All Black Everything You Know My Nigga Fresh Code
The actress Gwyneth Paltrow tweeted the Due north-word while at a Jay Z/Kanye West concert. Her music industry friends shrugged it off. Twitter did not. Joel Ryan/AP hide explanation
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Joel Ryan/AP
The actress Gwyneth Paltrow tweeted the N-word while at a Jay Z/Kanye West concert. Her music industry friends shrugged it off. Twitter did not.
Joel Ryan/AP
Editor'southward Annotation: This is a mail service near a racial slur, and there'southward no way around using information technology. Simply a heads up.
The impulse to make the world swell and simple, with hard and fast guidelines, bumps upward against the messiness of real life all the time.
Earlier this week, a New York City man named Rob Carmona was being sued by a erstwhile employee named Brandi Johnson, who said that Carmona harassed her and other employees. The story gained national attention considering of what Carmona was heard saying on a recording Johnson made to document the abuse at the office.
"I'chiliad gonna requite it to you hard-core," Carmona was heard saying on the recording. "You and her are very bright ... but y'all act similar niggers ... seriously."
Oh, yeah: Both Johnson, the employee, and Carmona, her boss, are black. The federal jury hearing the case awarded Johnson $280,000 in amercement.
Their workplace seemed to take more troubling dynamics than merely this slur — Carmona reportedly called another adult female a "whore" and dismissed a divide sexual harassment complaint because he said the adult female in question was "as well ugly" to exist the target of such a thing — but most of the attention centered on the act-like-niggers bit.
From the Associated Press article:
"In a case that gave a legal airing to the debate over use of the N-word among blacks, a federal jury has rejected a black manager's argument that it was a term of love and endearment when he aimed it at [a] black employee. ...
"The case against Rob Carmona and the employment agency he founded, STRIVE Due east Harlem, hinged on the what some run across equally a complex double standard surrounding the word: It'due south a degrading slur when uttered by whites but can be used at times with impunity among blacks."
Ah yes, the quondam "nigger double standard" conversation. To be sure, this is a singularly slippery word, with complicated, ugly histories broiled into it. But we care for it as if there should be articulate, simple rules around its usage, and then that we might signal out transgressors (and avoid transgressing ourselves). There shouldn't be a double standard, the arguments get. Just 1 standard.
Hither are a few ways folks propose dealing with this singularly radioactive give-and-take.
We tin accept the venom out of it by bold buying of information technology and using it affectionately.
Blackness people shouldn't use it if they don't want anyone else to utilize it.
Information technology can never be used in a positive way.
It will just go away if everyone stops using information technology.
To the extent that any of those prescriptions might true, it'due south only the narrowest sense: they presuppose there arbiters who can grant permission to say nigger and set the rules effectually how it's meant should someone say information technology.
But, of course, there are no rules. There are merely contexts and consequences.
When nonblack folks enquire why they can't say information technology but black people tin, the question misses the point. Anyone tin can say it — but that doesn't mean at that place won't exist fallout for doing so. Every bit we saw this week in the Carmona case, it's not clear that black people can't say nigger to other blackness folks without effect. (Hell, the there are specific spaces where the word itself is the topic of discussion and in which not saying information technology might earn you a side-eye for your preciousness.)
Terminal yr, when Gwyneth Paltrow tweeted a photo captioned "Ni**south in paris for existent" from a Jay Z and Kanye Westward concert in France, it ignited a minor controversy. Russell Simmons, Paltrow's friend, rushed to her defense, saying that the extra "didn't mean any harm." That ain't get over too well, because, again, it'southward non within Simmons' (or anyone else's) power to give Paltrow a coating pass. Paltrow'southward music manufacture friends were more forgiving, but the larger Twitterverse, full of people who have different orientations to Paltrow, was predictably much less willing to extend her the benefit of the incertitude.
Context is central to the way linguistic communication works. Information technology's why a term of endearment similar "baby" might exist appreciating between 2 lovers at habitation just grounds for a sexual harassment complaint if a boss were to say it to another employee piece of work. The relationships of the speakers to each other affair — their comparative power, their pasts with each other, even stuff like who's around them when they say it. This is probably uniquely true of nigger, irradiated by America's ugly and ongoing racial story.
Similar discussing race more than broadly, talking most nigger requires us to hold different and at times contradictory ideas in our heads at once. We have to actually acknowledge that we have different histories and alive in unlike spaces, that those spaces come with their own shared (or not-and so-shared) understandings, and that we can't control which particular histories and power relationships we are invoking when we decide to use certain words. Because we live with that context and non, say, in Gwyneth Paltrow's head, that context is ever likely to exist more powerful and resonant than any speaker'south intent.
In that aforementioned workplace harassment case, Carmona's lawyer argued that black folks employ nigger among one another with a specific, affectionate, intra-racial understanding. Only that, likewise, is wrong: there isn't one neat, universal black orientation to nigger, as is evidenced by the very different responses to Paltrow'due south tweet or Chris Rock'southward infamous "Black People vs. Niggas" skit or by the fact that Johnson understood Carmona's use of information technology equally emblematic of a larger constellation of workplace abuse.
We don't need universal rules around this stuff — not that we could we enforce them if we had them — but we do demand a much better understanding of our contexts. We need a stronger, more considered sense of why some things are received differently in one identify than they are in another. We demand to be more thoughtful, more than deliberate and more than fluid about the many spaces that we navigate, which require different levels of conscientiousness and clarity, so that we aren't misunderstood.
And if we venture outside of the very tiny universe of safe behaviors and interactions, we too need to accept that there volition be consequences. Some good, some disastrous, but none neat or uncomplicated.
Source: https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2013/09/06/219737467/who-can-use-the-n-word-thats-the-wrong-question
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