Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America(31)

You watch the documentaries and docudramas about O.J. Simpson and his infamous murder trial. You nod your head in agreement with the plea of black prosecutor Chris Darden that the court not air a recording of racist white cop Mark Fuhrman uttering nigger because it is the “filthiest, dirtiest, nastiest word in the English language” and it will “upset the black jurors.” (Of course you overlook, or ignore, how, as Darden speaks, the camera zooms in on Simpson’s handsome face, his furrowed brow and impish smirk suggesting a “nigga please” response to Darden’s declaration.)

You are proud of your principled stand against the use of hateful language. If the word must be referenced, it needs to be verbally castrated, stripped of its hostile spelling and snipped into harmless abbreviation. Nigger limps into the “N word.” My Lord, how you contort language; my God, how we demand that you do. You bend over backward grammatically to avoid the appearance that you for one moment tolerate bigotry. Yet the bigotry the word refers to remains in place. It is understandable that many of you cannot say that word, at least not in public, and never in front of black folk. We have made it clear, well, at least most of us, that we find it unacceptable for white folk to say it under any conditions. But despite all your effort and care, the word is still out there, still wreaking havoc, even when it’s not being spoken.

Nigger condenses the history of hate and the culture of violence against black folk. When white folk say the word they bridge the gap between themselves and the hateful history it reflects. It links verbal and physical violence. The term is also a form of moral violence. It has to do with the intentions of white folk when they hurl that word in our presence.

Beloved, I am not arguing there is evil magic in white lips to call down violence with words. The word nigger has such fantastically evil resonance because there is a kind of moral onomatopoeia at work: nigger is a word that comes as close as any to suggesting the racial violence that it describes. Nigger says lynching, castration, rape, rioting, intellectual inferiority, Jim Crow, second-class citizenship, bad schools, poor neighborhoods, police brutality, racial terror, mass incarceration, and more.

Nigger has no rival. There is no rough or refined equivalence between the term and the many derisive references to white folk. Those terms don’t evoke singularly gruesome actions. Nigger is unique because the menace it implies is portable; it shows up wherever a white tongue is willing to suggest intimidation and destruction. There are no examples of black folk killing white people en masse; terrorizing them with racial violence; shouting “cracker” as they lynch them from trees and then selling postcards to document their colossal crimes. Black folk have not enjoyed the protection of the state to carry out such misdeeds.

The state, in fact, rendered black folk even more vulnerable. White racism was the government’s science project; bigotry was its nightly homework. Evil flashed a white face in a terrorizing crackerocracy, an exuberantly diabolic band of proud haters of black culture composed of the Klan, the White Citizens Council, neo-Confederate outfits, white nationalist groups, and the legions of unaffiliated fellow travelers. Their mottoes differ, but nigger is the rallying cry for all of them. We must effectively respond in our day to the ugly persistence of racism, even if its form has changed.

So what are you supposed to do?

My friends, what I need you to do—just for starters—is not act. Not yet. Not first. First I need you to see. I need you to see the pains and possibilities of black life, its virtues and vices, its strengths and weaknesses, its yeses and nos. I need you to see how the cantankerous varieties of black identity have been distorted by seeing black folk collectively as the nigger. It is not a question of simply not saying nigger; you have to stop believing, no matter what, that black folk are niggers and all the term represents. Instead you must swim in the vast ocean of blackness and then realize you have been buoyed all along on its sustaining views of democracy. What would this nation be without the efforts of Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King, Jr., to make it behave according to its ideals? What would it be had not Diane Nash and Fannie Lou Hamer given their all to quench the fires of hate?

You must not only deal with familiar black persons, but with blackness per se, with blackness as a moral arc, with blackness as history and culture, with simple yet profound black humanity. You may discover after all that we, black and white, are far more alike than you suspected—or feared. Your fear that we are just alike may cause you at first to doubt, but then, defensively, to embrace the lie of black inferiority your people have practiced from the start of our experiment in democracy.

I sometimes think of how the nigger crawled from the newly forming white imagination as a denial of everything that was enlightened and human. I also think about how Frankenstein is the name of the scientist and not the monster, but the monster soon came to be identified by his inventor’s name. “Whiteness,” in the same way, may be the true nigger. Stitching together a warped reflection of yourself, each piece a rejected part of your own body, the creation is made from you, not just by you—a despised version of all your imperfections. Like the monster Frankenstein, the nigger is kept animate as much by the white fear of becoming, or, in a manner, of always having been, the thing it hates most, as by a competing fear: that it should lose control of a part of itself, yes, a black part, and a despised part, too. The loss of control is glimpsed in the black desire to be anything except the nigger that whiteness has made black folk out to be.