Well, as Emily’s housemate said soon after hearing the fatal word, that was
some f***ed-up s***. If Big Brotherhad been on the air 40 years ago, it
would have been the F-word that would have landed the girls in trouble.
Forty years ago, the Nword did creep on to the TV screen now and again, and
Alf Garnett was always on hand with “sambo”, “coon” and “wog”.
Times change. Fewer and fewer of us flinch at hearing the F-word on the
screen, especially since lazy screenwriters insist on using it as an easy
form of streetwise punctuation. “Nigger”, however, remains in a different
league, even if it is in general circulation among teens and
twentysomethings.
Emily Parr’s real offence, many would argue, is that she was simply too dim
and unworldly to realise how much offence she could cause.
But then white people in general can be forgiven for feeling confused, because
the rules surrounding the use of the Nword have become so vague. Most people
know, for instance, that “nigger in the woodpile” is definitely
unacceptable. The last time I heard it was 20 years ago when a Sloaney art
critic blurted it out in an office conversation. She had no idea that she
had said anything untoward, and I saw no point in correcting her.
People used to bandy the phrase around quite casually, but if you look up the
definition in Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase & Fableyou are left
in no doubt about the derogatory tone: “Originally a way of accounting for
the disappearance of fuel; it now denotes something deceitful or
underhanded. . .” The phrase “nigger-brown” has also faded away, to be
replaced by much more exotic titles on those multi-coloured paint charts.
But “nigger” itself has flourished and multiplied. Even back in the days when
African-Americans thought of themselves as “Negroes” or “coloured”, the
Nword was freely used with a multiplicity of meanings, some friendly, some
ironic, some hostile. Using the word among themselves, the victims of
prejudice sought to drain some of the poison from the ultimate expression of
white supremacy. The early wave of politically committed comedians, led by
Richard Pryor, took the process further, parading the word on stage and
making Whitey feel uncomfortable in the process.
It’s worth noting, however, that Pryor renounced the use of the word after a
trip to Kenya in 1979. Travelling in a country where almost everyone was
dark-skinned had a transformative effect, as he later described in his
autobiography. He wrote: “There are no niggers here,” I repeated. “The
people here, they still have their self-respect, their pride.”
Rappers have broken their share of the taboos. “Nigger” or “nigga” has become
the homeboys’ badge of honour. Randall Kennedy, an academic and the
freethinking author of the book Nigger: The Strange Career of a
Troublesome Word, has recalled how the late Tupac Shakur explained that, to
him, the word “nigga” stood for “Never Ignorant, Gets Goals Accomplished”.
Does Kennedy think that it is acceptable for whites to use the term? Here’s
the answer that he gave in a postpublication interview: “I’m glad the word
nigger is a stigmatised word. I’m glad that it is a word that causes people
to have anxieties. I’m glad that for the most part it’s a word that is
presumptively wrongful to use. I think that’s fine. But that’s not the end
of the conversation. It’s presumptively wrong to use nigger, but a
presumption can be overcome. So if a white guy uses the word nigger – if
anybody uses the word nigger – I’d say presumptively there’s a problem. But
then dig a little deeper and say, Well, what’s going on? What is this person
saying? Why did he say it? What is he attempting to accomplish? There may be
answers to all those questions that are perfectly fine. And at the end of
hearing the perfectly fine answers, I’d say, fine. It’s okay.”
So young white devotees of the hip-hop lifestyle have carte blanche. Ali G may
be a fictional creation, but there is no shortage of real-life “wiggers” –
white youths who copy the gestures and slang of the ghetto. Half a century
ago, Norman Mailer hailed the birth of a new American existentialist, the
White Negro, a figure who embraced the wilder mores of what would become
known as the counterculture. Wiggers have been indulging in a similar
journey, with the difference that their horizons tend to be confined to
bling and foxy ho’s.
It is no surprise, then, that the average Big Brother contestant wants to
join the fun. Life, however, is not quite so straightforward because,
historically speaking, “nigger” is a word which reeks of hate, and worse
still, dehumanising contempt. For many black southerners in the civil-rights
era, there was no more chilling sound than that of a white police chief
drawling the word “nigra”. Forty-odd years after the march on Washington,
“nigger” must be handled with care, like unstable explosives. The comedian
Michael Richards – brilliant as Kramer in Seinfeld – learnt that
lesson the hard way when he fired off some brash Nwords at noisy audience
members in a club.
If you wanted to be charitable, you could say that Richards was trying to be
sarcastic and ultra-edgy in a Lenny Bruce sort of way. But he misjudged the
mood entirely. In another well-publicised case, a municipal official in
Washington DC was forced to resign after using the word “niggardly” in a
discussion about budgets.
Moreover, not all African-Americans are happy about the role played by the
hip-hop stars. Cultural critics such as the pugnacious Stanley Crouch argue
that far from overturning stereotypes, the more thuggish rappers play to the
very worst stereotypes in what amounts to a modern, yet extremely lucrative,
form of the minstrel show. Is there really much difference, they ask,
between the black-face clowns of the 19th century and the baggy-trousered
wannabe pimps of the MTV age? It is a compelling question, and one that the
mainstream American media tends to duck, partly due to the notion that
anything that comes from the streets is “authentic” and thus above reproach,
and partly because too many people and corporations are making fortunes from
the status quo.
Still, Emily Parr’s lapse is not a sign that we are living in a society riven
with long-suppressed racism. That is not to say that prejudice does not
exist. But as a mixed-race person who grew up in a council estate in the
1970s, I’m pleasantly surprised at how much less overt prejudice washes
around in our daily lives. (Mixed-race was an unknown term back then. We had
to put up with “half-caste”, a word that evokes all sorts of unpleasant
sub-Aryan connotations.) True, I was called a “Paki” on my doorstep soon
after 9/11, but the generally muted reaction to the 7/7 bombings was
encouraging, to say the least. And let’s not forget that it was Shilpa
Shetty who came out on top in the last Big Brother furore.
My theory about the new row is that, like the Shetty business, it serves as a
proxy for the public’s unease about immigration. Well-meaning media worthies
have shied away from discussing numbers and consequences in too much detail.
They would prefer that the conversation moved on. Which means that we are
left to talk about symbols and ciphers and teenage girls who can’t stop
uttering naughty words. As the son of an immigrant, I suppose I should be
grateful for the broadcasters’ discretion. But I’m not sure that it really
it helps in the long run.
