-
The minute she said it,
-
the temperature in my classroom dropped.
-
My students are usually
laser-focused on me,
-
but they shifted in their seats
and looked away.
-
I'm a black woman
-
who teaches the histories
of race and US slavery.
-
I'm aware that my social identity
is always on display.
-
And my students are vulnerable too,
-
so I'm careful.
-
I try to anticipate
what part of my lesson might go wrong.
-
But honestly,
-
I didn't even see this one coming.
-
None of my years of graduate school
prepared me for what to do
-
when the N-word entered my classroom.
-
I was in my first year of teaching
-
when the student said
the N-word in my class.
-
She was not calling anyone a name.
-
She was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.
-
She came to class with her readings done,
-
she sat in the front row,
-
and she was always on my team.
-
When she said it,
-
she was actually making a point
about my lecture,
-
by quoting a line from a 1970s
movie, a comedy,
-
that had two racist slurs.
-
One for people of Chinese descent
-
and the other, the N-word.
-
As soon as she said it,
I held up my hands, said, "Whoa, whoa."
-
But she assured me,
-
"It's a joke from 'Blazing Saddles',"
-
and then she repeated it.
-
This all happened 10 years ago,
-
and how I handled it
haunted me for a long time.
-
It wasn't the first time
I thought about the word
-
in an academic setting.
-
I'm a professor of US history,
-
it's in a lot
of the documents that I teach.
-
So I had to make a choice.
-
After consulting with someone I trusted,
-
I decided to never say it.
-
Not even to quote it.
-
But instead to use
the euphemistic phrase, "the N-word."
-
Even this decision was complicated.
-
I didn't have tenure yet,
-
and I worried that senior colleagues
-
would think that by using the phrase
I wasn't a serious scholar.
-
But saying the actual word
still felt worse.
-
The incident in my classroom forced me
to publicly reckon with the word.
-
The history, the violence,
-
but also --
-
The history, the violence,
but also any time it was hurled at me,
-
spoken casually in front of me,
-
any time it rested on the tip
of someone's tongue,
-
it all came flooding up in that moment,
-
right in front of my students.
-
And I had no idea what to do.
-
So I've come to call stories like mine
points of encounter.
-
A point of encounter describes the moment
you came face-to-face with the N-word.
-
If you've even been stumped
or provoked by the word,
-
whether as the result
of an awkward social situation,
-
an uncomfortable academic conversation,
-
something you heard in pop culture,
-
or if you've been called the slur,
-
or witnessed someone
getting called the slur,
-
you have experienced a point of encounter.
-
And depending on who you are
and how that moment goes down,
-
you might have a range of responses.
-
Could throw you off a little bit,
-
or it could be incredibly
painful and humiliating.
-
I've had lots of these
points of encounter in my life,
-
but one thing is true.
-
There's not a lot of space
to talk about them.
-
That day in my classroom
was pretty much like all of those times
-
I had an uninvited run-in with the N-word.
-
I froze.
-
Because the N-word is hard to talk about.
-
Part of the reason the N-word
is so hard to talk about,
-
it's usually only discussed in one way,
-
as a figure of speech,
we hear this all the time, right?
-
It's just a word.
-
The burning question that cycles
through social media
-
is who can and cannot say it.
-
Black intellectual Ta-Nahisi Coates
does a groundbreaking job
-
of defending the African American
use of the word.
-
On the other hand, Wendy Kaminer,
-
a white freedom of speech advocate,
-
argues that if we don't all
just come and say it,
-
we give the word power.
-
And a lot of people feel that way.
-
The Pew Center recently
entered the debate.
-
In a survey called "Race in America 2019,"
-
researchers asked US adults
if they thought is was OK
-
for a white person to say the N-word.
-
Seventy percent of all
adults surveyed said "never."
-
And these debates are important.
-
But they really obscure something else.
-
They keep us from getting underneath
to the real conversation.
-
Which is that the N-word
is not just a word.
-
It's not neatly contained
in a racist past,
-
a relic of slavery.
-
Fundamentally, the N-word
is an idea disguised as a word,
-
that black people are intellectually,
-
biologically,
-
and immutably inferior to white people.
-
And -- and I think
this is the most important part --
-
that that inferiority means
that the injustice we suffer
-
and inequality we endure,
-
is essentially our own fault.
-
So, yes, it is ...
-
Speaking of the word only as racist spew
-
or as an obscenity in hip hop music
-
makes it sounds as if it's a disease,
-
located in the American vocal cords
-
that can be snipped right out.
-
It's not and it can't.
-
And I learned this
from talking to my students.
-
So next time class met,
-
I apologized,
-
and I made an announcement.
-
I would have a new policy.
-
Students would see the word
in my Power Points,
-
in film, in essays they read,
-
but we would never ever
say the word out loud in class.
-
Nobody ever said it again.
-
But they didn't learn much either.
-
Afterwards, what bothered me most
-
was that I didn't even explain to students
-
why, of all the vile, problematic words
in American English,
-
why this particular word
had its own buffer,
-
the surrogate phrase "the N-word."
-
Most of my students,
-
many of them born
in the late 1990s and afterwards,
-
didn't even know
that the phrase "the N-word"
-
is a relatively new invention
in American English.
-
When I was growing up, it didn't exist.
-
But in the late 1980s,
-
black college students,
writers, intellectuals,
-
more and more started to talk about
racist attacks against them.
-
But increasingly,
when they told these stories,
-
they stopped using the word.
-
Instead, they reduced it to the initial N
-
and called it "the N-word."
-
They felt that every time
the word was uttered
-
it opened up old wounds,
so they refused to say it.
-
They knew their listeners would hear
the actual word in their heads.
-
That wasn't the point.
-
The point was they didn't want
to put the word in their own mouths
-
or into the air.
-
By doing this,
-
they made an entire nation
start to second-guess themselves
-
about saying it.
-
This was such a radical move,
-
that people are still mad about it.
-
Critics accuse those of us
who use the phrase "the N-word,"
-
or people who become outraged,
-
you know, just because the word is said,
-
of being over principled,
-
politically correct,
-
or as I just read a couple of weeks ago
in The New York Times,
-
"insufferably woke."
-
Right?
-
So I bought into this a little bit too,
-
which is why the next time
I taught the course
-
I proposed a freedom of speech debate.
-
The N-word in academic spaces,
for or against?
-
I was certain students would be eager
-
to debate who gets to say it
and who doesn't.
-
But they weren't.
-
Instead ...
-
my students started confessing.
-
A white student from New Jersey
talked about standing by
-
as a black kid at her school
got bullied by this word.
-
She did nothing and years later
still carried the guilt.
-
Another from Connecticut
-
talked about the pain of severing
-
a very close relationship
with a family member
-
because that family member
refused to stop saying the word.
-
One of the most memorable stories
came from a very quiet black student
-
from South Carolina.
-
She didn't understand all the fuss.
-
She said everyone
at her school said the word.
-
She wasn't talking about kids
calling each other name in the hall.
-
She explained that at her school
-
when teachers and administrators
-
became frustrated
with an African American student,
-
they called that student
the actual N-word.
-
She said it didn't bother her at all.
-
But then a couple of days later,
-
she came to visit me
in my office hours and wept.
-
She thought she was immune.
-
She realized that she wasn't.
-
Over the last 10 years,
-
I have literally heard hundreds
of these stories
-
from all kinds of people from all ages.
-
People in their 50s remembering stories
from the second grade
-
and when they were six,
-
either calling people the word
or being called the word,
-
but carrying that all these years
around this word, you know.
-
And as I listened to people
talk about their points of encounter,
-
the pattern that emerged for me
as a teacher that I found most upsetting
-
is the single most fraught site
-
for these points of encounter
-
is the classroom.
-
Most US kids are going to meet
the N-word in class.
-
One of the most assigned books
in US high schools
-
is Mark Twain’s "The Adventures
of Huckleberry Finn"
-
in which the word appears over 200 times.
-
And this isn't an indictment
of "Huck Finn."
-
The word is in lots
of US literature and history.
-
It's all of our African
American literature.
-
Yet I hear from students
-
that when the word is said during a lesson
-
without discussion and context,
-
it poisons the entire
classroom environment.
-
The trust between student
and teacher is broken.
-
Even so, many teachers,
-
often with the very best of intentions,
-
still say the N-word in class.
-
They want to show and emphasize
the horrors of US racism,
-
so they rely on it for shock value.
-
Invoking it brings into stark relief
-
the ugliness of our nation's past.
-
But they forget
-
the ideas are alive and well
in our cultural fabric.
-
The six-letter word is like a capsule
of accumulated hurt.
-
Every time it is said, every time,
-
it releases into the atmosphere
the hateful notion
-
that black people are less.
-
My black students tell me
-
that when the word is quoted
or spoken in class,
-
they feel like a giant spotlight
is shining on them.
-
One of my students told me
-
that his classmates
were like bobble heads,
-
turning to gauge his reaction.
-
A white student told me
that in the eight grade,
-
when they were learning
"To Kill a Mockingbird"
-
and reading it out loud in class,
-
the student was stressed out
-
at the idea of having to read the word,
-
which the teacher insisted
all students do,
-
that the student ended up
spending most of the unit
-
hiding out in the bathroom.
-
This is serious.
-
Students across the country
-
talk about switching majors
and dropping classes
-
because of poor teaching
around the N-word.
-
The issue of faculty
carelessly speaking the word
-
has reached such a fevered pitch,
-
it's led to protests at Princeton, Emory,
-
The New School,
-
Smith College, where I teach,
-
and Williams College,
-
where just recently students have
boycotted the entire English department
-
over it and other issues.
-
And these were just the cases
that make the news.
-
This is a crisis.
-
And while student reaction
-
looks like an attack on freedom of speech,
-
I promise this is an issue of teaching.
-
My students are not afraid
of materials that have the N-word in it.
-
They want to learn about James Baldwin,
-
and William Faulkner
-
and about the civil rights movement.
-
In fact, their stories show
-
that this word is a central feature
of their lives as young people
-
in the United States.
-
It's in the music they love.
-
And in the popular culture they emulate,
-
the comedy they watch,
-
it's in TV and movies
-
and memorialized in museums.
-
They hear it in locker rooms,
-
on Instagram,
-
in the hallways at school,
-
in the chat rooms
of the video games they play.
-
It is all over the world they navigate.
-
But they don't know how to think about it
-
or even really what the word means.
-
I didn't even really understand
what the word meant
-
until I did some research.
-
I was astonished to learn
-
that black people first incorporated
the N-word into the vocabulary
-
as political protest,
-
not in the 1970s or 1980s,
-
but as far back as the 1770s.
-
And I wish I had more time to talk
-
about the long, subversive history
of the black use of the N-word.
-
But I will say this:
-
Many times, my students
will come up to me and say,
-
"I understand the virulent roots
of this word, it's slavery."
-
They are only partially right.
-
This word, which existed
before it became a slur,
-
but it becomes a slur at a very
distinct moment in US history,
-
and that's as large numbers
of black people begin to become free,
-
starting in the North in the 1820s.
-
In other words,
-
this word is fundamentally
an assault on black freedom,
-
black mobility,
-
and black aspiration.
-
Even now
-
nothing so swiftly unleashes
an N-word tirade
-
as a black person asserting their rights,
-
or going where they please or prospering.
-
Think of the attacks
on Colin Kaepernick, when he kneeled.
-
Or Barack Obama when he became president.
-
My students want to know this history.
-
But when they ask questions,
they're shushed and shamed.
-
By shying away from talking
about the N-word,
-
we have turned this word
into the ultimate taboo,
-
crafting it into something to tantalizing,
-
that for all US kids,
-
no matter their racial background,
-
part of their coming of age
is figuring out
-
how to negotiate this word.
-
We treat conversations about it
like sex before sex education.
-
We're squeamish, we silence them.
-
So they learn about it
from misinformed friends and in whispers.
-
I wish I could go back
to the classroom that day
-
and push through my fear
-
to talk about the fact
that something actually happened.
-
Not just to me or to my black students.
-
But to all of us.
-
You know, I think
-
we're all connected by our inability
to talk about this word.
-
But what if we explored
our points of encounter
-
and did start to talk about it?
-
Today, I try to create
the conditions in my classroom
-
to have open and honest
conversations about it.
-
One of those conditions --
not saying the word.
-
We're able to talk about it
-
because it doesn't come
into the classroom.
-
Another important condition
-
is I don't make
my black students responsible
-
for teaching their classmates about this.
-
That is my job.
-
So I come prepared.
-
I hold the conversation with a tight rein,
-
and I'm armed with
knowledge of the history.
-
I always ask students the same question:
-
Why is talking about the N-word hard?
-
Their answers are amazing.
-
They're amazing.
-
More than anything though,
-
I have become deeply acquainted
with my own points of encounter,
-
my personal history around this word.
-
Because when the N-word comes to school,
-
or really anywhere,
-
it brings with it all
of the complicated history of US racism.
-
The nation's history,
-
and my own,
-
right here, right now.
-
There's no avoiding it.
-
(Applause)