The "N" Word

[David Morris]

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-000004255jan17.story?coll=la%2Dnews%2Dcomment%2Dopinions

Stripping a Poison Word of Its Power

By NORAH VINCENT, Norah Vincent is a senior fellow at the Foundation for the 
Defense of Democracies, a think tank set up after Sept. 11 to study 
terrorism.

[...] this month, with the release of his controversial and much anticipated 
book "Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word," Harvard law 
professor Randall Kennedy may help invigorate the debate. His etymology of 
the "N-word" is far-reaching and refreshing: "As a linguistic landmark, 
nigger is being renovated. Blacks use the term with novel ease to refer to 
other blacks . . . whites are increasingly referring to other whites as 
niggers, and indeed, the term both as an insult and as a sign of affection 
is being affixed to people of all sorts.

"For bad or good, nigger is thus destined to remain with us for many years 
to come--a reminder of the ironies and dilemmas, the tragedies and glories, 
of the American experience."

But when blacks use the N-word are they partaking in racism themselves? 
Kennedy says that depends on intent. Of course, many blacks use the term 
endearingly, he concedes, as a way of reclaiming rather than invoking the 
old slur. But they use it derogatorily too. So is this black-on-black 
racism? If so, is it simply internalized self-hatred borrowed from whites or 
is it endemic venom?

In her shocking and bold new play "Yellowman," African American playwright 
Dael Orlandersmith ventures an unpopular view of black culpability. Now 
playing in Princeton, N.J., and poised to make a bicoastal tour, "Yellowman" 
tells the story of a light-skinned boy named Eugene and his darker-skinned 
playmate Alma, star-crossed lovers growing up in a bitterly divided South 
Carolina community of Gullahs--descendants of slaves who worked coastal 
cotton and rice fields--in the 1960s. As they mature, they are slowly, then 
violently ripped apart by familial racism. The Gullahs speak their own 
African-derived Geechie dialect. Yet still, they define darker skin as ugly, 
though more authentically black, and lightness as beautiful but at the same 
time traitorous and detestable because it is seen as having eluded the 
harshest burdens of slavery.

Orlandersmith makes liberal and jarring use of Kennedy's N-word, to similar 
effect. It grates. But there is no question of intent. In the climactic 
scene, the light-skinned Eugene and his dark-skinned father fight, brutally 
hurling the bywords of anti-black feeling at each other.

Kennedy's and Orlandersmith's probing, audacious new treatments of what 
musician and critic Stanley Crouch called the "all-American skin game" and 
the epithet that drives it are a welcome change from the usual gruel. They 
remind us that hate is not race-specific. Black racism, when conceived 
purely as a response to white racism, absolves blacks of the responsibility 
for their own prejudices and locks them into a demeaning co- dependency with 
specious white power.



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