Nigger: The Strange Career Of A Troublesome Word (14 page)

Wallace asserts that this exchange, within the context of the novel as a whole, strives to make the point that blacks are not human beings.
⁴⁴
That interpretation, however, is ludicrous, a frightening exhibition of how thought becomes stunted in the absence of any sense of irony. Twain is not willfully buttressing racism here; he is seeking ruthlessly to unveil and ridicule it. By putting
nigger
in white characters’ mouths, the author is not branding blacks, but rather branding the whites.

There was a time when Twain's own use of
nigger
signaled contempt. As a young man inculcated with white-supremacist beliefs and sentiments, he viewed blacks as inferior and spoke of them as such.
⁴⁵
As he matured and traveled and became more cosmopolitan, however, Twain underwent a dramatic metamorphosis. He grew to hate slavery and the brutality of Jim Crow and began to express his antiracist perspective satirically
through his writings.
Huckleberry Finn
is the best fictive example of Twain's triumph over his upbringing. In it he creates a loving relationship between Huck and Jim, the runaway slave, all the while sardonically impugning the pretensions of white racial superiority. Among Twain's nonfiction, a striking example of his revolt against bigotry is his piece “Only a Nigger,” in which he speaks in the voice of an apologist for a lynching:

Wallace, I suppose, would read this as an endorsement of lynching. But obviously it is intended to be just the opposite. The same holds true for
Huckleberry Finn
, which Twain designed to subvert, not to reinforce, racism.

I am not ruling out criticism of the novel. Perceptive commentators
have questioned its literary merits.
⁴⁷
It is undoubtedly true, moreover, that regardless of Twain's intentions,
Huckleberry Finn
(like
any
work of art) can be handled in a way that is not only stupid but downright destructive of the educational and emotional well-being of students. To take a contemporary example, the producers of
Mississippi Burning
intended their film to carry an antiracist message, but that did not prevent it from contributing inspiration to a wayward youth who, in
1990
, burned crosses outside the residence of a black family in St. Paul, Minnesota, in an effort to frighten them into moving.
⁴⁸

Such concerns, however, are different from the one I am addressing. I am addressing the contention that the presence of
nigger
alone is sufficient to taint
Huckleberry Finn
or any other text. I am addressing those who contend that
nigger
has
no
proper place in American culture and who thus desire to erase the N-word totally, without qualification, from the cultural landscape. I am addressing parents who, in numerous locales, have demanded the removal of
Huckleberry Finn
from syllabi
solely
on the basis of the presence of the N-word—without having read the novel themselves, without having investigated the way in which it is being explored in class, and without considering the possibilities opened up by the close study of a text that confronts so dramatically the ugliness of slavery and racism. I am addressing eradicationists who, on grounds of racial indecency, would presumably want to bowdlerize or censor poems such as Carl Sandburg's “Nigger Lover,” stories such as Theodore Dreiser's “Nigger Jeff,” Claude McKay's “Nigger Lover,” or Henry Dumas’ “Double Nigger,” plays such
as Ed Bullins’ “The Electronic Nigger,” and novels such as Gil Scott-Heron's
The Nigger Factory.

A third category of misguided protest involves cases in which insulted parties demand excessive punishment. Consider what happened in
1993
at Central Michigan University (CMU).

Keith Dambrot was in his third year as the school's varsity men's basketball coach.
⁴⁹
CMU also designated him as an “assistant professor;” presumably his subject was basketball. At halftime during a game against Miami University of Ohio, Dambrot tried to focus and inspire his team, made up of eleven blacks and three whites. He asked his players for permission to use with them a term that they often used with one another: the N-word. They nodded their assent, at which point Coach Dambrot said, “We need to be tougher, harder-nosed, and play harder.… We need to have more niggers on the team.”
⁵⁰
He then admiringly referred to one white member of the team as a nigger and went around the locker room categorizing the other players, by name, as either niggers or half-niggers. The niggers were the players who were doing their jobs well. The half-niggers or non-niggers were the ones who needed to work harder. Coach Dambrot later explained that he had used the term
nigger
“for instructional purposes with the permission of my African American players, and I used the term in the sense in which it is used by my African American players … to connote a person who is fearless, mentally strong, and tough.”
⁵¹

Despite the halftime pep talk, Central Michigan lost the
game. But that was merely the beginning of Coach Dambrot's problems.

Word soon spread on campus about Coach Dambrot's locker-room speech. He must have become aware of this, and realized that some observers might take offense, because he asked the university's athletic director to speak to the members of the team about the incident. None of them voiced any objection to what the coach had said. Nonetheless, the athletic director told Dambrot that regardless of his intentions, his use of
nigger
had been “extremely inappropriate.”
⁵²
The director then warned the coach that if he used the term again, he would be fired.

Soon thereafter, a student who had previously quit the basketball team complained about the coach's language to the university's affirmative-action officer. This administrator, a white woman, demanded that the coach be punished. She insisted that a formal reprimand be placed in his personnel file, that he be suspended without pay for five days, and that during his suspension he arrange for a sensitivity trainer to meet with the team to explain why the use of
nigger
was always inappropriate. She further specified that attendance at this sensitivity-training session should be made mandatory, that Coach Dambrot should “help assure that the team is not hostile to the training,” and that he should “convey his support of this training session to the players and the staff.”
⁵³

The coach did not resist, hoping that the incident would blow over quietly. His hopes, however, were shortly to be dashed. Publicity triggered two demonstrations at which
eighty to a hundred protesters expressed their disapproval of the coach's purported “racism.” The president of the university responded by announcing that the coach had been disciplined, declaring that “the term
[nigger]
is inappropriate under any circumstances,” and avowing that he was “deeply sorry about the hurt, anger, [and] embarrassment its use ha[d] caused individuals as well as the entire university community.”
⁵⁴
By that time, though, critics of the university, including state legislators, were calling for harsher punishment, which was soon forthcoming

On April
12, 1993
, the university administration fired Coach Dambrot on the grounds that “public reaction to the incident [had] created an environment that makes it impossible for the university to conduct a viable basketball program under [his] leadership.”
⁵⁵

Dambrot then sued the university, claiming that his discharge constituted a violation of his First Amendment rights. In a gesture of solidarity, members of the basketball team also sued the university, claiming that its speech code violated
their
First Amendment rights. The students prevailed—judges invalidated CMU's speech code—but not so their coach: judges ruled that the First Amendment did not bar the university from firing him. As interpreted by the Supreme Court, the First Amendment protects (to some extent) speech that touches upon matters of public concern. Therefore, if the coach had been talking to his team at halftime about, say, the racist history of the term
nigger
, his comments probably would have been protected. But in the view of the judges, Dambrot's
speech did not touch upon a matter of public concern and was therefore fully vulnerable to the university's censure.

Here, however, I am interested not so much in the courts’ conclusion that the university had the authority to fire the coach—a legal conclusion that seems to me to have been correct—as in the judgment that the university officials exercised pursuant to that authority. That judgment—or, more accurately, that
mis
judgment—casts a revealing light on our society's continued grappling with
nigger
and the cultural dynamics that surround it. The initial response by the athletic director—ordering the coach to desist—was sufficient. It recognized the undue risk that the coach's words might be misunderstood by members of the wider university community, while acknowledging that Dambrot had meant no harm.

Subsequent actions taken by university officials were excessive. First, the sensitivity-training session ordered by the affirmative-action officer was just the sort of Orwellian overreaching that has, unfortunately, tarnished the reputation of multiculturalist reformism. Among her requirements in regard to the session, after all, were that it must brook no debate over the propriety of the coach's language; that it must involve the coach in pacifying his players’ resistance; that player attendance must be mandatory; and that the coach must explicitly state his support for the process regardless of his own opinions. Second, prior to firing Coach Dambrot, CMU officials seem to have made little effort to clarify the controversy or to suggest to the university community that this was a situation in which underlying realities were considerably more
ambiguous than surface appearances might indicate. The fact is that Dambrot, though imprudent, was obviously employing
nigger
in a sense embraced by his players—a sense in which the term was a compliment, not an insult.
⁵⁶
Sometimes it may be necessary for an administration to sacrifice a deserving employee in order to mollify public anger that might otherwise pose a threat to the institution's future. In this case, however, the CMU authorities capitulated too quickly to the formulaic rage of affronted blacks, the ill-considered sentimentality of well-meaning whites, and their own crass, bureaucratic opportunism.

An even more deplorable incident took place in
1998
at Jefferson Community College in Louisville, Kentucky, where an adjunct professor named Ken Hardy taught a course on interpersonal communications.
⁵⁷
In a class exploring taboo words, students cited a number of insulting terms such
as faggot
and
bitch.
A member of the class mentioned
nigger
, and in the course of the discussion, Hardy repeated it. One of the nine black students in the twenty-two-person class objected to the airing of
that
word. Classmates disagreed, giving rise to a debate in which most of those present participated. At one point Hardy lent his support to the student who had first objected, suggesting that the class should take seriously the proposition that certain words were simply too volatile to be spoken out loud.

During a break, the student who had objected approached Hardy and requested that he stop using the N-word. Hardy defended the class discussion that had transpired but offered the student the option of sitting out the remainder of the session.
She rejected that alternative. Subsequently she noted her continued disapproval in a letter to Hardy and also relayed her complaint to the Reverend Louis Coleman, a prominent local civil rights activist. Coleman, in turn, called the president of the college and asked him to “look into the matter.” Hardy soon found himself in a tense meeting with the acting dean of academic affairs, who indicated, among other things, that the school could ill afford to antagonize prominent citizens. Although Hardy did not know it at the time, his career at Jefferson was at an end. A few days later the dean left a message on his phone stating that he would have no job at the college come fall.

The dismissal at Jefferson was worse than the one at CMU because it arose from a teacher's effort to make a point that was directly relevant to the intellectual concerns of a college-level course. By contrast, Coach Dambrot had acted imprudently in gratuitously using the word
nigger
in a context readily available to misinterpretation. Common to both cases, however, was the overeagerness of academic administrators to fire a subordinate for a
single
perceived misstep, even in circumstances in which the alleged wrongdoer had quite obviously been innocent of any intention to insult or otherwise harm those whom he addressed.

A much more sensible and humane response was modeled by high school students in Gould, Arkansas, in
1988
.
⁵⁸
A white teacher got into trouble because of a remark she made to an all-black class of students who were, according to her, becoming rambunctious. Exasperated, she said something designed to get their attention: “I think you're trying to make me think
you're a bunch of poor, dumb niggers, and I don't think that.” Upon hearing about her comment, ninety-one parents signed a petition demanding her removal. The school board requested the teacher's resignation after she acknowledged that she had committed “a dumb, stupid mistake.” She was reportedly about to leave the town for good when students circulated petitions asking the board to reconsider its decision. The petitions were signed by
124
out of the town's
147
high school students, only two of whom were white. In light of this development, the school board, chaired by a black man, reversed itself. Asked to explain the students’ intervention, a student leader replied, “We were ready to forgive and go on.… Anybody ought to get a second chance.”