We Give the N-Word Entirely Too Much Power
The racial slur has an ugly, despicable history, but that's all the more reason to strip it of its power over us
WLBT journalist and meteorologist Barbie Bassett was reportedly fired from her position as a journalist and meteorologist at WLBT in Mississippi recently after uttering a phrase associated with the N-word.
Here’s the context: At the end of a segment discussing famous rapper Snoop Dogg, Bassett uttered one of the rapper’s catchphrases, “Fo shizzle, my nizzle.” Watch for yourself:
Apparently, “Fo shizzle, my nizzle,” is slang for “For sure, my n-----.”1 I was familiar with the phrase, but unaware what “nizzle” stood for. Maybe it’s common knowledge and I’m just lame and out of touch, but I’m willing to bet plenty of people — especially unhip white people like myself — are unfamiliar with the etymology of the term. I can’t be sure if Bassett knew what it meant, but that’s beside the point. Her case is emblematic of a longstanding oversensitivity surrounding this admittedly repugnant word.
And let me be clear: The N-word is a disgusting word with a terrible, racist past, and anyone who hurls it as a slur should be ashamed of themselves. But for far too long, the word has commanded an almost mystical power over the American people, to the point that the mere utterance of it — not as a slur, but in academic or journalistic contexts — is considered unacceptable. It’s become like Voldemort: The Word That Shall Not Be Named. What’s worse, numerous people have been cancelled not for using the word itself, but, like Bassett, for merely referencing it! Here are just a few examples:
In 2018, Emory University School of Law professor Paul Zwier was disciplined and faced termination for uttering the N-word to a student. He’d been relating that racists had called him a racial slur because they were angry about his civil rights work.
In 2020, the University of Southern California suspended professor Greg Patton for using a Chinese filler word, “ne ga,” in class. The word is not a slur in Chinese, but students in his class took offense because it resembles the racial slur.
In 2021, Jason Kilborn, a professor at the University of Illinois Chicago John Marshall Law School, was placed on administrative leave over exam questions that used the words “n_____” and “b____” — the N-word and a misogynistic term used to refer to disagreeable women, respectively. The words appeared exactly as I’ve used them here — that is, they were not spelled out but rather included the first letter, followed by underscores standing in for the remaining letters.
So many people have been fired, disciplined, or otherwise cancelled for using the word “niggardly” — a word that means “miserly” and has a completely different etymology from the N-word — that it has its own Wikipedia entry.
These cases all illustrate the absurdity of the extreme taboo surrounding the N-word. Nobody should be throwing the word around casually as a slur. But if one cannot repeat the word in the context of attacks on their civil rights work(!), cannot use the word in an academic context while taking great care to censor the full word to accommodate easily offended students, and cannot utter words that merely sound like the N-word but are not, in fact, the N-word, then we as a society have truly lost the plot.
Kilborn claimed he had used the exact exam questions that got him in hot water for ten years without ever causing a stir. So what changed in those ten years? I suspect a lot of it has to do with increasing fragility among American youth. As Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt lay out in their book, The Coddling of the American Mind, the younger generations are being taught a kind of reverse cognitive behavioral therapy that is making them less resilient and more fragile than ever before, reliant on trigger warnings and safe spaces just to make it through the day. For someone to deign to utter an offensive word, regardless of the context, leaves such fragile students practically prostrate on the floor.
There are glimmers of sanity surrounding the N-word uproar, however. Bassett, the fired “fo shizzle” TV journalist, found an unlikely defender in radio host Charlamagne tha God.
“She can’t say, ‘Fo shizzle, my nizzle? Oh, I guess cause (it's) a derivative of [the N-word],” he said on his show “The Breakfast Club,” later adding that Bassett might not even know what the word means. “Come on, we got to stop man,” he said. “That’s not a reason to fire that woman.”
He’s right. Perhaps the incident warrants an apology — although I think even that’s a stretch — but certainly a firing, or even a suspension, is overkill. Treating every utterance of, or reference to, the N-word as if it were a physical assault on Black people infantilizes them (although it's worth pointing out that often it's white people who are the most offended). It’s totally understandable for Black people to feel terrorized and victimized when the N-word is hurled at them as a racial slur. But in academic contexts, they are more than capable of hearing the word without experiencing a hint of trauma, and to believe otherwise is a form of racism — it's to believe that they are so weak and helpless that we must take drastic, unreasonable measures to shield their precious, sensitive ears from a bad word.
Context matters. Used as a slur, the N-word is an ugly word that is almost always uttered by some of the most pathetic losers on the planet. But used in an academic or journalistic context, it’s essentially just like any other word, and we do a disservice to Black people — indeed, to all people — when we pretend otherwise.
Although the entire point of this article is that we shouldn’t blindly refrain from using the N-word in academic or journalistic contexts, I’m declining to write out the full word. I want the emphasis of this article to be on the argument, and I don’t want that to be overshadowed by any controversy that may arise from my spelling the word out — a decision I’m sure will be controversial in itself, but so be it.