Obama’s use of n-word sparks debate on reclaiming taboo words

This article contains language some may find offensive:

In light of U.S. President Barack Obama using the n-word in a podcast released on Monday morning, debate about the re-appropriation of taboo words was thrust into the spotlight.

While the president took some criticism, others applauded his use of the word in the context of relaying an important message.

“Racism, we are not cured of it. And it’s not just a matter of it not being polite to say nigger in public,” Obama said in an interview on comedian Marc Maron’s podcast.

The comment comes after nine people were shot to death at a black church in Charleston, South Carolina.

The president’s language was censored, angering local Toronto activist Andray Domise.

“That word should not be bleeped out,” Domise said. “President Obama should not be castigated for using the word in a conversation about white racism. We are going to bleep that out? No. Don’t sanitize it. Don’t try to whitewash it. Don’t try to erase the pain of it.”

Domise believes black people have the right to reclaim the word.

“We can take ownership of the word because it’s been used to describe and dehumanize us for so long,” he stressed. “So if somebody wants to take that word back and find empowerment in it…more power to them.”

Musician Devonte Hynes spoke out about the issue saying: “I think the anger and discussion about the word is a distraction from the actual discussion that should be happening. It’s all about the context. Which is why you hear rappers saying it (to each other). Their intention behind the word is an intention of friendship and kinship.”

Fellow musician Tom Krell, who is white, said “If you’re white the word is not yours to use.”

“If you’re black, it’s your prerogative when and how you want to use it.”

The gay community has also taken ownership of once derogatory terms like “queer” and “dyke.”

In an email interview with Ron Smyth, Associate Professor of Psychology and Linguistics at University of Toronto, Scarborough, explained his point of view on the issue to CityNews reporter Avery Haines.

Dear Avery:

Well we start with the given that an essential characteristic of language is that it is always undergoing change at every level: pronunciation, words coming in and dropping out as well as changing their meanings, differences in who says what based on things like age, sex, social class and many other variables, changes at the grammatical level and in word formation processes. It’s never static.

Reclaiming words that have developed nasty connotations is an attempt to intervene in this natural process for specific political, social and other reasons. And it’s difficult because it means we have to convince people to use what are essentially taboo words until their old connotations are bleached out of them, and new ones can develop.

Queer is a good case in point. When I was growing up in the 50s and 60s it was a dirty epithet to be used against gay men, or against anyone that you wanted to insult severely. However, it was also a perfectly normal word used in literature and everyday speech. Gradually, though, the idea that it meant something horrible about gay men caught on more and more.

When reclamation started, I was a late adopter, because it just felt so wrong. Even though I was involved with the gay community since about 1970, there weren’t enough people around me who used the word in its liberated form for me to be able to utter it. Now, decades later, I’m find with it, but it’s important to realize that it no longer refers just to gay men. It has developed its own, broader meaning (“semantic broadening” is a common process for lexical change). That’s why we say LGBTQ: these letters stand for lesbian, gay, bi, trans and, in its own category, queer, which seems to envelop any type of sexuality that goes against the grain of heteronormativity. It can refer to cis people who like trans and vice versa, or to polyamorous people, to intersex or asexual or BDSM or whatever else you need it to cover. So we haven’t really reclaimed the word ‘queer’ meaning ‘gay man’ but removing the odious connotations; we have extended it to mean something new. For the word “gay”, we have a different situation: a word that in my youth was already not all that common with the meaning “happy”, although it was there for example in the song White Christmas (“make the Yuletide gay”). If you check the google ngram viewer you’ll see that both gay and queer were dropping in frequency from their peaks around 1920; “gay” bottomed out (no pun intended!) around 1980, and “queer” around 1990, but then they both took off again — with gay reaching historically high frequency around 1980 and continuing its upward trajectory. Queer started rising in the early 90s (which is about when we heard a lot about Queen Nation), and has doubled since then, although it’s not anywhere near its peak from the end of WWI to the beginning of WWII. I interpret this to mean that both queer and gay replaced the waning uses and gave both words new meaning. But is “gay” a case of reclamation? Some would say it’s expropriation (that was the argument for years from people of older generations, who kept saying that it was a perfectly good word with a perfectly good meaning, except that people my age would never have said it). Or you can compare it to the creation of Ms. (which is of course an older term of address, but the ngram shows low frequency in 1800 and only gradually started its rise around 1970, then it explodes up to and including 2000 (which is where the ngrams end).

Another question worth asking is how a reclaimed word like queer can extend to people other than those who are leading the reclamation efforts, and their allies, so that it enters the language more broadly. For example, for many years, as I mentioned above, I never used queer even though others around me did. It just didn’t seem right for me. But now you see it used in the broader press, and I’m going to take a wild guess that most of the usage is in the politically progressive meaning, rather than the old usage as an epithet. So what seems to happen is that there is a lot of sensitivity over who can and who can’t use these words as they broaden their scope. In the 70s we used queer within our community while outsiders continue to hurl it at us as an insult. The N word is a very clear example; within the black community it has been used as a term of solidarity for an awfully long time, but it’s still pretty hard to find a way for a white person to use it without being criticized for it. In Canada I’ve noticed the same thing about the word “Indian”, which coming out of a white person’s mouth seems to suggest ignorance of all the other possible terms like First Nations, Aboriginal, etc., but which is in fact used by First Nations people among themselves. Check out the report on residential schools to see what kind of language is used there. I think the same applies to dyke. Another question is who counts as being a member of the inner circle. For example, is it more OK for a gay guy to use the word dyke and for a lesbian to say fag, compared to if straight people use these words?

I haven’t thought a lot about this next point, but there may be literature out there on the particular contexts in which taboo words are used. For example, when fags and dykes use those words, I’ll bet it not meant to be hurtful, but rather to describe the particular kind of gay man or lesbian they’re talking about. Being butch or femme could easily be relevant to a conversation in the in-group, i.e. more descriptive than insulting.

So in the end I would say that reclaiming words is easiest within the particular community, and that it is much harder to extend the use of these sensitive words to the population as a whole. I have finally become used to hearing “queer” used in the news, for example, as simply a descriptive word whose meaning is by now well known. But the N word? I don’t think so. Will that change? Depends. Do black people want to follow the route of queer? Does it matter than it would only involve a change of connotation (insult) as opposed to denotation (black people), in contrast with ‘queer’, which developed a broader meaning?

Well that’s what poured out of my fingers. You can use whatever you’d like from this in your piece.