Author: Madison Newell

If You Can Say It, Why Can’t I?

It could be because of the recent election of a president who references minority or marginalized groups as “the blacks” or “the gays”. It could be because of the recent societal rejection of ‘political correctness’.  Regardless of the reasoning, I find myself constantly in conversations about race. One that keeps coming up is the years long debate over the use of the N-word. Specifically, why it’s socially acceptable for the N-word to be used by African American people and why it is off limits to others—specifically Caucasian people. People ask me how I feel about white people specifically using the word, when it’s okay to use it, whether or not I use it, and the classic question “If you can say it, why can’t I?”.

Let’s get one thing straight: The word ‘Nigger’ is a derogatory term that emerged in the 19th century to refer to slaves, and continued even after the 13th Amendment to refer to all black Americans. Prior to it’s derogatory usage, in the 16th century, the French ‘negre’, and Spanish ‘negro’ were words used to reference people who were dark-skinned. The history of it’s usage in the United States should be reason enough not to use it, though it has proved insufficient. Within the last couple of decades, the reclamation of the word by the Black community inspired debate over who is and isn’t allowed to say it. The enunciation is modified by dropping the “-er” and adding an “a” and most importantly, it’s a term of brotherhood and sisterhood endearment – a racial connectedness that reflects the same sentiment as saying “I see you, I am you”.  Generationally, whether or not it is a good flip of the meaning, or a self-fulfilled prophecy is another article altogether – my grandparents have more violent memories associated with the word and do not deem it as acceptable to use.

Which brings me to my answer. I believe there should be a place of reflection prior to using the word. What connects you to it? I’m a black woman, and with this I’ve been able to experience the word in a positive and negative light. The derogatory historical significance of the word deters me from using it entirely. Though, right or wrong, accepted or rejected, it’s a part of my sub-cultural vernacular. Imagine being in a jam-packed frat party at 1 in the morning, at a primarily white university, and hearing your white peers shout it to “N***as in Paris”.  You can imagine the surprise I felt. It is a word that comes with racial ‘hate’ baggage, although pop-culture treats it as a new taboo. My point, it isn’t new. It’s personal to the people who were negatively labeled by it. I would dare to ask, if you could think of the most deplorable word that is racially motivated, would you want to be reminded of it by the race of people who created the stigma? People who probably shouldn’t be using the word, often will defend their use of it by describing it as an entirely different word due to its positive connotation. They’ll tell me that I’m wrong because it’s the equivalent of saying “my friend”. The word “friend” was not derived from a slanderous word used to label a community of people taken from their home-continent and enslaved for hundreds of years. The N-word was originally touted to inflict black inferiority to black people who were stripped of their identity due to slavery.  And while I don’t think it’s any more acceptable for those of other minority backgrounds to use the word, the historical significance of the word must be kept in mind. Who was calling who what, and when?

In this day, time and age of political and racial unrest, it is not a word to be taken lightly. Much thought should be taken, starting with your personal ancestral relationship to it.

“You’re So White”

I don’t remember a time when people didn’t attempt to strip my ethnicity from who I was. I heard it from friends, classmates, and even their parents. In their minds, it isn’t possible to be so intellectual, so “articulate,” so aspirational, while also being Black. As though the only way to accept me was to carefully measure me by how much I complied with a stereotype. In retrospect, I’ve noticed that as I grew older, the type of racism I experienced became more and more implicit, occurring on a micro level.* In middle school, I remember telling my mother about how my classmates called me an “Oreo” during recess. They told me that I was “white” on the inside because I didn’t talk like a “regular” Black person. My mother turned to me and told me not to accept the pseudo-complement. She said that being African American and speaking “proper” English were not mutually exclusive, and that the way I spoke was not a result of me being internally “White”- it was a result of my first-rate education and intellectual capability.

As I grew older, the way people enacted racism was more complex than comparing my personality to a popular snack. The message, however, was always the same: “You’re so white.”  Why anyone, with positive or negative intentions, would say that to a person of color is something I never really understood the root of until attending a predominantly white University. In conversations about racism with other Black woman undergraduates about their experiences with racism, the phrase “you’re so white,” and how much we’ve heard it throughout our lives, always comes up. The women I spoke to all had something distinct in common: they were high achieving, intellectual individuals. To me, this isn’t unusual, so I was perplexed by all these people who found it to be so.

I have been surrounded by a support system of high achieving Black men and women all my life. However, given that many of my peers and their parents were only exposed to stereotype, they saw me as an anomaly, but I never saw the contradiction. I still don’t see a contradiction. It took me a long time to understand that people saw a discrepancy between how I spoke and how I looked. Strangely, they felt a need to tell me so. My embodied Blackness didn’t fit their perceptions of what Blackness should be.  When confronted by the existence of someone who does not fit into that understanding, instead of expanding their conception and understanding of Blackness, they labeled me as “white.”  

I grew up believing in myself and my abilities, not because I wanted to be the exception to the stereotype, but because I never registered one in the first place. My peers called me an Oreo because the person they saw in front of them clashed with their preconceived ideas of who they should have been seeing at their magnet schools, their NHS meetings or their research labs. But what they didn’t realize is that those things were never “theirs” in the first place. No one group can claim ownership of intellect, achievements, taste in music, or personality type. There is not one “type” of Black person, and there is no one “type” of any person of any ethnicity. We are all individuals with diverse backgrounds, interests and aspirations- not cookies to be boxed into a misrepresentation of our respective cultures.

*What are Microaggressions?

Microaggression theory was originally developed by a psychiatrist named Chester M. Pierce in 1970, and has been elaborated on by several psychologists and psychiatrists since then. Derald Wing Sue of Columbia University has categorized different types of “microaggressions” into 3 groups: Microassaults, Microinsults and Microinvalidations. According to Sue, microaggressions are “everyday insults, indignities and demeaning messages sent to people of color by well-intentioned white people who are unaware of the hidden messages being sent to them.”

DeAngelis, Tori DeAngelis. “Unmasking ‘racial Micro Aggressions'” American Psychological Association. 2009. Web. 10 Oct. 2016. <http://www.apa.org/monitor/2009/02/microaggression.aspx>.