I’ve been concentrating too hard on religion with my think pieces, and have decided to take a break from that to focus some attention on race issues. I am re-posting some notes I wrote last February for Black History Month on my Facebook.

This post originally appeared on February 8th, 2010

This is the only circumstance under which you will hear me use the word “nigger”. I thought I would get it out of the way immediately, so we can dispense with the tired euphemism “the N word.” Here goes… (deep breath)

Nigger nigger nigger, nigger nigger. Nigger? Nigger nigger nigger.

There. It’s out there in black and white (pun fully intended). I make jokes, but there’s really nothing particularly funny about this word. In fact, repeating it over and over didn’t make its impact any less meaningful, like it does for other words. Nigger is perhaps the least-understood word in the common lexicon, although thankfully it is far less common than it was 20 years ago (or indeed, 60 years ago), and continues to baffle people to this day. It’s a word that cannot be fully comprehended without knowing its history.

First off, I want to dispel a myth. Nigger is not a “bad word for black person” or simply “a racial epithet.” It isn’t a naughty word, or a mean name, or something you shouldn’t say when there are black folks around but joke about in the privacy of your country club. The word “nigger” is a bastardization of the word “negro”, the original European terminology for a person with dark skin from trans-Saharan Africa. As organized slavery became the engine for the economy of the United States, “negro” became “nigger” in the same way that “you all” became “y’all”. In that respect, I suppose, it was a fairly innocuous moniker, since one could argue that “negro” is not, in and of itself, a derogatory term.

However, slavery in the United States became a much different animal from slavery as it had been practiced throughout history. Historically, slaves were people of no noble birth or who had been captured in war who were sold to citizens, and who could, eventually, buy or otherwise earn their way (or the ways of their children) into freedom. African slaves in the United States were not captured in war, they were kidnapped, poached basically, by agents of the American government. They were shipped, inspected, branded and sold in exactly the same way one would sell livestock (this, while horrible, is actually not very different from standard slavery practice… or modern-day prostitution). What made American slavery so unique, however, is that the slaves were treated, and thought of, as animals. “Nigger” was a term used to dehumanize African slaves to reduce them to the level of farm equipment. “Nigger” wasn’t a term for a black person, it was a word specifically designed to remove African slaves’ personhood. Niggers weren’t people, they weren’t even merely slaves – they were an entirely sub-human species of animal.

Nigger was actually a scientific term for a while. Because African slaves had been sufficiently dehumanized, scientists of the day felt comfortable making all kinds of wild, unfounded claims about the nature, physical characteristics, intelligence, and even moral rectitude of “the nigger”. These completely unscientific, evidenceless assertions made their way quickly into the common consciousness; the effect of them was felt centuries later when black people were being denied the vote. Black people, it was said, were not intelligent, trustworthy or hard-working enough to deserve full rights under the law. This was backed up with bogus scientific claims from racist doctors, and was the reigning official understanding for quite a while.

This is what the word “nigger” means. The meaning of some words changes over the years, as their connotation shifts due to common vulgar usage. The word “vulgar”, for example, denotes the common, everyday vernacular, but it has connotatively come to mean rude and inappropriate (obviously I meant it denotatively, not connotatively). However, since nigger dropped out of common usage before it lost its sting and association to history, its meaning has not changed. In other words, it’s inaccurate to say “well that’s not what I meant when I said it.”

More recently, the word was re-bastardized into the more commonplace “nigga.” I personally have mixed feelings about this usage. The idea was to take the word “nigger” and re-purpose it to reduce its impact and take ownership of it. However, while I might sympathize with the aim, I don’t think it has accomplished its goal. It requires general knowledge of the difference between the two words, including the full history of “nigger” to make such a re-purposing genuine. For the vast majority of people in North America, the history is not well-known, thus the difference between nigga and nigger becomes nebulous, inscrutable, and largely ignored.

So what about rappers, comedians, and other celebrities who use the word “nigga” as part of their language? Are they wrong to do so? In a rare moment for me, I am going to equivocate rather than pronouncing what the “right” thing to do is. Considering the history this word has, I myself can’t imagine why anyone would want to use it, even in its diluted form. It is a word so foul as to preclude any reasonable use except to discuss it as a literary term. Every time it is uttered, it stirs up the ghosts of 400+ years of black exploitation and systematic oppression. Without the proper forum and tools in which to discuss it, those ghosts can never be laid to rest. I think there is next to no justification for its use whatsoever.

However, the word does force discussion of the issues that I have been raising in these posts. Putting it out in the forefront of media means that the world cannot rest on its laurels, and must discuss the glaring race problem that still persists in our society. The rapper Nas composed an absolutely brilliant album, originally titledNigger (due to pressure from various groups, the album went untitled), which touches on all these topics and more. The title was intentionally designed to generate just such a discussion. If you haven’t listened to it yet, you should. That such high-minded debate is being championed by someone who is on the level of the common man (or as close as you can get to that level without drinking the Krunk Juice) suggests that maybe we are more ready to have this conversation than I thought.

It’s not my place to make decrees that govern a community that I, admittedly, am not a big part of. The sociopolitical standing of black people in the United States is very different from that of black people in Canada; and while I feel sympathy and a sense of camaraderie, I am more like a non-voting member of the community – I can take part in the discussion but don’t have any official powers. To put it plainly, I’m not going to tell Nas what he can and cannot call himself, but I will never call anyone a nigga.

This is part 3 of my 6-part discussion of race and race issues that was originally written in February, 2010 for Black History Month. This post originally appeared on Facebook on Friday, February 5th, 2010.

Hopefully, if I have been persuasive enough, you agree with my premise that “blackness” is not merely a description of someone’s skin colour or heritage; nor is it simply the group with which someone identifies most strongly. Neither one of these methods is completely up to the task of encompassing and describing the phenomenon of blackness that, at first brush, seems almost simplistic in its… well… simplicity.

As a side note: if you’re confused right now about what it is to be black, congratulations. You’re now one step closer to knowing how it feels like to be black.

So we’ve got two methods, both of them wrong. Is the truth somewhere in the middle? Is there some sort of interaction between these two factors that, when properly looked at, produces “black”? The short answer to this question is both yes and no (you can start beating your head against the wall now. I’ll wait). Yes, blackness can be seen as a combination of how others see you and how you see yourself; however, no this is not a sufficient or reasonable end-point.

Let’s start with the good news. In my Chris Matthews post (author’s note: this was a short essay I wrote about my reaction to Chris Matthew’s moronic comments during Obama’s first State of the Union) I tried to provide a quick one-sentence definition of what “black” means. I said something along the lines of it being a sociological pattern that is ascribed to black people, which is about as circular a definition as you’ll find outside of theology. This is because it can’t be fully discussed until we are in this head-bangingly frustrating position of having rejected both “defined by others” and “defined by self” as plausible definitions. So the good news is that we can finally start fleshing out this definition a bit, to a place where it is at least workable.

“Black”, in my mind, is an externally-attributed label. It is what happens when someone looks at your skin and your features and pronounces you something. Obviously this is not a formal proclamation or even an overt statement of fact, it’s merely a reflection of the accumulated views of other people in a racial context. As my dad said to me when I was very young “you can talk about half-this and half-that as much as you want – doesn’t change the fact that when they look at you, they see a black person.” “Black” carries with it a whole host of associated stigma, which is a topic for a subsequent post, but it is definitely a label that is applied to someone, based mostly on the colour of their skin and heritage.

The second feature of this definition is that at some point a black person must self-identify as such. There must be, in many cases, a deliberate reach for (perhaps “connect with” is a better approximation) blackness. The further removed you are from the black community (in my case, in my friend’s case, in countless others), the more difficult this reach becomes. Some people, like Tiger Woods, deny this reach and instead self-identify somewhere else. This is where their self-identity comes up against their identity as prescribed by society; they are told that they aren’t what they think they are, and that the decision has already been made for them. It’s undeniably cruel and un-enlightened, but it’s really just like any other form of self-identity. Even though the idea of “true self” would maintain that the only thing that matters one’s own definition of who he is, the more pragmatic approach recognizes that it is influenced by his interactions with society. Racial identity is no different.

Lawrence Hill, author of a few novels on race including, most famously, The Book of Negroes illustrates this very well in his book Black Berry, Sweet Juice. In it, he talks about the role of “minority” in places that are not white-dominated. Briefly, he argues that in places like Nairobi, Kenya – or indeed any circumstance in which there are few white people around – people don’t self-identify as “black”. They are merely “people”, or, more precisely, they self-identify in ways that do not include a black/white distinction. Basically, there are almost no “black” people in rural Africa. One becomes a member of a racial grouping only when defined in contrast to another, just as (for the most part) you and I don’t self-identify as “mammals” except in the context of comparison to non-mammalian species.

Most of you should have, by now, recognized that this is the shittiest definition of anything ever. It’s full of circular arguments, unsupported assertions, and so many exceptions as to make the rule virtually moot. For example, what if a person who is 1/8th black is raised as a black person, though to all appearances he is white? Technically speaking this person has just as great a claim to blackness as anyone else once he has established his pedigree. This isn’t just a hypothetical – Sean Daley, better known by the rap alias “Slug” is half of the hip-hop group Atmosphere, and is exactly as described. How does the definition apply to someone like him, especially since he engages in a “stereotypically black” pursuit?

The reason why the best definition I can think of is such a terrible one is because “race”, as we know it, is not a scientific entity. There’s no more rigour to racial studies than there is to old-style taxonomy – classifying things based on what they look like, rather than their genetic heritage. Sure, it might apply 80-or-so percent of the time, but when it becomes necessary to apply it systematically, it quickly falls apart. Think of it like the sky. The sky is not a real thing. There’s no point at which you fly upwards and encounter the part of the atmosphere that is “the sky”. It’s simply a colloquial phrase used to describe a visual phenomenon that is, by and large, useful for crude description. Race isn’t based on anything we’d call science, it’s simply a carry-over from a time when we lacked the sophistication and enlightened ideals we try to apply today.

I want to point out at this point that this does not mean “race isn’t real”. Race is “real” just like the wind is “real”. Sure, it’s just a descriptive phrase used to crudely describe an underlying phenomenon, but tell that to the guy that just lost his house in a hurricane. Race, while not a scientific concept, is nonetheless experienced by people on both sides of an act of racism – for them it is very “real”.

So when we try to apply a systematic technique to the question “what is blackness” we come up woefully, and predictably, short. Blackness is defined simultaneously externally and internally. This may prompt us to ask “wherefore, then, black history?” If “black people” aren’t a homogeneous group, isn’t the classification of “black” history completely arbitrary? Predictably, perhaps, the answer is “yes and no”. Black people in North America (and indeed, most parts of the world) have a partially-shared cultural heritage insofar as we are all treated as “black people”. We face similar struggles, we rise and fall similarly with each other’s successes and failures, even when there is no familial or social connection between us. For the moment it can be useful to think of, focus on, and learn about our shared history and identity until such time as we have, as society, been able to resolve what it means to be anything.