Cigarettes Used To Be Called “Fags” But A “Nigga” Is Still A “Nigga”

My fingers kept slipping off the keyboard just typing the words. FAG, NIGGA, but not N with the full on gger. What crazy trolls will these keywords attract? “We don’t use that language,” I can hear my school teacher mother’s voice buzzing in my ear. For the hip hoppers, gen-yers, round the way brothers and sisters and wannabees, it’s part of our vernacular. With family, with friends, with coworkers, with lovers, uptown, downtown, old, young, in the boardroom on the street and even in the White House in some small dark corner.

I admit it, I’ve inhaled, I’ve used it. But its power, its significance as a word of degradation can still send a chill down my spine or cause a sharp intake of breath when I hear it used for its original intention. This came up for me when The Nightly Show did a short segment on the latest round of 2016 presidential candidates. Rick Perry is back in the race with a host of others, but none of them held a lease for a hunting lodge named “Nigger Head” as his family did. Say what? I thought Larry Wilmore was trying to stretch a conservative agenda joke way too far, until I did some digging and found this to be true and a source of embarrassment for Perry when he was the governor of Texas.

For those of you who have read some of my previous posts, you know my love of old school dictionaries. I pulled my red cloth bound Webster’s New Collegiate from my bookshelf to find this:

Unfortunately this is not an anomaly. Apparently an offensive term for dark skinned people was used to name various landmarks, including a lake in upstate New York, named thus until 2011. This shit was on official maps!

So no, I’m not paranoid or overly sensitive when I hear a group of pubescent Asian boys tossing the N word on the subway amongst each other like air balls or when Tom Hanks’s white, privileged son thinks it’s cool, because it’s part of Hip Hop Culture and doesn’t mean the same thing. Guess what America, it still does!

Do we address our Jewish homies with “Hey my Kike” or our Spanish friends “Yo, you’s my Spic,” or our Asian brothers and sisters with “Gooks in the house?” These are all terms that were placed upon people considered marginal by a mainstream culture in charge and fully aware of the damage they were inflicting. So why have we made it okay for us?

I can remember sitting in my high school chemistry class needing to start an experiment, but I didn’t have any matches. Behind me sat a blond haired, blue eyed white boy chanting, “Niggers, Niggers, burn them Niggers,” as he’s playing with his lighter. No, it wasn’t the sixties and I wasn’t in the South, try Massachusetts in the Eighties.

As black people we all have our Nigger stories, too many to recount and often too painful to retell. But we should. Words are powerful. Use them wisely.