Exception for an ugly word

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				THE
Column Archive				VIRGINIA GAZETTE
				WILLIAMSBURG, VIRGINIA
Exception for an ugly word				February 28, 2009

It was the Greek sophist Gorgias who posited that words have no underlying substance and hence are not participants in true being. “What we communicate to our neighbors,” said Gorgias, “is a word, and not substance or reality.”

Yet there are words in most languages that are so content-specific that, while they lack substance or even truth, they do convey and communicate images, however false or pejorative, that are unmistakable to both the speaker and the listener.

Frequently such words refer demeaningly to racial or nationalistic characteristics. During the period of the great immigration of European and Asian peoples into this country, there arose a plethora of detestable ethnic slurs to describe those of German, Spanish, Italian or Chinese descent.

Nomenclature of this sort usually depends for its derivation upon a sense of superiority tinged with fear on the part of those who tend to look askance at whatever smacks of otherness or at that which impinges on their economic and social sense of what constitutes American purity. Archie Bunker was far from a comedic anomaly.

Thanks to the constant simmering and stirring of the melting pot that is America, such nation-bating verbal abominations are rarely heard these days, though we still for some reason countenance a dalliance with defining origins through such euphemisms as Italian-American or Chinese-American.

There is one ethnic slur, however, that has not vacated the language and whose barbs still sting those blacks who are its target.

Derived from a perfectly benign Latin adjective, “niger,” which simply means “black,” the now-corrupted noun, with its explosive, hard double “g” sound, soon took on in Europe and Colonial America the pejorative connotations with which we associate it today.

We have tried numerous circumnavigations of the word and have finally hit upon the apparently more acceptable “N word.” Whatever circumlocutions we use, however, we should not lose sight of the fact that sooner or later we must strip the word of its linguistic power to denigrate and demean the nation’s most substantial minority.

Left unmasked, it inevitably falls into the destructive hands of people like the middle school teacher in Florida who was suspended for ten days for writing the word C.H.A.N.G.E on the blackboard and telling his students that it was an acronym for “Come Help A N..... Get Elected.” The man should have been fired.

According to educator Dr. Claudia Stolz, we do ourselves a great disservice by fearing and hence failing to acknowledge the power of words with destructive racial overtones. “To educate means to stimulate growth,” says Stolz, “and by ignoring the vernacular and all its implications, we aren’t seizing the opportunity to educate.”

And this, I suspect, was what was in the mind of a fourth-grade teacher in the WJC school system who explained the word in conjunction with her discussion of segregation in the South and cautioned her students against its use.

Again, fear of the word and the associated description used by white purists to describe those who supported civil rights for blacks, resulted in a complaint by at least one angry parent and a reprimand for the teacher.

Yet, if teachers are going to discuss segregation and slavery, both of which are the embodiment of this nation’s vile treatment of blacks, how can they totally avoid a word that conveys the very underlying substance of these woeful eras?

It is, after all, the one verbal relic that still captures in all its infamy our once unfathomable attitude toward the black race. And it is the one word that was placed before the name of every black slave as part of his or her official record.

As education professor Maghan Keita put it relative to teaching the word in “Huckleberry Finn,” “If you don’t teach how the word is used in the framework of the text, you’ve missed a teaching moment. Our task is to prepare students to think, so that when they are confronted with these words, they can see what the author’s intent was.”

Or, I might add, what the speaker’s intent was.

In short, it is only by dealing with racial slurs and explaining to students the power inherent in them to cause shame and hurt that we can reduce or destroy their effects.

Last week attorney general Eric Holder expressed some dismay relative to confronting this nation’s continuing racial problems. “Though this nation,” he said, “has proudly thought of itself as an ethnic melting pot, in things racial we have always been and continue to be, in too many ways, essentially a nation of cowards.”

I suggest that reprimanding teachers of any age group who try to clarify and defuse the ugliness of this or any other ethnic slur is part of that cowardice. Contrary to the claims of Gorgias, there are some words whose underlying substance is just too reprehensible to ignore.