Why it's so hard to talk about the N-word

Professor Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor leads a thoughtful and history-backed examination of one of the most divisive words in the English language: the N-word. Drawing from personal experience, she explains how reflecting on our points of encounter with the word can help promote productive discussions and, ultimately, create a framework that reshapes education around the complicated history of racism in the US.

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-Nehisi 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 PowerPoints,

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 overprincipled,

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 names 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 over 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 bobbleheads,

turning to gauge his reaction.

A white student told me
that in the eighth 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 so 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)