The N-word and a comment from Duncan
Rick Smith
Hmmm. I wouldn't get a pass for saying this because I would understand how offensive it is for some -- or many -- people, but Trump would get a pass because he wouldn't care if it's offensive to many -- or any -- people? That makes no sense.What we'd tolerate in a President or casual citizen 75 or 100 years ago isn't necessarily acceptable now. I generally find John McWhorter thoughtful and interesting even when I disagree with him. He hasn't convinced me on this one.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/06/opinion/n-word-trump.html
New York Times
Tuesday, June 6, 2024
OPINION
The N-Word Would Work Differently for Trump
Opinion Writer
Rumors have long circulated that Donald Trump used the N-word while taping “The Apprentice.” Last week one of the show’s producers, his nondisclosure agreement having expired, recounted one instance in extensive detail. His account seems highly credible and is rather nauseating. The hunt is once again on to find the audio.
We have concrete evidence of Franklin Roosevelt using the N-word in marginalia before his presidency; Harry Truman used the word freely in his letters to his wife. There are a lot of anecdotes of Lyndon Johnson using the word. As for Mr. Trump, he has denied that the N-word was even in his vocabulary. A recording, should one ever emerge, would reveal that as one more of his lies.
But it wouldn’t actually change anything. Nor does the recent round of details. For one thing, we have already heard Mr. Trump say a great many racially dismissive things — about Mexican rapists and immigrants from “shithole countries,” among others. This word burns, but so do all the others. For another, polling has already suggested that even video evidence would have little impact on Trump’s chances of being elected. His acolytes have stayed loyal through his vulgar comments about women, his impeachments and now his conviction as a felon. “I’m not hiring him to date my daughter,” a voter told The Indianapolis Star back in 2016. “I’m hiring him to run the country.” Anyway, if a videotape did emerge, his supporters would almost inevitably dismiss it as having been generated by A.I.
This all goes for Black fans, too, a group whose considerable growth is making Democratic Party strategists nervous. As I have written, Mr. Trump’s racial attitudes are not the deal breaker for many Black people that they are for what we might call the Blue American consensus. Black people are perfectly capable of distinguishing between someone they personally like (or who seems as if he would like them) and someone they think should lead the country.
Nor would the use of that word, even by a president, produce a racial reckoning in any real way. America may have needed the recent reckoning on the nature of structural racism or the relationship between Black people and the police. It does not need a lesson on the ugliness of the N-word.
The term’s inflection has changed so many times in American history that you could write a book about it. I have gotten close.
In Frank Norris’s novel “Vandover and the Brute,” published in 1914 and set in late-19th-century San Francisco, when the word is used to describe a sweet young schoolteacher’s observations of one of her Black students, it is understood within the context of the narrative to convey affection. By the late 20th century, the word had a very different resonance, and “polite society” forbade its casual usage by white people. But the transformation over just the past 25 years or so has been seismic. As recently as the 1990s, though the word was every bit as much a slur as it is now, it was not yet considered unspeakable. I was interviewed about its use and used it several times in the course of the discussion, as did the white person who was interviewing me, the friends — Black and white — who told me they’d heard the conversation and others who wanted to share their own thoughts on the topic. This was ordinary.
I first sensed a sea change in 2003 when the N.A.A.C.P. chairman Julian Bond publicly castigated someone for saying that the name of the Redskins football team was “as derogatory to Indians as having a team called” — and here the person used the N-word — “would be to Blacks.” There had come a phase where in the Blue American consensus, anyone who was not Black was to treat the six-letter slur like Voldemort’s name, unutterable for any reason. But even since then, the consensus has shifted. I was comfortable writing the word out for reference purposes well into the 2010s, out of a sense that a Black writer might have somewhat more flexibility. In a 2021 essay about the word’s evolution, I made the decision to use it, carefully. But I have since come to feel that doing so makes so many people so uncomfortable that it is not gracious or effective.
The N-word has become, in this, unique in the English language. There are still some contexts in which it could be acceptable for a man to name the most vicious slur against women, or a straight person to refer to words that have demeaned gay people. This word functions differently, as the poet Laurie Sheck learned when she used it in a discussion about James Baldwin.
This is why some say a videotape showing the former and perhaps future president using the word could have such a strong impact.
But Black people are too strong to fall apart at the sound — or even the sight — of an old man using a word as a verbal snap of the locker room towel. We already know who Mr. Trump is. If he used the word, he would have done so under the assumption that he’s better than us. We would hear it as confirmation of the opposite.
John McWhorter (@JohnHMcWhorter) is an associate professor of linguistics at Columbia University. He is the author of “Nine Nasty Words: English in the Gutter: Then, Now and Forever” and, most recently, “Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America.”
Rick Smith
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