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| Photo taken from www.Foxsearchlight.com/12YearsASlave |
By Will Brown
It started when I was in high school. I was
overweight, unpopular and a bit of a social misfit. Some of my teammates on the
football team used the word, so I started copying them.
The more I used it, the more comfortable it became.
My rationale at the time was I was saying “-a” instead of “-er.” Attending, and
graduating from a Historically Black College, may have expanded my awareness as
an African-American, but, it didn’t stop me from using the n-word when I knew
white people weren’t around.
In hindsight I was ignorant to use the n-word.
In some ways calling it the n-word takes away some
of the word’s sting
.
.
The word is nigger. If seeing or hearing the word
nigger does not jar, unnerve or impact you then there is plenty of media out
there to jolt your consciousness. One that tingled mine was the recently
released movie “12 Years A Slave.”
Chiwetel Ejiofor’s role as the
film’s protagonist was riveting. The content, language, violence and culture
displayed in the film were certainly not sanitized. Still, what struck me most
was just how comfortably people were called nigger in 19th century
America.
It’s one thing to read about our
peculiar institution. It is dramatically different to hear the word said hundreds
of times in a film without the movie losing a shred of credibility. The film
was so evocative I overheard a few people in the theater audibly wince during
some of the scenes and exclaim their incredulity at America’s slavery system.
Midway through the 133-minute movie I told myself I
would work on not saying the n-word anymore.
My usage has dwindled since college, but not to the
point where I don’t occasionally succumb to using the word, or saying “ninjas”
and “negro” in its place. But the reality is it should not take a movie for me
to know and do better.
My father was an Army officer before and during the
Civil Rights Era. My mother, who grew up during the Civil Rights Era, subtly
and overtly campaigned for justice from her community. One of the few
similarities my parents have nearly two decades after their ugly separation is
that neither has, and neither does, use the n-word.
I am someone who cried while watching a movie about
the Little Rock Nine in fourth grade, read plenty of books about 19th
century America, paid more attention in history class than just about any
other, sat through Eyes on the Prize with my parents, was forced to look up the
world nigger in the dictionary when I was in elementary school to get an
understanding of it. To top it all off, I graduated from a HBCU. Yet, none of
that made me rethink my usage of the poisonous word more than watching a film
based on an 1853 book that was written by a man largely forgotten in history.
That those personal
facts were not enough to dissuade me from using the n-word is just as
embarrassing to me as the culture that initially added that word to American
English.
Let’s not mince words, America’s greatest shame is
how it treated Africans and their descendants. Certainly, there have been other
embarrassments; however, little compares to considering humans chattel.
Nigger is a word that should serve as a reminder
just how dark our history is.
No whitewashing, sanitizing and 21st
century political correctness can change what happened in the past. It’s also a
reminder that what was put in the history books was not completely
accurate. (Speaking of historical
accuracy, there is a certain scene in “12 Years A Slave” that should remind you
of America’s third president — the same man who wrote the Declaration of
Independence.)
Most of us know the line in the Declaration of
Independence about holding truths to be self-evident and that all men were
created equal. Most of us also know that in America, those ideals are sometimes
not worth the paper they were written on.
The Declaration of Independence also states “all
experience hath shown (sic), that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while
evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which
they are accustomed.”
For years I was comfortable with using the n-word.
As little evil as I would like to think I committed by using a word I picked up
playing high school football, it’s certainly time I abolish it from my
vocabulary.
Laughs and liveliness
-Wb
