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African American

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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Thank God in my Lifetime

by Sid Parham on January 19, 2009 · Comments

in Politics

WASHINGTON - JANUARY 07: U.S. President Georg...
Image by Getty Images via Daylife

I began this series of posts asking how I could bring the importance of Obama’s election to the students at The Family Foundation School.  The answer I seem to be providing is to share our experiences with them, to show that history is series of lives lived and examined, not dusty reports of events.  I want to skip now to this past year and the elction itself.

I started the year a Clinton supporter.  I well remember Jimmy Carter and Obama seemed an honest, well meaning, but inexperienced candidate. As the campaign went on, I became more and more impressed with his vision and his self control.  The Jeremiah Wright controversy and Obama’s speech about Race in America made me a supporter.

Anyone who has spent time around African-American churches would not have been surprised at Wright’s rhetoric and anyone who had read Henry Louis Gates’s  The Signifying Monkey would have had a context in which to place it.   To a certain extent the Wright controversy brought up some of the cultural contradictions in the country.  It also challenged the role of the church in politics.  People who were happy that their church spoke out became increasing uncomfortable after the YouTube video of Wright’s sermon.

Obama faced this issue head-on which is the first thing that attracted me to him, but more importantly he made it personal.  He talked about his experience and about his white grandmother, who he reported had said things about Blacks that hurt him personally.  He also acknowledged this woman’s love for him, her support of him, and the good she had taught him.  Suddenly there was a model and permission for all of us to move forward without forfeiting our love of our personal past, a way to move apart from our family’s racism without denying our love for them.  They were of their time.  We are now and we live in a country where those ideas and feelings are no longer viable.

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