How many times have you used the n-word?

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 19^th 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 19^th 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 21^st 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

What type of legacy will you leave?

By W.W. Brown

James Hawkins was loved by so many of his students because he was always willing to spend time with them. Which makes it fitting James Hawkins died about to do the one thing he was known for doing throughout his career — visit with a student.

Hawkins spent 35 years on the journalism faculty at Florida A&M University. The last eight years of his career were as dean of School of Journalism and Graphic Communication. He was the embodiment of “the college of love and charity.”



News of his passing hit me harder than any similar announcement in my life. It was a sucker punch to the solar plexuses that I wanted to believe was a rumor—the type of rumor Dr. Hawkins and other professors would have told us to investigate, but ignore.

The rumors were devastatingly true. Students, graduates, professors and so many others were stunned by the fact a man with such a huge heart was killed by a heart attack. Emotions reverberated around the J-School family faster than breaking news around Orr Drive because everyone had a story about how James Hawkins’ lessons touched them.

For a three semester period my grades plummeted. At other schools I would have been discarded, or ushered aside. At Florida A&M there were conversations with Dr. Hawkins and other professors to try and figure out the cause of my uncharacteristic academic performance.

When it came down to it, I graduated — barely.

Receiving my degree from Dr. Hawkins remains one of the happiest moments of my life.

Years after I graduated I would stroll into his office to shoot the breeze and see what was going on. Every time I did, Dr. Hawkins was always happy to see me and hear about how my life progressed.

He would ask about my girlfriend, who eventually became my wife; how my job was going; how I was doing. He was always eager to hear what I had to say, even if he had students waiting outside his door.

A move to Texas eliminated those infrequent visits. It had been a couple years since my last visit to Hawkins’ office.

The last time I went to the J-School, in January, Hawkins was retired. There was someone new in the corner office of the fourth floor of the still-to-be-named journalism building. Our conversation was cordial, but it wasn’t the same.

Trying to recreate what was so natural with the Dean— I was only at FAMU for a semester when Dean Robert Ruggles retired so Dr. Hawkins will always be “the Dean” to me — was not going to come easy. As the months went by, I once again realized just what a gem we had in Dr. Hawkins.

The first time I gave money back to the university that conferred a degree on me, and my father before me, was when I was told a scholarship was being endowed in Hawkins’ name. The minimum donation was $100. I gave a little more than that. It was the least I could do — give more in honor of a man who did that until his dying breath.

The official announcement came on Facebook, from an alumna who is now a Senior Producer at CBS News.

“He was traveling back from Atlanta this afternoon and decided to stop and have an early dinner with a former student in Macon, Georgia. We all know that is just one of the reasons we loved Doc. He kept in touch with all of us and made us feel special. He texted the former student at 3:18 to say he had arrived, but when he had not come inside the restaurant by 3:30, she went outside to look for him and found him unresponsive in his car.” 

As the swift and heartfelt reactions came in from classmates, friends and former Rattlers, I wound up liking the status of every person I knew who posted a tribute on social media. It was cheesy, but one of the few ways I knew to show them I was mourning with them.

In lieu of flowers, the Dean’s wife asked people to send donations to the James E. Hawkins Endowed Scholarship Fund. A donation would be a fitting way to continue the legacy of a man who gave everything for his students.


Laughs and liveliness,
-Wb

The college of love and charity

Growing up my parents shared a 1985 Volvo 740 GLE. No matter how much they bickered about other things, one thing was always constant during my childhood — the orange and green license plate on the back of that maroon Volvo.

That simple plate celebrating the centennial of Florida A&M University was my introduction to a school and a history that is as much a part of me as my parents.

Florida A&M is not the best school, or the most perfect school, but it is my school. To this day there is a misnomer that the school only accepts blacks. Of course the truth is that only one of Florida’s three public universities founded in the 19th century has never excluded anyone because of race or gender — Florida A&M.

My dad went to the school so long ago it some people called it FAMCEE, because it was Florida Agricultural and Mechanical College. It didn’t become a university until 1953, the year my dad graduated.

Eventually, I found my way to the school which was once a slave plantation. Florida’s first territorial governor Robert DuVal owned the property. Until the 1940s there was a massive oak tree adjacent to where the current library sits that bore the blood of beaten slaves.

Traditions at so many colleges are being whitewashed by those who choose to only remember the good ol’ days when the sky was apparently bluer.

It would ruin a good story to know that Paul William Bryant and Wayne Woodrow Hayes frequently visited Tallahassee, Florida to get insight from a coaching wizard— Alonzo Smith Gaither.

Even when they were nothing but Jazzbirds playing on a combination of grass and dust, Saturday’s in the fall were always about an experience for Famuans. The smell of all sorts of unhealthy concoctions waft in the air prior to kickoff, some unfortunate opponent is pummeled for 30 minutes and then the world’s best marching band takes center stage.

The experience is what fathers tell sons and why mothers want their daughters to return to Tallahassee. It’s what has become a part of the lore of a school that is largely ignored or forgotten — even by its local newspaper.

Time may have grayed and thinned my dad’s hair, but the bushy mustache he had as a sophomore in 1950 remains. Pictures hidden away in archives only tell so much.

Older generations serve as modern-day griots, the ones who remind future Famuans that Foote-Hilyer was once the only hospital for black people in Tallahassee or how every building on campus tells the story of a person who was critical to the school’s mission of educating African-Americans.

Without those stories, we would not know the student union building, which was once a hotel, was named after an interim president, in H. Manning Efferson, who rarely gets credit for being the bridge between one of the university’s more unpopular presidents (William H. Gray Jr.) to one who became president emeritus upon retirement in George W. Gore.

It was a warm February afternoon, one where the sun prevented icy thoughts of the night to enter the consciousness. After hours canvassing North Florida talking to football players, I idled at a Kentucky Friend Chicken to write about what I witnessed that day.

While waiting to see just how bastardized Harland Sanders’ Southern delicacy had become, a group of people were talking about one of the boys I recently interviewed.

They started talking about his future and how his choice of college would be the perfect fit for him because of its proximity to home, the family atmosphere within the football program and the hospitality of the campus crowd.

They were talking about Florida A&M.

Laughs and liveliness,

-Wb