Monday, January 11, 2016

"Can I Say Nigger?"




So, I’m at the Japan Writers Conference yesterday fiending for some caffeine. So I’m headed for the coffee table to cop a cup of Joe when I spot another black person (that made two) standing in front of the table fixing himself a cup. I hesitated for the briefest of moments before going over there. I had this feeling of, “Do I drag the power and uniqueness of my blackness in this place over there and, combined with his black power, create this vortex, this black hole, in the middle of this event?” You know? Maybe you don’t.
Anyway, I do work my way over there because I figured there was a good chance he was there because of all the promoting I’d been doing of the event over the past month or two. And the coffee was calling me.
I stood beside him and said, “What’s up, bruh?”
He glances at me and almost stumbles and drops his coffee.
“This is surreal!” he says with a heavy British accent. “I’ve been reading your work since before I came here, man, and here you are!”
“Yep, it’s me, in the flesh. Nice to meet you.”
He said his name was Gerard, or something. I couldn’t really navigate the accent well. But we got along nicely. Started chatting it up and pretty soon that vortex I anticipated formed around us, and all the white and Asian faces that filled the joint started finding it hard to ignore.
One guy approaches us, stops before us and says with a heavy Irish accent:
“I would like to ask you guys a question, if it’s OK. But before I do I want to just say that I’m going to use a word that I know isn’t a good word. In fact it’s the “N” word. But before I do I just wanted to...”


I knew where he was going. Something about this vortex, it has a tendency to draw these types of characters, you know? Maybe you don’t.
Gerard and I glance at one another. Actually he knows, too, I ascertained with a glance...which had me wondering, and not for long, if England has its issues with the word Nigger, as well.
I glanced back at this guy. I knew him...well, knew of him. We’re friends on FB and we’d had several correspondences of late. He’s a writer as well. I’d even attended his panel a few minutes earlier. So maybe that’s why I entertained his line of questioning as long as I did. Or maybe I was still high from the presentation I’d done an hour earlier (which had gone especially well), a lecture ironically about writing on sensitive subjects like race. But the vortex takes no prisoners apparently, it sucks all sensitivity and sensibilities into the depths of triple stage darkness...I guess. I dunno.
He’s a pretty direct guy so it didn’t take him long to get to his point. “Why can’t white guys use the word ‘nigger’ if you guys do? We’re all humans, right? If you guys are allowed to use it and I can’t then that’s divisive. The last thing we need is more things keeping us apart. I advocate no one uses it, that it be taboo, personally. And mind you I don’t want to use it, but since you guys are putting it out there, I think white people should be able to use it as well.”
Gerard and I exchanged another glance, both wordlessly inquiring, ‘Is he just being facetious or is he really asking this shit?’
I never expected to be asked such a thing.
I mean, Tarantino never asks. He just does it. Or maybe Sam Jackson gave him his “nigger” commuter card. I dunno. But he never asked me. In Pulp Fiction, he just created a white character and wrote himself into a scenario where this character was on such good terms with a cold blooded black killer for hire that when his white anger was sparked (cuz of a “dead nigger” in his garage) his use of the word was normalized and tolerated by this assassin...his use of the word hinted at his having a relation with Sam Jackson’s character that I’d never heard before between a black and white guy in all my years of being black.


So, Gerard and I proceeded to give this guy the standard answers to this question, like gentlemen, capable of remaining civil and having a rational conversation without losing our fucking minds over some arrogant and privileged white guy in his entitled fucking feelings over being told by someone black,“sorry, you can’t call me nigger without there being an ass-whipping attached to it!”
We explained, sort of in a tag team style that we hadn’t rehearsed (we’d just met after all) that we didn’t care how unfair he thought it was that someone else gets to use nigger when he doesn’t. That white people gave up the privilege to use that word except in the context they gave it when they invented it as a tool of oppression. That whatever decision black folks come to internally about the use and meaning of the word Nigger, whether to reclaim and sanction it or rid our lexicon of it forever, it’s OUR call. And that as one from whom this oppressive word may or may not be reclaimed, you do not get to have a word in that conversation. Holla at us when humans are truly equal and we can talk. After all, just because there’s one word in all of the English language you’re not welcomed to use doesn’t mean you are being victimized or discriminated against. Count your blessings that’s the only discrimination you’re facing.
After a while though we both realized that he could not see through his blinders of entitlement. After all nigger was their creation, so it’s only natural that they retain some kind of residual longing for it...the ones who had given up using /thinking / feeling it in the first place, that is.
“In conclusion,” I said, wrapping it up abruptly. “Unless you wanna get in some shit, I’d refrain from using that word...unless you’re with like minded folk. That’s all I’m saying...”
“Oh, no no no, I don’t want to use it, I just think...”
But by then I was done, you know? Maybe you don’t.
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