Reading Jamelle’s post on the Dr. Laura “n-word” incident made me think back to my time teaching sociolinguistics to first-year college students. I used to have them read “Teaching the N-Word,” an essay by Emily Bernard, a professor of English at the University of Vermont (for anyone who hasn’t read it, I suggest you do), as a springboard to discussing linguistic taboos and the convoluted politics of race.
I used to write the word on the board in the International Phonetic Alphabet, a universal notation system for human speech sounds, in an attempt to decontextualize the word, give it a clinical treatment before the inevitably uncomfortable conversation that followed. It was a version of the tactic we use when we say “the n-word” instead of “nigger”; it gives the speaker a comfortable sense of remove. But the fact of the matter was that it was never easy to talk about it. It’s probably the most powerful word in American English, and it’s powerful because of its very prohibition; one of the points I always tried to stress is that taboos in fact endow words with totemic power. It’s almost as if its very utterance will bring upon the speaker the collective shame of American slavery.
Those who rail against “political correctness” see the prohibition as a form of oppression, which is laughable if you consider the degree of oppression
This is not to say that I think the solution is that everyone should run around saying “the n-word” as a way of
Words only have meaning within context, which is something that those who rail against “political correctness” seem hard-pressed to understand.
