This was originally framed as a comment to a posting on Obama's language in his radio interview with Marc Maron. I've been encouraged to post it as an independent diary, and being the lover of self inflicted pain that I am, I decided to do it.
This is a difficult subject for me to write about, as a white male who's taken more than his share of advantage of the privilege that status confers. But I'm also a bit of a masochist, I guess, so I'll plow ahead. Please bear with this discussion - I'm not going to line out offensive words or imply what they are, for reasons that I hope the argument will make plain. I'm going to use them, flat out, and that may offend or inflame some. I understand (to the extent my background allows me understanding) that reaction, but I nonetheless think there's a value to doing so.
As all those who object to the use of racial/ethnic slurs well know and legitimately point out, words are weapons. They can injure, they can insult, they can degrade. they can be used as markers of one's (perceived, at least) power over another, and a stark remainder of past atrocities. For these reasons of simple decency, such slurs have been increasingly and rightly cast out of polite or public discourse, as the new obscenities (not that they never were obscenities, just that many of the old ones - curse words etc - seem to be accepted parts of the culture today).
But the power in these words lies not in the words themselves, but the significance we attach to them. Words, that is, are weapons only if we feel the wound. That was the genius behind the humor of Lenny Bruce and the progressive comics of the 1960s. They broke down all sorts of cultural barriers, and exposed the hollowed out false morality of the 1950s, by using the most derogatory "obscenities" and slurs possible and turning them into jokes. Punch lines. It's similar to Mel Brooks' lifelong dismantling of the Nazis - not by refusing to acknowledge their existence or omitting to name them, but by mocking them so explicitly and mercilessly that they became not feared would-be conquerors and agents of a Holocaust (though, to be sure, a bitter anger over that evil underlies Brooks' mockery), but buffoons.
When some idiot calls someone a nigger, or a kike, or a spic, or a queer or a faggot (as a gay man I've sure had those last two thrown at me), or any other slur, the speaker count on the hearer to be offended or hurt. It's their intent. And they feed on that reaction. It's what they want. They want to cause the hurt, to use the word as a weapon, to establish their power and superiority over the person to whom it's directed. In a twisted way, the more opprobrium we attach to these words socially, the more perverse glee these people get from using them, like a child repeatedly poking an animal with a stick.
Lenny Bruce and his successors recognized that the way to defang words is to take away their sting. Not by ignoring their offensiveness, but by turning them to punchlines and butts of jokes. This led in the late 1960s and early 1970s to a breaking down of taboos over what words could be used - not to an acceptance of them as less and crude, but a downsizing of the nature of the crudity to something that could be dealt with openly in a social environment and not howlingly rejected per se as unspeakable. For a time, things seemed to moving in this direction not only with regard to sexually related words, but racial and ethnic slurs as well. For example, one of the best songs Patti Smith ever wrote was "Rock and Roll Nigger" on her "Easter" album, In it, she used the word defiantly as an emblem of those (like her, in her own self perception at the time) who were "outside of society":
"Jimmy Hendrix
was a nigger
Jesus Christ and grandma too
Jackson Pollack
was a nigger
Nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger"
She sure didn't shy away from her topic! If you haven't heard it, Google it - it's an amazingly good song. Elvis Costello also used the term in "Oliver's Army" off the "Armed Forces" album, that came out about a year later - again as a general derisive divorced from racial context (immediate, at least). Sly and the Family Stone also recorded songs that used "nigger" in a way to deny its pernicious power over the truly liberated Black man or woman.
But since the late 1970s, our humor and culture have shifted away from that approach (which was truly radical), and resorted instead to a version of what can only be termed Puritanism: the notion that some words are too naughty to be spoken aloud. We used to categorize words having to do with sex or excretory functions in this way (George Carlin's famous Seven Words You Can't Say on Television), but their status as "obscenities" has now faded to a point where someone objecting to their use even in public is regarded as a prude. Don't get me wrong, I say "fuck" as much as the next guy, and in a lot of completely non-sexual situations, but we forget the crudity of such terms at our peril.
Why, then, are "fuck" etc. now socially acceptable things to say - despite their frequent connotation of violent intercourse and forced subjugation of women - yet "nigger" etc is greeted by shrieks worthy of a remake of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers"? The answer, I think, is in the very selective loosening of moral bounds that the 1960s gave us. It became OK to talk more frankly about all things sexual, but ethnicity, as it became a more recognized and sensitive issue, replaced it as a linguistic no-fly zone. We didn't lose our sense of the forbidden, we simply shifted its boundaries. We can deal with sex, but race? No way.
This is where I wish people like Lenny Bruce were still alive, to point us to a better way. Because Bruce's essential social point - that words have power only because we choose to give it to them, and to those who hurl them as weapons - remains just as potent today. If we're really going to defang the race hatred behind the users of such language, somehow we need to defang the epithets they like to use. If we remove the power of the words, what are these jerks left with? If you remove the language of hate, you strip that hate of much of its would-be power. I have found that the greatest way to stop someone calling me a faggot or a queer was to say thanks (often while laughing derisively). That always brings them to a halt - what, you're not offended or hurt? It's a pretty priceless reaction. It visibly emasculates them (if you will), and leaves them with no means to express their hatred. It takes their power away in one fell swoop.
My college roommate and best friend was the son of two Holocaust survivors. I learned more from him, and his parents, about the nature and depth of human hate and depravity than I could have from any book. The sight of the numbers tattooed to his parents' wrists was more than enough. More than once, they'd laugh about dealing with some idiot who'd called one of them "kike" or something similar, by ignoring or brushing them off. The reaction was invariably inarticulate rage - they were supposed to get offended by such a term, but they declined to cooperate. Did this take a thick skin? You bet. But it's legitimate to ask, wasn't this a more effective way to deal with such an intended insult than actually to take umbrage, as the speaker intended and hoped?
Please understand this - none of this is to say that I think such terms ought to become acceptable parts of the lexicon - they shouldn't. Nor did my roommate and his parents regard such terms as OK to use. They did, however, refuse to acknowledge that the terms had any power over them. They were better than that, and those who used them defined themselves as inferior by their mere use of the terms in a hateful way. It's a linguistic jiujistu - your enemy's display of strength becomes the demonstration of his real weakness.
(Of course, I think there are pretty hard limits past which one shouldn't as a matter of simple propriety, use "shit," "fuck,' "suck," and about twenty other crude terms, either, but that's just me. I'm getting old, I guess.)
What we need to do, I think, is in many ways inherently contradictory: to insist that racial and other slurs have no place in any decent vocabulary, yet to refuse to acknowledge them as insults when used hatefully. That was the goal of Bruce's comedy, and it's one that we need to embrace today. How to do both at the same time, I have no idea. But it's clear to me that so long as we as a society react so strongly to the use of slurs by idiots - by euphemisizing them ("the N-word"), by refusing to speak of them, by trying to pretend they no longer exists - we do little but encourage those idiots to use them again: precisely because their use causes the outraged reaction the speakers desire.
In this light, I think Obama's refusal to shy away from the term "nigger," especially in the social context in which he invoked the term, is welcome and very intentional. He doesn't 's hide behind polite euphemisms or willful denialism, because doing so also hides the stark reality of the racism that the term carries with such a term. If we're to beat the word "nigger," and its fellow travelers in the world of hate speech, we have to face it squarely - to speak it aloud - and to confront all that it means without flinching. That's not fun, and to be sure Americans are good at evading that sort of real discussion, especially on all things racial. But it needs to be done.
The President is out to confront such terms, and to disarm them - not by hiding from them, or pretending they don't exist, or euphemisizing them with dashes instead of their actual spelling. He wants to disarm the speakers of hate, to take away the only real weapon they have - their hateful words. That's bold. That takes actual courage. That's worthy of Lenny Bruce. I hope the rest of us find similar strength.
If my use of any of these offensive terms has indeed offended, I apologize. Such, I hope you see, was not my intent. This is a hard topic to write about (especially, as I said, as a white male), and I've done the best I could. I'm sure I can and should do better. But I do hope, and am bold enough to think, that I've made at least a couple of points that deserve consideration. I hope those will receive some consideration.