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.
"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 "
^this. And the next time someone tells me it's 'reverse racism', I no longer have the patience to do anything but punch them right in the nose.
This performative dance is deeply strange - because you're right: this is not about freedom of speech, or any discussion.
This is about territory: the white person saying, 'This is mine. Everything is mine. Your history and pain are mine, to savour or deny'.
It's 'I can do it, so I will do it and I must do it, to show I can' - and when that is no longer completely true, the ones who took all the geographical and mental territory (and still occupy most of it) rage and howl about the injustice of it all.
Perhaps what's so strange about these recurring white vapours is that the rage is quite real but the expression of it performative. Yet it is also a compulsive performance - like the Dancing Plague in Europe, in the Middle Ages.
The knowing wink is also a tic, beating against the current, borne back ceaselessly by the past.
I do not recommend going into the comments section on Bari Weiss's substack if you would like to keep your sanity. I wish they would all read this instead.
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.
"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 "
^this. And the next time someone tells me it's 'reverse racism', I no longer have the patience to do anything but punch them right in the nose.
This performative dance is deeply strange - because you're right: this is not about freedom of speech, or any discussion.
This is about territory: the white person saying, 'This is mine. Everything is mine. Your history and pain are mine, to savour or deny'.
It's 'I can do it, so I will do it and I must do it, to show I can' - and when that is no longer completely true, the ones who took all the geographical and mental territory (and still occupy most of it) rage and howl about the injustice of it all.
Perhaps what's so strange about these recurring white vapours is that the rage is quite real but the expression of it performative. Yet it is also a compulsive performance - like the Dancing Plague in Europe, in the Middle Ages.
The knowing wink is also a tic, beating against the current, borne back ceaselessly by the past.
Ta-Nehisi Coates discusses this issue here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QO15S3WC9pg&feature=emb_title
I do not recommend going into the comments section on Bari Weiss's substack if you would like to keep your sanity. I wish they would all read this instead.