To start off, I will have to apologize to Sly & The Family Stone fans for thinking that this would be a post about one of the greatest bands to ever take the stage in rock music. This post is about words and society. I came across a story that was posted on MSNBC about a Chicago Public Schools teacher that filed a federal lawsuit against the district for the right to use the word "nigger" in his classroom as part of teaching Mark Twain's classic The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
As Chicago Public Schools' Lincoln Brown, the teacher in question, was teaching his 6th grade class at Murray Language Academy back in October, school principal George Mason walked in as he uttered the word "nigger" during his lecture and all hell seemingly broke loose. Brown took to the media after filing his lawsuit with his attorney and claimed that he is a victim of character assassination, denied he is a racist, and reiterated that he was only using the word in historical context as part of the lesson. Mason, on the other hand, contended that Brown used it in an abusive and inappropriate manner which is a violation of Chicago Public Schools policy. For the incident, Brown was suspended for 5 days by Chicago Public Schools and Child Protective Services for Illinois upheld the suspension when Brown tried to appeal.
I think the vast swath of us can remember The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from back in middle school. Set in the antebellum South, the titular character forms a friendship with Jim, a slave, who Finn helps escape to freedom. Twain used Southern Vernacular English in the text, which gave way to frequent use of the word "nigger". At the time, "nigger" was often used as Southern vernacular for the word "negro", and was not only used by whites, but by a vast amount of blacks as well. What is often noted, and at times ignored, is that Huckleberry Finn is indeed a satire, and one of the most scathing attacks on antebellum Southern life and attitudes, especially racism; not to mention, at the time that the novel was published in 1884, "nigger" was actually not seen as a pejorative racist term -- the word would not take on that meaning until the late 1890s to the early 1900s.
In the irony of all ironies, the word "nigger" became "nigga" with African American Vernacular English (which I think is a massive misnomer, because blacks, whites, Latinos, and even Asians all use this form of English) during the 1970s, after which it grew in use in various comics by black artists. "Nigga" is a vernacular corruption of "nigger". Just like "ain't" is a vernacular corruption of "isn't". Just like "chink" is a vernacular corruption of "China" and more specifically "Chinese". For the record, when I say "corruption" I merely mean it as "progressive distortion". Connotation is what makes something acceptable or not acceptable, but even then the clarity of what is "acceptable" is now becoming expanded and some what clouded. In fact, its increasingly being seen that "nigga" is not even used to just refer to blacks; Latinos picked up on the word referring to other Latinos that may not even be of black African descent.
"Nigga" has taken on the same movement that "bitch" has taken on since the feminist movement: a word of self-identifying empowerment. This is mainly in conjunction with the hip hop movement, in which the word started to explode in acceptance and usage throughout the 1980s, and today you will have to look high and low for a hip hop album that doesn't even have the word uttered once. While connotation still carries a lot of weight, as it should considering use of certain words will illustrate what attitudes someone holds, it actually foolish that we should insist that the word "nigger" should never be uttered in public and stricken from public conscience. To do that, we would have to do the same for "nigga", "bitch", "queer", and any other word that is now a term of empowerment and loose endearment and had previous use as a pejorative exercise of a superiority complex.
So what's the point of this post? I personally take no real issue with the word. As unpleasant as the word may be, for one, it is a part of the development of the English language and secondly it is an artifact, if you will, in the evolution of race relations. Because it is really a historical linguistic artifact, I would not be opposed to the word being used in a classroom for teaching purposes. Realistically, it cannot be expected that sixth graders, like the ones at Murray Language Academy, would be able to fully comprehend the development of a word that by that time in their educational and personal lives, has largely been ingrained in their minds that ever since the word was developed in the 16th century, it has always been a "bad word" even though for nearly the first 3 centuries of the word's existence in the English language, it wasn't seen as one. It is indeed the reason why that it takes significant care when using that word for teaching purposes as part of a lesson on historical race relations, which is often what books like Huckleberry Finn is used for at the middle school level in conjunction with teaching the historical development of the Great American Novel.
As for the lawsuit in question that spurred this post, it is coming to a fight of "he said, he said". We'll probably never know what truly happened until the case goes to trial and ostensibly students that were present in the class will get called to testify. Yet at the same time though, political correctness has to give way to an unabashed critical look at our history. We'll never have a good understanding of how this society functions unless we take a look at the historical construction of our society, no matter how plush or painful it may be.
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