Why I hate ‘the n-word’

One of the depressing aspects of writing a column attuned to social hypocrisy is so rarely running short of new material. Any pundit keen to highlight the grievous injustices committed haughtily in the name of justice these days is spoilt for choice.

So: Augsburg University, Minneapolis, Minnesota. A student reads aloud a quote from James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time: ‘You can only be destroyed by believing that you really are what the white world calls a nigger.’ The last word causes a stir. When the white professor, Phillip Adamo, asks the class what they think of the student’s reciting of the quote verbatim, he repeats the word. The next day, the students kick Adamo out of his own classroom; since as ever the animals are running the zoo, he complies. The students powwow.

You know the drill: students complain to the administration about the ‘hurt’, ‘harm’ and threat to their ‘safety’ caused by having been subjected to a bad word. Cut to the chase: Adamo is removed from the course. He’s now been suspended for a second term.

Typically, all this wailing over trauma and injury is fake. The university campus is now a predatory environment, and the professors are prey. By allowing those two incendiary syllables out of his mouth, Adamo dangled a gotcha moment too enticing to pass up, as if having stopped to tie his shoelaces on a veldt teeming with hyenas. The pattern of these stories is unmistakable: they are not about justice, or the policing of prejudice. They are always about the exercise of power.

For it is not true that those poor Augsburg students are so stupid, so badly educated, so incapable of employing their own judgment, and so far removed from the world of common sense that they don’t know the difference between citation — during discussion of one of the most revered black authors in American literature — and the hurling of a historically loaded epithet with intent to wound.