John McWhorter Discusses the “Use” versus “Reference” Distinction Regarding the “N” Word.

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?

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Erich Vieth

Erich Vieth is an attorney focusing on civil rights (including First Amendment), consumer law litigation and appellate practice. At this website often writes about censorship, corporate news media corruption and cognitive science. He is also a working musician, artist and a writer, having founded Dangerous Intersection in 2006. Erich lives in St. Louis, Missouri with his two daughters.

This Post Has 4 Comments

  1. Avatar of Bill Heath
    Bill Heath

    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.

  2. Avatar of Erich Vieth
    Erich Vieth

    From Quillette, and the Harry Potter reference is apt:

    So what we’re left with is the spectacle of an acclaimed reporter being purged not for malevolent actions, nor even malevolent intent, but rather for making a certain kind of sound. This is an important departure from ordinary mobbings because, even in their most dogmatic form, theories of social justice generally are at least nominally concerned with the improvement of human morality, which, crucially, is inseparable from the question of intent. McNeil, on the other hand, is being judged according to a theory of wrongdoing that presents certain words or phrases as evil by their mere utterance, as with a Harry Potter spell.

    For the full article, see “With a Star Science Reporter’s Purging, Mob Culture at The New York Times Enters a Strange New Phase

  3. Avatar of Erich Vieth
    Erich Vieth

    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:

    While the Times’ initial investigation confirmed that his intentions in using the slur were not hateful or malicious, a group of Times staffers later complained that because McNeil’s highly lauded reporting involved a pandemic “disproportionately affecting people of color,” any use of offensive racial language was unacceptable, and therefore, so was McNeil’s presence at the Times.

    While McNeil’s incisive reporting of the science of the pandemic had little or nothing to do with the broader social issues that concerned the staffers, this argument was enough to sway the leadership of the Times. In announcing their support of McNeil’s departure, Executive Editor Baquet and Managing Editor Joseph Kahn wrote to Times staff, “We do not tolerate racist language regardless of intent.”

    This is perhaps the most chilling statement uttered by the editors of a major US newspaper in recent times.

    It is an attack on the free reporting of information if context no longer matters, and it is an attack on education if a respectful discussion about language itself risks dismissal. This is part of a more worrisome trend in higher education where “trigger warnings” are now required in many schools before any language is used that might cause discomfort or offense in some individuals. Many professors now simply avoid discussing controversial topics, or emotionally charged language, rather than risk an outcry that could result in their dismissal.

    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.

  4. Avatar of Erich Vieth
    Erich Vieth

    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”:

    This is an argument about three words: “Regardless of intent.” Should intent be the only thing that counts in judgment? Obviously not. Can people do painful, harmful, stupid or objectionable things regardless of intent? Obviously.

    Do any of us want to live in a world, or work in a field, where intent is categorically ruled out as a mitigating factor? I hope not.

    That ought to go in journalism as much as, if not more than, in any other profession. What is it that journalists do, except try to perceive intent, examine motive, furnish context, explore nuance, explain varying shades of meaning, forgive fallibility, make allowances for irony and humor, slow the rush to judgment (and therefore outrage), and preserve vital intellectual distinctions?

    . . . We are living in a period of competing moral certitudes, of people who are awfully sure they’re right and fully prepared to be awful about it. Hence the culture of cancellations, firings, public humiliations and increasingly unforgiving judgments. The role of good journalism should be to lead us out of this dark defile. Last week, we went deeper into it.

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