interact with the world, and the words you use—is not ‘reverse racism’. Discomfort is not bigotry.
The truth is that white people are being asked for the bare minimum—don’t say racist slurs, remember racism exists. Attempts to make it more complicated than that are silly and suspect.
Just something to think about the next time you feel like having a ‘debate’ over someone’s humanity.
Whiteness & the Bare Minimum
This "debate" drives me right out of my skull. I grew up in the 'hood. The actual, honest to Bob 'hood. I knew as a small child that THAT word was not mine, that using that word in ANY context would earn me an ass-kicking. And I would have deserved it.
You get by in the 'hood by being respectful. That means you don't take things from your neighbors that do not belong to you. That includes the way they speak and the words they use. I don't care how fluent my honky ass is in AAVE, that is not my dialect to use. Also? "Honky" and "Cracker" are not racist, stop crying about your feelings, Karen.
Every time I see some privileged white kid adopting AAVE and trying to act "gangsta", I want to drag them down the street I grew up on and see how long they last, showing their asses like that. I'd give it 5 minutes before they'd drop the N-bomb and need scraped up off the sidewalk.
As far as I'm concerned, there is no room for debate on this. That word belongs exclusively to the Black community. You won't die from not being allowed to say it.
Ugh. I saw that "Woke me when it's over" thing Stephens wrote and I was so offended that he used Orwell’s “warning” of a world in which “the past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became the truth” as a warning against wokeness. Orwell was describing our world as it was and is right now — we have been being fed white supremacist lies in school for centuries. So, indeed, “no transgression is too trivial to invite a moralizing rebuke.” Every time we don't pipe up is an aggression that enables further ones.
I don't know if anyone here ever saw the first essay I wrote for TheHairpin a decade ago, but in it I describe this same racist slur thrown at me on the first day of middle school. The slur was spelled out in full, and at the time, I felt like I was righteously exposing the racist people who'd used it as well as the racist enablers who'd let it be repeated over the next few years.
As time went by since that first essay, and as the backlash against woke-ness became more and more egregious, I began misremembering it as not spelled out. Yes, Nietsche says: "Memory says, 'I did that.' Pride replies, 'I could not have done that.' Eventually, memory yields." But recently, in light of all this assholery from people like Stephens (and even, still, from people I actually know, oh my god) about that word, I decided to check, and discovered the reality. There it was, spelled out. I asked for the essay to be pulled.
Yes, I was telling a story about what someone else, a racist (and then many other racists), had said to me, but though I'm not white, I am also not black, and the word is not a word that I can ever personally feel the violence of the way I would if I were black, empathy notwithstanding. It's never going to hit me the same way. Talking with BIPOC friends about what a violence it is to see that word in print made me understand that a not-black person can't possibly know what that's like. Not even the racism I've encountered for my own demographic (or perceived demographic, since I'm fielding lots, based on my ambiguous non-whiteness) can compare to that, and if you haven't felt it, all you have to do is take one's word for it. Like you said, is it too much to ask? It's not.
The upshot is that whatever my intention was at the time, it's not a word I wanted sitting around waiting like a toxic easter egg in an old essay for someone to stumble upon. I was asked if instead of pulling the essay I wanted to change the word to the usual euphemistic way of referring to it, and I decided no, I'm not even sure I need to bring it up ever again even euphemistically, because the essay wasn't about racism. I've got plenty to say about racism, but that wasn't the essay in which to say it.