THE END OF THE N-WORD
I love saying it. I mean, I really love saying it. There are few words I honestly enjoy saying more. “Fuck,” maybe. “Bitch,” definitely (the gay way, NOT the straight way). “Sativa?” Hmm, that’s a tough one.
Here’s what I love most about saying it. There are so few places left where you can comfortably say it. We are a dying breed, the coven of brothers and sisters who proudly reclaimed a word stolen from African nobility, and then denigrated by the colonizers and evildoers on which the Divided States of American now stands.
It is the word “n@#$a.”
And I can no longer say it.
I have only been called a “nigger” three or four times — but I have felt the sting of being a nigger almost every day of my life. I have felt the physical and metaphorical lashes across my back many, many times. Ironically, I am writing this piece about as far away from the next black person as I could be (a small town in the Niagara region of Ontario). And yet, today, for a quick moment, I felt more like a n@#$a than I ever have — the cliche of the n@#$a aesthetic.
Let me set the scene: it’s a humid summer night, sticky but not unbearable. It’s the perfect night to be assassinated by mosquitos. I am wearing a black wife beater and Adidas basketball shorts so long they would have earned me a spot on the Fab Five. My nostrils are twisted in competing barbeque smells, as my eyes look up to the stars making their arrival after a blood-orange sunset. I had just got back from selling a random item on Marketplace. Found money, homie. My dog barks at a horny stray cat, while Jay-Z’s live version of “Can’t Knock the Hustle” with Beyonce on the hook plays. Me and my new roommate are smoking his and her joints, the first from a reup of a new strain. It’s delicious and new, like the first time your tongue is between new legs.
We’re not talking; she’s got her headphones on listening to Shenshea or some other dancehall goddess. Her hips occasionally sway as if she is powerless to the riddim because she, like all descendants of the fete, is indeed powerless. She has no questions or concerns or complaints, and if she does, I can’t hear a fucking thing she says. But we are connected by the fabric of the night — people whose lives rise in a whisper as the rest of us go to sleep, and the spirits who rise with the moon to dance upon us. It’s a nightly flash mob-like Michael Jackson’s Thriller video for those condemned and blessed to see the afterlife. Occasionally, either one of us makes physical contact; we try to act like it’s accidental, but we both know it’s not. There’s an extra touch as we pass the lighter, and a slide on the hip and butt cheek as the beat drops.
And we don’t pass the weed because some people (not me) are bad at sharing.
My Jackie Robinson Brooklyn Dodgers fitted cap is cocked at 3:00, while tears of n@#$a naps streak down my face. I have a car with gas in it; my kids are healthy and live with their “Baby Mama,” (and we are on good terms!), and I’m waiting on a check in the mail. There’s food in the fridge, not everything I want, but everything I need. And there’s just enough money, just enough, for one rainy day. Maybe one and a half days.
This is the N@#$a American Dream to repeat this night, every night, over and over and over again. From Doughboy to Baby Boy to Top Boy, this is what we want — to be in peace, with our woman, our weed, and our wisdom — nightly communion of thoughts with the creator.
Then it hit me, as if one of those stars flew down and plonked me on the head. The N@#$a American Dream is not something we should celebrate — it is the consolation prize for accepting this slice of n@#$a life that this is all we should subscribe to; this is all we can be.
We all remember Martin Luther King’s dream. I was 12 or so, right around my son Justin’s age, when I won my Harlem Church district’s “I Have A Dream” speech competition. There is nothing that gets more attention than a young black boy with the preacher gene in him. But no one ever asked us to dream, or what our version is of the should be/could be. We’d go to school and read a bunch of books about the potential greatness of our people from Tubman to Douglas to Jim Brown and Ali. I would take the train giddy on the hope of the future, and then I’d get off the train at 167th Street and the Grand Concourse, into a world that even smelled different than the bleach-streaked aroma of a morning in Times Square.
I recently went back to 167th Street as part of my opportunity to reconnect with my childhood. I didn’t recognize it, not because it looked different. Tragically, it looked exactly the same. I hadn’t been there in 25, 30 years and I just expected that time would have been kinder to the neighborhood. My building was like many others in the Bronx, two buildings connected by a courtyard. I assumed it was designed to provide some aesthetic. Now, all of that was ripped up and replaced by a large gate that looked leftover from the Spofford Prison.
Imagine walking through bars every single day of your life, going to the store or the school, or returning home with a lady. The bars are preparing you — numbing you — for the metal detectors in schools, the stop and frisk policies, the blood in the streets, and the prison pipeline. This is the problem with n@#$as — we accept the abuse, the torture of our senses, and the microaggressions that plague us. We rarely move forward. N@#$as are happiest with the shit they got, and if it’s still there the next day, we gucci. Our dreams are small, simple,
Then I thought of my boys, Justin and Xavier. It’s even weird to call them boys, because they are my men, young and experienced, but men, nonetheless. They are feral and smelly and curious and intelligent. I used to be responsible for what they saw, heard, and felt about the world. I crafted their life experiences so that they are fans of Star Wars and Marvel movies, and game shows and baking shows and drive-ins, and waterfalls. They are the best of me, the most beautiful parts of me, and the realest parts of me. The parts of me that I actually love.
Now, they are of the age where their world is now the world. They are consuming content faster than their mother and I can stop them, including my own content. They are reading my words, even when I think they aren’t. They will discover that Santa and the Tooth Fairy are bullshit and that we have been moving the fucking Elf on the Shelf all over the house and setting up the Easter egg hunt. It’s why teenagers are so angry; they are in trauma over all the lies parents have told them. Their language is growing and changing, and I can already hear more colorful language out of their mouths.
When I was back in the Bronx, I walked along the Grand Concourse, down by the old folks’ home that looked like a mansion, and past the home of the original Fever Club (one of hip hop’s earliest landmarks featured in the movie Krush Groove), to Mullaly Pool on Jerome Avenue, where I first grabbed a left breast. Before I knew it, I was at the only thing in the Bronx that had changed — Yankee Stadium, moving from one side of 161st Street to the other, and wiping away little league ballfields where I learned to play America’s pastime. At that moment, I realized I had more in common with the spoiled Westchester teenagers and hedge fund billionaires that show up only for box seats and overpriced beer. I get to leave. I get to go home to my suburban suck-up of a life, and my kids will never know what life is like behind bars. Why would I want them to ever know what that feels like?
So why would I use a word that represents every single thing I escaped from, that millions of us have escaped from? If I am so willing to leave behind the grit and the grime of the hood, why wouldn’t I also leave that same mentality behind? I used to wear sports jerseys, specifically baseball and basketball ones, well into my 30s, but at some point, I just stopped. It felt like it was time.
For me, the difference between jerseys and the N-word is my love for it, and how hard we fought to defend our right to say. The Great N@#$a Reappropriation Project, as it should be called, began in the late 60s and 70s. As a kid, I heard the word “n@#$a” every single day, more than I heard “Mommy” or “Daddy.” When the legendary group N.W.A. stamped their place in the culture, young black people began saying it in defiance to the “parental guidance advised” CD rebellion in the late 80s. I was one of those freedom fighters. Oh, and it just felt great to say.
As I climbed up the corporate and suburban ladder, there were fewer and fewer people to share the n@#$a secret with — or, more likely, I ran further and further away from saying it. Perhaps that should be the case — the word should be kept in smoky rooms, over spades games and barbeques, amongst family and friends. Soon, my kids will be faced with those same choices about what they say, what they wear, and the impressions made by both, and I want to be sure they make the right one. But I can’t be a hypocrite; well, I could. Being a hypocrite is one of parenting’s biggest talents. We want more for our kids — for them to be better, do better. Shouldn’t we also want their language to evolve?
To replace the word, I’m considering the word “bigga,” a cross between brother and n@#$a, combining the two most important greetings in the hood vocabulary. I could also let the word die and make the radical choice of calling those friends by their actual names (four of them, to be exact). While the Bronx may still look like it is trapped in 1988, our language doesn’t need to be.
