Nigger: The Strange Career Of A Troublesome Word (13 page)

Although many whites follow this convention, some rebel. Two noteworthy examples are Carl Van Vechten and Quentin Tarantino.

Van Vechten sparked controversy when, in
1926
, he published
Nigger Heaven
, a novel about black life in Harlem. The title alone alienated many blacks, including some who knew the author personally. Van Vechten had, for example, selected some lines of poetry by his friend Countee Cullen to serve as the epigraph for his book, but when he told the poet about his proposed title, he turned, in Van Vechten's words, “white with rage.”
²⁹
And soon their friendship ended. At an antilynching rally in Harlem, a protester burned a copy of
Nigger Heaven.
And in Boston, the book was banned.

Van Vechten was well aware that the title would singe the sensibilities of many potential readers. Even his own father objected to it: “Your ‘Nigger Heaven’ is a title I don't like,” Charles Duane Van Vechten informed his son in
1925
. “I have myself never spoken of a colored man as a ‘nigger.’ If you are trying to help the race, as I am assured you are, I think every word you write should be a respectful one towards the blacks.”
³⁰
Yet the younger Van Vechten persisted, emblazoning upon his novel a title that still sparks resentment.

It should not be overlooked, however, that while many blacks condemned
Nigger Heaven
, others—including some of the most admired black intellectuals of the day— applauded it. Charles Chesnutt, the first black professional man of letters, praised Van Vechten in a letter, telling him that he hoped that the novel would “have the success which its brilliancy and obvious honesty deserve.” Walter White, himself a novelist as well as a leading official with the NAACP, expressed both admiration and regret that he had not thought of the title first. Paul Robeson sent Van Vechten a congratulatory telegram that stated, in part, “
nigger heaven amazing
in its absolute understanding and deep sympathy thanks for such a book
.” Charles S. Johnson, editor
of Opportunity
, one of the key journals of the Harlem Renaissance, commented that he “wish[ed] a Negro had written it.” Along the same lines, novelist Nella Larsen mused, “Why, oh, why, couldn't we have done something as big as this for ourselves?”
³¹

James Weldon Johnson, author of “Lift Evr'y Voice and Sing” (the “Negro National Anthem”), wrote an effusive review in which he declared that Van Vechten had paid colored people “the rare tribute of writing about them as people rather than as puppets.”
³²
Later, in his autobiography, Johnson would assert that “most of the Negroes who condemned
Nigger Heaven
did not read it; they were estopped by the title.” Looking toward the future, he would conjecture that “as the race progresses it will become less and less susceptible to hurts from such causes.”
³³
On this point he was clearly wrong, for as we have seen, even in this new century
nigger
retains its capacity to anger, inflame, and distract.

The white film director Quentin Tarantino has recently updated the racial politics triggered by Van Vechten's novel by writing film scripts in which
nigger
figures prominently. Tarantino's leading man in
Jackie Brown
, a black gun runner, casually uses the word throughout the film; in one sequence he hugs a black underling and, with apparent affection, calls him “my nigger,” only to murder him in cold blood a few minutes later. In
True Romance
, Tarantino orchestrates a confrontation between a white man and a Sicilian mobster. The man knows that the mobster is about to kill him, and in a
final gesture of defiance, he laughingly tells him that since North African moors—“niggers”—conquered Sicily and had sex with Sicilian women, his ancestors must have been niggers. Further, the condemned man speculates that the Sicilian's grandmother “fucked a nigger” and that therefore the mobster himself is “part eggplant.” And in Tarantino's
Pulp Fiction
, a scene featuring a black hit man, his white partner, and a white friend of the black hit man has the professional assassins showing up unexpectedly at the home of the friend to dispose of a bloody car with a corpse inside. Exasperated, the white friend complains to his black hit-man buddy that “storing dead niggers ain't my fucking business.” It isn't so much the fact that he will be breaking the law by helping to conceal a murder that worries him; rather, it's the fear that his wife will divorce him if she comes home while the hit men are still in the house. This white man who talks of “dead-nigger storage” loves his wife and is absolutely terrified by the prospect of losing her. It is important to note that she is black.

Spike Lee, among others, has taken exception to Tarantino's playfulness with
nigger.
When it was noted in response that some of his own films also make extensive use of
nigger
, the director replied that as an African American, he had “more of a right to use [the N-word].”
³⁴
Lee himself has not articulated the basis for that asserted “right,” but at least three theories are plausible. One is that the long and ugly history of white racist subordination of African Americans should in and of itself disqualify whites from using
nigger.
A second holds that equity earned through oppression grants cultural ownership rights: having been made to suffer by being called “nigger” all these
years, this theory goes, blacks should now be able to monopolize the slur's peculiar cultural capital.
³⁵
A third theory is that whites lack a sufficiently intimate knowledge of black culture to use the word
nigger
properly.

All three of these theories are dramatized in Lee's film
Bamboozled
, a farce about a black scriptwriter who, in order to keep his job, creates a television-network variety show featuring all of the stereotypical characteristics through which blacks have been comically defamed: blackface, bugging eyes, extravagant buffoonery, the omnipresent grin. Lee takes care to make the worst of
Bamboozled's
many villains an obnoxious, presumptuous, ignorant white man—Dunwitty—who deems himself sufficiently “black” to boast to his African American subordinates that he knows more about “niggers” than they do.
³⁶

The great failing of these theories is that, taken seriously, they would cast a protectionist pall over popular culture that would likely benefit certain minority entrepreneurs only at the net expense of society overall. Excellence in culture thrives, like excellence elsewhere, in a setting open to competition—and that includes competition concerning how best to dramatize the N-word. Thus, instead of cordoning off racially defined areas of the culture and allowing them to be tilled only by persons of the “right” race, we should work toward enlarging the common ground of American culture, a field that is open to all comers regardless of their origin. Despite Spike Lee's protests to the contrary, Quentin Tarantino is talented and has the goods to prove it. That is not to say that he should
be exempt from criticism, but Lee's racial critique of his fellow director is off the mark. It is almost wholly ad hominem. It focuses on the character of Tarantino's race rather than the character of his work—brilliant work that allows the word
nigger
to be heard in a rich panoply of contexts and intonations.

In
1997
in Ypsilanti, Michigan, a computer technician named Delphine Abraham decided to look up the definition of
nigger
in the tenth edition of
Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary
.
³⁷
This is what she found:

Abraham recorded what she subsequently felt and did:

The question is, should Abrahams, Mfume, or anyone else have felt insulted by Merriam-Webster's definition?

No.

The definition notes that the term is usually taken to be offensive and then states, for good measure, that the N-word “now ranks as perhaps the most offensive and inflammatory
racial slur in English.” Abrahams claimed that the Merriam-Webster definition labeled as a nigger anyone who happened to be black. But that view is unreasonable given the totality of the definition offered by the dictionary. In defining
nigger
, moreover, Webster's
10
th does not vary from its typical practice. For instance, in defining
honky
, the dictionary posits:
“usu. disparaging:
a white person.”

In response to Abraham's petition drive, representatives of Merriam-Webster tried to depoliticize the matter by portraying the dictionary as a mechanical, autonomous linguistic mirror. To this end, the marketing director repeatedly averred that “a dictionary is a scholarly reference, not a political tool. As long as the word is in use, it is our responsibility as dictionary publishers to put the word into the dictionary.”
³⁹
Similarly, the company president, John R. Morse, portrayed his editors as mere technicians lacking independent powers of their own. Dictionary makers, Morse maintained, “do not invent the words that go into the dictionary, and they don't decide what meanings they will have.”
⁴⁰
Morse simultaneously undermined his own point, however, by noting that “offensive words… appear only in hardcover college-level dictionaries, which are edited expressly for adults. Slurs and other offensive words are not included in dictionaries intended for children. Nor are they published in any smaller, abridged dictionaries, such as paperbacks.” With respect to these other dictionaries, the managers of Merriam-Webster had decided, for various reasons, to excise the N-word. Whether or not this decision was a sound one is, for the moment, irrelevant. The important thing to recognize is that dictionary makers do, in
fact, exercise judgment, notwithstanding Morse's evasive denial.

Deciding whether to note or how to define a deeply controversial word is an inescapably “political” act, and claims to the contrary are either naive or disingenuous. The issue, then, is not whether editors shape the substance of their dictionaries. Of course they do. The issue is the substance of the choices made. Some of Merriam-Webster's critics have condemned the editors’ decision to include any reference at all to
nigger.
“If the word is not there [in the dictionary], you can't use it,” one protester asserted in favor of deleting the N-word alto-gether.
⁴¹
That tack, however, is glaringly wrongheaded. Many terms that are absent from dictionaries are nonetheless pervasive in popular usage. Moreover, so long as racist sentiments exist, they will find linguistic means of expression, even if some avenues are blocked. There are, after all, numerous ways of insulting people.

In sum, the campaign against
Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary
was misguided. The dictionary defined the term adequately, and the dictionary's editors were correct in including the N-word despite the embarrassment and hurt feelings the term inflicts.
Nigger
should have a place in any serious dictionary. The word is simply too important to ignore.

A second, and achingly poignant, example of mistaken protest is the widespread repudiation of
Huckleberry Finn
, now one of the most beleaguered texts in American literature. Monthly, it seems, someone attacks Mark Twain's most famous book on
the grounds that it is racist. The novel's most energetic foe, John H. Wallace, calls it “the most grotesque example of racist trash ever written.”
⁴²
For many of
Huckleberry Finn's
enemies, the most upsetting and best proof of the book's racism is the fact that
nigger
appears in the text some
215
times. At one point, for example, Huck's aunt Sally asks him why he is so late arriving at her house: