I remember the day Barak Obama was elected President of the United States. I was in America for the birth of a grandchild. When the announcement came that the first black man in history had been elected to the Office of President, I was over the moon, overcome with emotion. A white woman from Canada delirious with hope. I was even able to obtain a much sought after souvenir- an Obama button. Racism had taken a grievous hit, or so I thought.
Looking back, I am sad to say I think his election unleashed another round of racism. Too many could not accept a black man in the White House. And I think, too, there is a vestige of that apartheid time in America where laws prevented marriage/sex between blacks and whites that remains in the collective unconscious of America.
There is an icon that is slowly being removed from the culture, that speaks to this age of irrational, ontological hate-this age of slavery. It immediately brings to mind a myriad of emotions, a plethora of pictures reminding us of the dehumanization, denigration and humiliation of a group of people not for anything said or done, but merely for being black. The icon is a word consisting of six letters.
There are some words that carry within them years of haunting memory. Nazi comes to mind. No need to say more. We know the history embedded in those four letters. If we removed the word from the lexicon to protect the feelings of those who experienced Nazism we would do a disservice to their descendants; victims and victimizers.
The souls of black people have been under attack in many different ways, but one of the most hurtful has been language. And there is one word in particular that violates the soul of our black brothers and sisters. It begins with "N." We can't say it or write it anymore. It is being removed from books that are considered classic, books that speak to us through time about a particular epoch when freedom was a gift of the "privileged," that came with being born white.
The "N" word, like Nazi, carries within a history of man's inhumanity to man. It screams to us about the arrogance of white people who considered themselves to be entitled to an intrinsic value not to be accorded to those not white. It has been, pardon the expression, whitewashed. I fear not to protect the sensibilities of the black population, but to assuage the shame of the white people. By stripping it down to a letter it loses its power as a symbol of an age of horror, an age of man's inhumanity to man for no other reason than this group was black in a white world, almost presaging the 20th century Aryan rage.
It was watching Django Unchained and Twelve Years a Slave that led me to believe that removing the word from old classics that spoke to and documented the time was in the best interests of the white world, not those of colour, and certainly not those whose families were abused by slavery.
The word with six letters-a word I cannot write- is the word that represented a time that gave Lincoln the moral courage to push through the Thirteenth Amendment. This is the word that propelled Dr. Martin Luther King to speak of his dreams.
I have thought a great deal about racism. I recently re-watched the movie "The Help" which triggered more questions. For me the story is a picture guide to deconstructing racism. There's a dissonance that came out of the movie. How is it that white children, raised in the south by loving black nannies, nannies who often spent more time with them than their own mothers, how did they grow up to be racist? They loved their nannies. Yet, they grew up to demand of other black nannies that they use different toilets, different water fountains, different shops, theatres, a regular apartheid style of life. How do you grow up loving your black nannie and then treat all black people as unequal people?
I think we can get that answer from Oxford University biologist, Richard Dawkins, who described two types of information that are intertwined and passed through the generations. There are the genes that pass on our DNA and there are "memes" which he refers to as "units of deep cultural information." These cultural memes become as much a part of us as our DNA.
What is most astonishing, to me, is the speed with which one of these memes can enter the collective unconscious of a society. Slavery, the treatment of black people as something other than human, came to North America about 400 years, ago. That discrimination, that dehumanizing of another based on colour was quickly accepted and embedded, yet it seems to be taking forever to demolish.
Growing up in a family, a community, a society, that taught separation of the races, debased the black population, it is only natural after centuries of these lessons that one would automatically think this way-unless something happened to change your perspective.
That something is education in morals and values that hold high the sanctity of all life-no matter the race, colour, creed or religion. It is learning about "the other" in order to make "the other" an "us." History proves this isn't easy. But I think that removing the symbols of that hate too soon can be counter-productive.
Turning the six letter word I cannot write-into the "N" word" is as an attempt to remove the guilt and shame that should still be felt by white culture. We need powerful symbols to remind us that we are all God's children, equal in His eyes and deserving of respect.
I worry that either removing the six letter word I cannot write from books or changing it to the much more pleasant expression the "N" word, could lead to wiping out the history, the moral and ethical failure, it carries.
Imagine a little girl four generations from now reading Tom Sawyer. She looks to her mother and says, "Mommy, what does the "N" word mean?"
"The "N" word? O, yes, I think I remember. I don't remember the word, itself, but I do remember it means something terrible."
Wilhelm von Humboldt said in the eighteenth century, "Language is, as it were, the external manifestation of the minds of the peoples. Their language is their soul, and their soul is their language."
