John McWhorter now has a Substack column and I have signed up to support his work. He recently expressed dismay that a particular group of people pretend that they don’t understand this distinction: it is one thing to use a rude word as an epithet to hurt someone and an entirely different thing to refer to that word (in this case, the “N” word) by saying it or writing it in order to discuss that word. Woke mobs are doing everything in their power (including attempted cancellation) to characterize non-harmful uses of the “N” as “harmful to people in exactly the same way it hurts people to hurl the “N” word as an epithet. McWhorter’s position (with which I agree) is that this is all theater and power plays. No one is hurt when we discuss the “N” word and all of us know that. In fact, we should be able to freely discuss the use of that word by using the word. This Woke trip wire should be dismantled. What truly hurts us all is to pretend that use and reference are the same. Here’s an excerpt from McWhorter’s essay, “The N-word as slur vs. the N-word as a sequence of sounds: What makes the New York Times so comfortable making black people look dim?”
The idea that it is inherent to black American culture to fly to pieces at hearing the N-word used in reference is implausible at best, and slanderous at worst. But the second and more important is that insisting on this taboo makes it look like black people are numb to the difference between usage and reference, vague on the notion of meta, given to overgeneralization rather than to making distinctions.
To wit, the get McNeil fired for using the N-word to refer to it makes black people look dumb. And not just to the Twitter trollers who will be nasty enough to actually write it down. Non-black people are thinking it nationwide and keeping it to themselves. Frankly, the illogic in this approach to the N-word is so obvious to anyone who does make distinctions that the only question is why people would not look on and guiltily wonder whether the idea that black people are less intellectually gifted is true.
I would like to be the fly on the wall in the private living spaces of all of those people who claim that they are hurt even when someone uses the “N” word merely to refer to it or discuss it (e.g., to discuss the extent to which it is harmful). I smell the strong stench of hypocrisy wafting from the Woke mob. How long before it is a terrible thing to even write “the ‘N’ word” or “N*****” when merely attempting to discuss the word?
In 1958, in fifth grade, our teacher read aloud several pages of Huckleberry Finn. The first time she came to the name of a key character, she paused for perhaps one-twentieth of a second before skipping half of Mark Twain’s powerful use of a descriptor in a name and called him “Jim.” Thereafter there was no pause. Being in a rural area, the school was fully integrated even though the county was not. My younger sister and I played with friends who were white and friends who were black. The matriarch of a local black family wanted cleaning work, and my mother hired her; every week she sent her home with “excess” food we couldn’t eat. It’s how rural America was, and is.
I had already read the book a few years earlier, and asked the teacher after class why she didn’t read the whole name, “Nigger Jim.” She gave me the usual crap answer, and I accused her of cowardice and denying the students an opportunity to discuss slavery openly. I still feel that way. https://www.colorlines.com/articles/why-jim-needs-remain-huck-finns-nigger is an interesting take on the matter. If we cannot discuss our history we cannot learn from it. We were open with our children about how the use of racial epithets as insults was not merely wrong but stupid. We were open with them about most things, and by their tenth birthdays were able to use “vagina,” “penis,” and other terms correctly in conversation.
How much better would things be if Republicans admitted that the Southern Strategy was racist, and the Democrats admitted the same about cynical use of civil rights support, both in the sixties? Starting with a basis that there are no clean hands clarifies discussion.
From Quillette, and the Harry Potter reference is apt:
For the full article, see “With a Star Science Reporter’s Purging, Mob Culture at The New York Times Enters a Strange New Phase“
At Quillette, Physicist Lawrence Krauss comments on a recent act of abject cowardice by the NYT, one that cost distinguished science reporter Donald McNeil his job:
https://quillette.com/2021/02/11/making-the-profane-sacred/
This would be comical if people were not losing their jobs over the unwillingness to recognize the use versus reference distinction.
Excerpt from an article by Bret Stephens, writing at the New York Post, article titled: “Read the column the New York Times didn’t want you to see”: