It needs to stop. A lot of people have lost their lives because of that word, whether we’re talking about lynchings or Black people killing other Black people. It can take a conversation and turn it into something savage at the drop of a hat. It’s a word that brings the ugliest part of our past into the present. When white people say it, it brings them back to the time when it was right as rain to put Black people in chains and hang them from trees. It brings them back to when it was fine for us to be mistreated or to have nothing close to equal rights. When a white person says it today, with a scowl on their face, it feels like they’re punching my ancestors. I want to fight them, but I also just want to plead with them, on behalf of my great-grandparents: “Haven’t my ancestors have been through enough? Stop, already!”
The word also divides the Black community. We still look at each other like there are house niggers and field niggers, without understanding that it’s better to be nobody’s nigger. There is a scene in the movie Deep Cover, where Laurence Fishburne is asked by a white supervisor, “What’s the difference between a Black man and a nigger?” Fishburne replies, “The nigger is the one that would even answer that question.”
Let us be the generation to drive it out of our vocabulary as a society, but not in a way that’s just about censorship or banning the word, because that’s too easy. Much more difficult is looking honestly at our history. Not just Black history, but ALL of our history. We have a civil rights photo collection in our house, a big, beautiful coffee table book with images so vivid they cause jaws to drop. When my daughters and their friends pick it up to look at the young Black boys and girls in the middle of a dangerous struggle, I remind them that our eyes are trained to look at the Black faces and their determination as they walk to school. But I tell them also to look at the white faces in the background: the young, jeering faces shouting slurs and throwing things. “All of those folks are now around your granddad’s age,” I tell my daughters. They’re still with us, and those people now walk around, every day, living with what they did, and either trying to rectify it in their brains, through penance, or voting for Donald Trump and passing that hatred down to their children’s children. That is this country. Them. We cannot afford to pretend they don’t live among us.
The NFL announced, to a lot of publicity, that it will be trying to crack down on players who say “nigga” during a game, with refs handing out fifteen-yard penalties for one infraction and an ejection for a second offense. Their reasoning, I think, is rooted more in protecting their brand and policing how Black players talk to one another than in any kind of change. But if it makes some of us think critically and changes some habits, maybe it will be for the best. I think they know that some white fans and white executives and coaches get very uncomfortable with the word. Why does it make them so uncomfortable? That goes less examined. With some of them, I don’t necessarily think it’s because they hate racism. I think it’s because hearing that word reminds them of their own guilt. It reminds them that their ancestors held a savage power over my ancestors. It brings back the time when people stood around a tree to watch a Black man get hanged, while they snacked on popcorn and posed for postcards. Think about watching a hanging as a form of entertainment. Think about how much you would need to dehumanize somebody to be all right with that kind of killing. The word “nigger” is the gateway to a person becoming “strange fruit.” It’s a word that takes them back. It takes them back to Emmett Till, lynched because they said he whistled at a white woman. But he had a lisp, so it sounded like he whistled but he didn’t. He was killed for having a small gap between his teeth, a fourteen-year-old boy, beaten and hanged. I think the savagery of the word reminds them of the time when a lisp could be a death sentence.
The NFL’s punishment of Black players for saying “nigga” is also curious, if also ridiculous, if you step back to look at how the word has been used in sports historically. Think about the thousands of white fans who, on July 4, 1910, chanted “Kill the nigger” at the boxer Jack Johnson, when he fought “the Great White Hope,” Jim Jeffries. Think about how the word was used against the people we now hold up as the greatest idols of the last one hundred years: people like Joe Louis, Jesse Owens, and Jackie Robinson. At many points they were all subject to crowds that said, “You may be great at sports, but you are nothing but a ‘nigger.’” Think about how that behavior from white fans still hasn’t died. Adam Jones, of the Baltimore Orioles, had it shouted at him in Boston in 2017, and
