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Okay, fuck it. I’ve seen far too many horrendous takes on this whole N-word business - by fully grown adult human beings who I otherwise respect - not to comment. I don’t have the answers, but here are some thoughts on the N-word by a light-skinned person.
1. It is fundamentally strange that only people with certain skins are allowed to make certain sounds out of their mouths - sounds that can be heard far and wide in popular culture - and not people with other skins. It’s cosmically absurd, I don’t give a damn what anyone says.
2. If the issue is harm reduction, drawing the sting out of the word is a better path than re-injecting it with historical and moral meanings by reacting to these instances like we do. Black people will then always assume the worst intent when hearing the word and thus feel pain.
3. The idea that black people just can’t handle hearing a word from nonblack people, no matter the context, implies that blacks are the weakest and most sensitive group of people in human history - which is the opposite of the truth. It implies black inferiority, frankly.
4. There’s a bigger picture here. By policing the racial boundaries of what words people can and can’t say based on intergenerational bloodguilt and innocence, we are reinforcing the importance of race categories - which aren't really real. We are giving racists what they need.
5. I’m not denying the pain. I was called “kike” growing up literally hundreds of times. It hurt. It made me feel less than. It made me feel like I was betraying the Jews who suffered in the holocaust, that their suffering was all for nothing, that they were inferior like I felt.
But it's just a word, used by others out of their own insecurities. At a certain point you have to let the past be past. It's time to grow up on race. This whole game of racial guilt and innocence is a dead end. It's shattering our togetherness as a nation.
I don't have a solution. But I think we should move in the direction of caring less about words and more about actions, and not predicating our moral identity on anything race related whatsoever. Ending with a classic quote by the great Albert Murray below. Much love to everyone.
"The United States is in actuality not a nation of black people and white people. It is a nation of multicolored people. There are white Americans so to speak and black Americans. But any fool can see that white people are not really white, and black people are not black."
