I want this word to die just like I want the ideas that lead people to wear swastika bands on their arms to die. And that’s why I want to apologize to my ancestors, my family, and especially my daughters for all the times I’ve used this word thoughtlessly over the course of my existence. I want to apologize for my role in giving the word life. I know it’s different when a Black person says it than coming from a white person. The meaning and intent often differ. That’s not the point of this apology.
My point is that I now realize the only reason I used it is because I did not realize its magnitude and its power. I did not fully understand what our people had endured while hearing this word, and I did not understand how there are people in my community and even in my family who hear it and it carves up their insides, especially the older generation, who hear it and think about what was yelled at them when they were on the way to a school they were brave enough to desegregate. We need to stop using it, and this isn’t me pointing the finger. I’m looking in the mirror. I need to do better. I’ve been ignorant, and I’m guilty for saying it, for being a model for other young Black people who say it and—this really stings to admit—I am guilty for making my white friends, when I was younger, feel comfortable saying it, like it’s a joke. I’m haunted by the idea that my daughters will say it like it’s nothing. This is my guilt because I want to see myself as a leader, yet here I am, giving this word of slavery and violence life when it needs to be buried in the ground.
The first time I remember hearing the word and feeling subhuman was from a white classmate in Louisiana. I was in grade school, and I beat this kid in some kind of meaningless game at recess. I remember he just looked at me, cold, shrugged his shoulders, and said, “It’s fine that I lost because you’re still a nigger.” I didn’t even know what it meant—all I knew was that he wasn’t supposed to be saying it. I felt the violent impulse to fight, and something as old as the Louisiana swamps echoed deeply inside both of us. He said it to me because he wanted us to get violent, and that is exactly what happened.
After that schoolyard scuffle, I realized the word was something my family and friends said to each other casually. But I had never heard it consciously. It floated in the air and I kept breathing it in, not realizing how toxic it was. I had family in Texas, Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi, and when they got together they used it like it was an adjective or a pronoun or even a comma. I would hear my uncle laugh and say something like, “Oh, this nigga’s crazy!” It could be filled with affection, as in, “Man, I love that nigga.” Or it could be someone rolling their eyes and saying, “Nigga, please.” Or it could be used in rage, a cousin saying, “Man, if I see that nigga again, I’m going to kill that nigga.” It might even be at the dinner table, when you’d hear with love, “Nigga, pass the peas.”
It was a word we used as a stand-in for emotions we could not otherwise express. The word made you feel something bone-deep, so we used it to make the people around us understand that what we were saying was real and demanded attention. “I’d die for my friend Rico” doesn’t convey the necessary emotion or even sound right. But “I’d die for that nigga” does. That’s what is so damn sick about it: we want people to know that we are feeling love or hate; friendship or anger; pleasure or pain; but to make the people closest to us know that we are getting real—getting human—we come back to a word used to make us believe we are less than human. It’s the legacy of white supremacy: our ignorance. My ignorance.
I carried that ignorance until I read what the poet Maya Angelou wrote about racial slurs, and her words haunt me. She said, “I believe that words are things … I think they stick on the walls, they go into the upholstery, they go into your clothes, and finally, into your very body.” I believe that, too. The word enters your lungs like asbestos dust, eating away at you from the inside.
The only way to get this cancer out of our bodies is if we reckon with the word’s history and see it not as a term of endearment that we are somehow reclaiming, but as the word said before James Byrd was dragged from the back of a truck; the word painted on LeBron James’s house before the NBA finals; and the word chanted in Charlottesville by people who want us gone.
If I heard my daughters use it, no matter how casually, no matter if they were just repeating the lyrics from some music, I would be appalled and tell them that’s not a word we use in this house. If it were a regular part of the music they listened to I wouldn’t take their music away, but we’d need to have a conversation every single time I heard it. It might make listening to that music a lot less fun.
This thinking is a recent change for me. I’ve been coaching and doing clinics my entire adult life. But five years ago, when I was coaching a team and heard some of the kids joking and saying it, I would’ve said, “Whatever. That’s normal. That’s just how young people talk.” I might have even said, “That’s just how niggas talk, man!” But now, I think I would have to stop practice and
