Disparaging Blackfolks in the Language of Your Choice

Why do so many people feel so free to dehumanize Black people and use racial slurs to promote their own aims? Why does this come so trippingly off the tongue – whether in Germany or China or the United States?

In Canada recently, a Black family purchased a brown leather sofa. Upon its delivery, the 7-year-old inquisitive girl in the family noticed that its color was described as “nigger brown.” Who can make up this stuff? Read the story that ran in the Toronto Star and that is now making its way around cyberspace:

Racial Slur on Sofa Label Stuns Family
http://www.thestar.com/Article/200265

This comes not long after the revelation that a German military training film was told conscripts to imagine that they were shooting Blacks in the Bronx. This is how the Associated Press reported the incident:

“The clip shows an instructor and a soldier in camouflage uniforms in a forest. The instructor tells the soldier, “You are in the Bronx. A black van is stopping in front of you. Three African-Americans are getting out and they are insulting your mother in the worst ways. ... Act.” The soldier fires his machine gun several times and yells an obscenity several times in English. The instructor then tells the soldier to curse even louder.”

Why do we permit ourselves to be such easy targets of racial stereotypes that even an over-the-hill radio jock can casually label a dignified and disciplined team of women basketballers, most of them Black, “nappy-headed hos”?

Whenever people say that if Black people can use such language and convey such attitude a la mode then why can’t people who are not Black, then make it clear that not all Black people permit this. As I said in a discussion at a Society of Professional Journalists meeting a week ago, some people find use of such historically demeaning terms “liberating,” but with me the only thing liberating about such usage in my presence is the liberating of my fist upside someone’s head when they even dare to call me the N word or even a “nappy-headed ho.” Not that I mind the acknowledgment that I wear my hair in the natural style, but that I don’t condone that plus the implication of promiscuity as a default definition of Black womanhood.

Nor do I tolerate hearing kids in my Harlem neighborhood who are not African American casually calling each other “nigger.”

In a recent trial in New York, a defendant – a white guy who’d grown up around Blacks and Latinos – argued that his use of the N word while walloping a Black guy was not indication of a hate crime. He had pronounced the word as “nigga” – a hip hop version of “my brother” or “my friend” or whatever. If he had used “nigger,” then that would have been the measure of racial contempt.

Pity the fool!

But didn’t too many of us open the door to such thinking? This is now global when even someone who can barely speak English and knows nothing of African-American history can feel as free as a Klansman to treat us as scum of the earth.

Back in Canada, the father of the 7-year-old, “explained the origins of the word to daughter Olivia, telling how it was a bad name that blacks were called during the days of slavery in the United States.”

We’d all be so lucky if use of that word had ended in 1865!