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The “N” Word

by Sid Parham on November 26, 2009 · Comments

in cultural studies

letter N
Image by Leo Reynolds via Flickr

As one who tracks our alumni on facebook I am exposed and frequently entertained by the slang of college students.  No change seems to strike me more viscerally than their casual  use of the “N” word.  My reluctance to spell it speaks to its taboo nature.  As one who grew up in the South of the 1950’s and lived through the civil rights movement, the word carries considerable moral and historical weight for me which makes its current uses difficult.  Are we seeing a reversion to older forms of discrimination or a genuine shift in racial attitude?

I have defended teaching Huckleberry Finn even as I had wished Twain had written “Slave Jim” instead of “Nigger Jim.”  I have come to understand the multiple uses of this word within the African American community.  Claude Brown’s wonderful essay from the 1970’s on the “soul word” is perhaps the finest balance of intelligent linguistics and felt personal experience about this topic.  But I knew that as a white I was barred from this discourse.

Hip hop culture seems to have changed all this. Young white people–mostly men–refer to each other an “my niggah” as if the “ah” erased much of the word’s evil history.  At first, I saw this phenomenon as  simply disaffected, but relatively privileged, white youth claiming an outsider position.  As one who spend the summer of 1968 in San Francisco,  I can assure them that this is not a productive political move. Then across my facebook wall I watched a white student call his African American friend “my Niggah,” and saw the African American reply with friendship and no sense of insult.  I was shocked.  Had the world of my students so changed that this was possible?

Chuck Berry and Motown are credited with moving the civil rights agenda forward. On reflection, I see that America has accepted the cultural prominence of Black people long before it has included them in America’s material prosperity.  This morning’s Washington Post reports that the unemployment crises as hit African American men 3 times harder than their white counterparts.  The divisions remain, yet this new use of the “N” word seems to imply that generational solidarity may be more important than race .  Also this usage marks an era of greater friendship and contact between the cultures.

So maybe this usage is a good thing or maybe I’m just too old to accept a world  in which I cut on my computer and am greeted with “Good Morning my Twiggahs.”

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A Failure of Scholarship?

by Sid Parham on August 19, 2009 · Comments

in cultural studies

To rename is to revise, and to revise is to Signify.–Henry Louis Gates, Jr

In his best known and perhaps best piece of scholarship, The Signifying Monkey, Henry Louis Gates traces the development of a distinctly different African American rhetoric. He begins with Yoruba praise songs and traces this development through slavery, many writers and even Mohammad Ali.  Indeed he talks about the “trope a dope.”  African Americans developed a double voiced rhetoric full of both hyperbole and hidden meaning which was designed to mean one thing in the speaker’s community and another in the wider world. Presumably then Gates knows whites hear certain rhetoric differently than African Americans do.

We can imagine the good professor, tired from his Chinese journey, trying out a little trope a dope on the policemen who missing the irony, as Gates’s theory predicts he would, arrests the professor.  Part of my enjoyment of this event has been the way in which knowledge has been rendered useless by “signifying.”  For African Americans, including the president, the arrest was an absurd example of what happens too often to African Americans.  Its value as a signifier exceeds its value as an individual event.

The white press pretended the event had no “signifying power,” and examined it as a single event.  Of course, the president’s remarks were seen as symbolic and “inappropriate.” A similar fate befell Jeremiah Wright whose preaching, or at least the clips I saw on television, were full of signifying and in that sense no different from many other African American preachers. Consistently whites tend to hear only the single voice of a doubled voice and to miss the riffs and syncopation.

This issue ended not by court resolution, not by a journalistic transcript of every word spoken in the Gates house that evening, but in a flury of signifying.  The White House garden was turned into that most American of summer places–the patio beer party. The vice president was there to equalize the racial balance and we had that most American of solutions the face to face sit down.  All done as a silent movie.

The lack of any honest dialogue about the remaining racial tensions in this country have made us very sensitive to those events, utterances, and acts that signify those differences and tensions with discussing or resolving them.  The signifying monkey will be with us along time.

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