A student raised his hand. He reminded the class that Polish people are dumb. I nodded and thanked him for that very apropos stereotype, but reminded him and the rest of the class that the late Karol Wojtyla (Pope John Paul II) was Polish, yet was one of the most intelligent, linguistically-gifted men the world has seen in quite some time. But, yes, the Polish have often been generalized as less-than-stellar in the area of intelligence. We went on. Canadian tourists in Florida can be annoying, the Japanese are scrambling over the globe with their cameras, Italians are great cooks but are abysmal at war, Jews are mostly doctors and lawyers, white people can’t dance, while blacks all love basketball—all supremely idiotic assumptions, of course. At this point I always share the story of one of my all-time favorite students raising his hand and telling the class that, despite the fact he was black, he had absolutely no regard for the sport of basketball. He was dead serious, too. Talk about thirty stunned and befuddled white kids.
As I continued with my lecture on stereotypes, I reminded my students that words like spic, gook, wop and nigger were words that still hurt. I really showed my age when I told the class that George Jefferson used to call his white neighbor, Tom, a honkey. The students had absolutely no idea what honkey meant, nor did they have a clue as to who George Jefferson was. They had, however, heard of the term cracker. Then I digressed and painted the scene at Ellis Island, many decades earlier, clarifying the term WOP (without papers). I could see the bell was about to ring, so I left them with an assignment to read the next chapter in their texts.
The following day, Jamaal was absent. I didn’t think anything of it. I just assumed he was sick. But when he missed my class again the next day, I did a little digging, which is what I should have done the day before. What I discovered was curious: Jamaal had been in school both days, just not in my class. On my way to break, I happened to run into a colleague who taught around the corner from me. I mentioned Jamaal’s absence, because I knew that he and Jamaal were pretty close. He nodded his head, “Well, Jamaal really doesn’t want to go back to your class,” he explained. I stopped in my tracks. Why? What for? What was the matter? “You used the word nigger in class the other day, and he’s really upset.” I thought about it. Yes, I had used that word—along with several other slurs. I’d been doing it for years, and nobody had complained before. I had taught very few African American students, so the issue had really never presented itself. “I’ll talk to him,” I said. He shook his head and informed me that Jamaal did not want to speak to me. “Well, can you get him back to my class? I mean, I don’t really want to turn Jamaal in for skipping.” What I wanted was to get the kid back in my class, so he could see I wasn’t a bad guy. My colleague said he’d talk to Jamaal and, thankfully, he was back in his seat the following morning.
The quarter progressed. We moved from the subject of discrimination to substance abuse. After that, we tackled sexuality and then moved on to crime and justice. Jamaal made little effort to pay attention. He rarely took notes, and often put his head down on the desk. Instead of confronting him, I just let it go. I knew exactly what he was doing. I also knew that, from my previous conversation with my colleague, Jamaal wasn’t going to give me the time of day. He’d already made up his mind about me and the course. He was done. He was over it.
I got angry. How dare this kid throw in the towel, and assume I was a racist? Who was he to make such a snap judgment because of one lousy word used in an academic context? Had he made the same stink, the year before, in sophomore English when he was required to read Huckleberry Finn? Or Lord Jim? Or perhaps One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest freshman year? And don’t think for a minute, I fumed, that I didn’t know he’d used that very word before in conversations with his homies. I think that bugged me the most. At any rate, toward the end of the quarter we found out that Jamaal was transferring to an all-black school twenty minutes to the south. I thought fine. Good riddance. Go ahead and change high schools, so you can play on a different basketball team your senior year. See who cares, because it won’t be me.
Anyway, he got the grade he earned in my class, and was soon gone. We finished the semester. Summer came and went. Jamaal went on to star for his new school the following year, and I resented seeing his name every time it appeared in the sports page, which was quite a bit I should point out. I stewed about the whole series of events for quite a while, before finally archiving the issue somewhere between the last super bowl and the Cuban Missile Crisis.
So, let me say this to be completely fair. In the ensuing years, I’ve heard nothing but good things about Jamaal. Apparently he’s an upstanding citizen, a good father and a loving husband, even a charitable guy. He’s visited different schools, and has spoken to kids about doing the right things. He may harbor resentment towards me after all these years, or maybe he just thinks I’m an idiot. Heck, maybe he doesn’t even remember me. Regardless, I’m okay with that. I was wrong. I shouldn’t have used that word in my lectures, and no I don’t know for sure that Jamaal ever used the N—word in the company of his “homies”. I never personally heard him utter the word, so I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt there.
In the years since the Jamaal incident, I’ve done some soul-searching, and have decided that I won’t use n— in my lectures again. I simply refer to it in class as the N—word. I’ll occasionally use it in print for academic and literary reasons, (you’ll see it in print here, of course) but I won’t speak it out loud in the presence of my students; I feel that it’s a vile word, one of the most disgusting compilations of letters ever assembled. And it’s even worse when it’s uttered out loud. I want you to know that I could not have made an admission like this a few years ago, so I guess it shows how I’ve grown as a person (and God-knows I still have a lot of growing to do). But there. I’ve said it.
Confession is good for the soul.
One lousy word.
Now how’s this for coincidence. A few years after Jamaal’s departure, I received a call from another colleague of mine, who is the dean of students at a private high school outside of Indianapolis. He was none other than Jamaal’s basketball coach at our high school back in the day. I swear I’m not making this up. Anyway, he told me of a situation whereby several of his black students were strutting about campus calling each other n-gger. He wanted to know if I had run across anything like this at my own school. I told him I had, but only a few times. “I wouldn’t be surprised if more of it went on behind my back,” I said. Naturally, he wanted to know what I had done about it. Resolved from the Jamaal incident several years prior, I didn’t hesitate to tell him that we did not tolerate the use of that word by any student, regardless of race, or for any reason. Period. I could sense his hesitation at the other end. “Look,” I added, “For years they’ve been telling us n-gger is one of the vilest, if not the most vile word in the English language. As adults and especially as educators,” I said, “we cannot allow these kids to demean each other in this way. Of course they’ll never understand what we’re trying to accomplish, but that shouldn’t stop us from stepping up to the plate and showing some leadership.” He agreed with me, but he also wanted to remind me that these kids had no racist intent toward one another; they were all buddies. The N-word, he continued, meant something different to them—certainly different than if it came from the mouth of a white person. I understood fully. I’d heard this argument many times before. It was old hat. In fact, I was well-aware of Randall Kennedy’s controversial book— Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word and some of the questionable claims made by the Harvard professor. Here’s just one of those claims: “It (the N-word),” Kennedy says, “can be used right now to terrorize and demean people. It can also be used to say you’re my man,