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Spitting Out The N-Word

This past week’s adventures in public transit have not been all that adventurous. I am still the only white guy on the bus - going on two months now without a single mirror image of myself. It’s hard to figure that one. The law of averages should be on my side, I would figure. I guess I would figure wrong.

One event does stand out, though. Small potatoes when compared with global warming, urban violence and what to do with Anna Nicole’s remains, but stand out it does. There I was at my favorite intersection – Mt Pleasant and Germantown Avenues – the same spot where I met the bicyclist from a previous entry waiting for the H Bus. Two teenagers were sitting on the steps of the Germantown Avenue Presbyterian Church. The steps are a perfect place to sit waiting for the bus, especially since the backrest of bench at the bus stop has been vandalized. Why twist the back off a bench so that no one can sit and wait for a bus, I think. But I also digress…

So two teenagers are talking. I of course am invisible. I try to count how many times they use the word “nigger”. It is difficult to keep track. This isn’t just because of the frequency – at least ten times in the first minute that I am there. It’s difficult to keep count because of the number of times one of the boys is spitting onto the sidewalk. I stop with the word count for a minute and watch as this boy spits also more than ten times in one minute. Is there some connection, I wonder.

Well, as I watched them, I thought in fact that there was a connection. They were equally oblivious to both the spitting and the speaking. I noticed that neither had names. They referred to each other as “nigger”, and to just about everyone they know.

Now I get the whole taking-back-the-language-from-the-oppressors viewpoint. Reclaiming “queer” by the gay/queer community is a case in point. Be that as it may, I find the word nigger offensive no matter who uses it.

Maybe it is because of the family I grew up in and the times then. My grandmother used that word at every opportunity. I remember the arguments we had as children about going to visit her. How none of us wanted to, and how much that must have hurt my father’s feelings. I remember how he would try to stop her from spitting out that word. It was the tone that she used. Like a Gatling Gun spitting out bullets is the way I heard her venomous remarks. I didn’t like it as a small child, and I have never been able to hear the word without also hearing that hateful tone.

I guess, though, that I took away from that brief encounter (passive as it was) with these young men is just how unconscious we all can be. And how hateful speech can never really be totally rehabilitated.

I do think it strange that words, like most everything else, are also being privatized in our culture these days. Ethnic slurs used to be more open source than they are today. It seems that, as long as you are speaking about “your own people”, you can say the most hateful things. Will we ever get to the point that “our own people” is all of us? On that afternoon waiting for the bus it seemed like that time is still a long way off.