By Dr. Carol M. Swain
Johnny Wolfe, a white male history and African American Studies teacher, was recently fired from a college prep charter school in Kansas City after black students complained he had committed the unconscionable act of using the N-word, “nigger,” multiple times while teaching one of his classes. Was his transgression so intolerable it warranted a dismissal from teaching?
I don’t think so; I believe it is impossible to teach African American history without dissecting the N-word and its complexity within and outside the black community. My license to speak on the subject, for those who believe I need one, comes from the fact that I am a black political scientist born and raised in the rural South. There was a time when America’s intelligentsia agreed with me. Now, it’s considered “racial violence.”
Back in 2003, the pre-Obama years, it was acknowledged that understanding the intricacies of the N-word was essential for understanding American culture and life. In fact, Harvard Law Professor Randall Kennedy, who also happens to be black, published Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word.He set the gold standard for honoring contextualism. Kennedy explained: “I have invested energy in this endeavor because nigger is a keyword in the lexicon of race relations and thus an important term in American politics. To be ignorant of its meanings and effects is to make oneself vulnerable to all manner of perils. . .”
America’s intelligentsia celebrated and applauded Kennedy’s genius. The New York TimesdescribedNigger as “provocative […] engaging and informative.” The Dallas Morning News wrote that the book “should be required reading […] especially if we seek better understanding of ourselves and others.” The Philadelphia Inquirer opined that the book “demonstrates a key truth about the N-word […] it tracks our racial history and stars in a slew of court decisions that reveal large truths about bigotry and free expression.”
There wasn’t some sudden break from sanity after Kennedy. Prior to 2003, using the word “niggardly” (ungenerous, stingy) could get people fired. Nobody cared to check a dictionary before siding with the offended. In 1999, D.C. Mayor Anthony Williams had a budget official forced into a premature resignation because his use of the word was interpreted as a racial slur. As it was then, so it is now for the worse: those with authority cater to ignorance.
Fast forward to 2011. Pious editors gleefully whitewashed Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn and by 2019, we find efforts to ban Twain and other classic literature like To Kill a Mockingbird and Of Mice and Men. In 2020 and 2021, merely reading aloud literature containing the verboten word became a fireable offense. It did not matter if Harper Lee’s Pulitzer Prize book written during the civil rights movement teaches us about prejudice, racism, and courage or that Mark Twain’s 1884 publication illustrates to us the importance of interracial friendship and the use of slang in literature. What’s more: if white authors and teachers are not allowed to vocalize the word, “nigger,” does the restriction apply to black literature, rap, plays, and films?
The N-word is now a bargaining chip for political activists seeking more support for diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and new hires. White authors and teachers can’t say or read the word in a classroom setting— but students can listen to rappers yelling it (and other profanities) on Billboard’s Top 100.
There is a double standard. Apparently, Johnny Wolfe didn’t get the memo.
Mr. Wolfe represents an endangered species in the academy: a white man with the audacity to teach African American Studies at a 96 percent minority institution. He was too comfortable with blacks and had the hubris to think he could get away with teaching materials that required using precise language rather than euphemisms. Today’s diversity, equity, and inclusion activists often vocalize their disdain of white men. How much more so for one who deigned to teach African American Studies.
I believe teaching should be based on merit and that we should address political realities. History, and those who teach it, are not the enemy. Ignorance is. I have had my own encounters with the word “nigger.” I prefer the word to the N-word substitution.
Mind you, I grew up during the Civil Rights Movement. I’ll never forget one day at school after Martin Luther King Jr’s death when a white classmate, who had shown nothing but kindness to me, expressed relief at King’s death. This smart, prim, and proper girl, Amy, said: “I am glad he is dead. He made all the niggers act up.”
Another day, I was a young adult working in a library. I noticed a bored child sitting at a table all alone. I handed him paper and a pencil to occupy his time. His father asked him upon returning, “Where did you get those things?” That little child of 5 or 6 said, “The nigger lady gave it to me.” Interestingly enough, a look of horror swept over the father’s face as he lifted his finger to hush his son.
The N-word, in those contexts, had some malice behind them — but it did not constitute “racial violence” that so damaged me that I could not become successful in America. Sticks and stones. Blacks use the N-word as a term of endearment and as a disparaging putdown of lower-class behaviors. What’s truly damaging is the minorities who use the word so liberally and, in the same breath, weaponize it against unsuspecting white liberals who mistakenly believe that their years of civil rights support translates into an anti-racism that makes them immune to accusations of racism. No white person is ever immune because the power lies in the hands of those who wield the word.
Now I’m 68 years old in the year of our Lord 2022: where we bend over backwards to prevent black students from feeling uncomfortable over a word that long ago lost its Jim Crow bite. Let’s hope we drop that habit for the new year.
Dr. Carol M. Swain is a Distinguished Senior Fellow in Constitutional Studies with the Texas Public Policy Foundation and a former tenured professor at Vanderbilt and Princeton universities. She is co-author of Black Eye for America: How Critical Race Theory is Burning Down the House.