The Working Press: News Matters, but Only when Readers Trust the Papers

Tags

All the President's Men, Blogging, Blogs and Ethos, David Simon, Democracy, Derek Thompson, Does the News Matter to Anyone Anymore?, Education, Essay, free speech, Free Working Press, Freedom, Full Frontal, Halcyon, John Oliver, journalism, Last Week Tonight, News, Newspapers, NPR, patriotism, Politics, Reporters, Republic, Satire, television, The Atlantic, The Daily Show, The Nightly Show, The Wire, Walter Cronkite, Watergate, We Are Mired in Stalemate, Why Do Americans Distrust the Media, Writing

 

I believe in newspapers and the power of a free working press.

That sentence sounds like it should be immediately followed by “Journalists of the World UNITE” which itself is then followed by a fanfair of trumpets and people dancing in revelry while waving the banners of revolution, but in fact the only response I should, and would hope for, is for the reader to nod their head and agree.  Such is the dream, yet not always the reality, and in fact, it seems the last real refuge for real reporting seems to be in cinema or “parody” news programs like The Daily Show, Full Frontal, or Last Week Tonight.  On one side note The Nightly Show is no longer running which is unfortunate because it seems every time Comedy Central puts up a show that tries to present news and information from a black perspective it only ever lasts a few episodes before it gets canceled.  That’s an entire article or online lecture by itself, but I’ll have to get to that later.

A few weeks back Last Week Tonight did a piece about the state of Journalism, specifically the Newspaper industry in the United States and the sentiment expressed by John Oliver mirrored Gerald Ford’s now classic statement during his first State of the Union Address.  The State of Newspapers in the United States is “not good.”  That’s a simple way of saying print news in America is either dying or plagued by bias.  The complex way is saying that newspapers in America are on the decline due to the rise of digital news, low sales of printed newspapers, lack of trust by the readers, and the general apathy of readers due to the fact that most people get their “news” via Facebook or Google.  There isn’t much, if any money, going into newspapers and this a conflict because a free media is responsible for monitoring for corruption and ensuring that the public of a democracy are informed to what is actually going on in their government.

I recognize immediately that my position can immediately become one of obnoxious preaching or else a nauseating mourning of an industry that possesses an “inherent nobility” and so I’m going to try and maintain a professional distance from emotion.  My point in bringing this topic up is not to wail and bemoan the tragedies that are taking place in the journalism industry, but instead to allow these tragedies to illuminate the importance of the media and two articles which shed an revealing light on this subject.

In September of this year, The Atlantic put out an article by Derek Thompson titled Why Do Americans Distrust the Media, and while it’s a short essay it manages to point out several of the reasons why Journalism in general is becoming so suspect to citizens of the United States.  Early on in the essay Thompson explains what is happening to that trust:

With these enormous caveats out of the way, the fact remains that Americans’ “trust” in “the media” is falling steadily, according to Gallup. Even if the precise definitions of these terms is debatable, the overall decline is clear and noteworthy.

This collapse in trust is not evenly spread across all demographics. The drop has been most dramatic among young and middle-aged respondents and, most recently, within the GOP. Together, it seems reasonable to conclude that the recent decline in media trust has been concentrated among middle-aged Republicans, a key part of the Trump constituency.

It should be made clear that the article is not Anti-Trump, it simply relies regularly on Trump and Trump supporters denying the legitimacy of newspapers when scandals appear which tends to happen a lot.  Still the facts remain that more and more citizens are beginning to recognize or perceive flaws in reporting, and when you take into account that perception tends to create reality far more often than facts it begins to become clearer why so many Americans distrust news.  Thompson’s article goes on to list out five reasons why this distrust exists, and the fourth reason, that it’s easier to find news that confirms bias rather than challenging it, he manages to make an important point about how this distrust forms:

Today’s journalists are more comfortable taking strong positions on partisan issues than they used to be. This is often a good thing. But the increased partisanship of large news outlets might feed a public perception that neutral objectivity doesn’t exist, and therefore, people are entitled to scream “partisanship!” about any viewpoint that they disagree with. The Pittsburgh-Tribune Review recently asked Donald Trump Jr., how he felt that the Pulitzer Prize-winning team at PolitiFact found that 70 percent of his father’s claims were false, more than twice the ratio of Hillary Clinton. Trump’s response: “I would argue that PolitiFact is a very liberal organization.” The shocking thing about this claim is that it’s not shocking, at all. It has become acceptably normal for a politician to call a Pulitzer-Prize winning organization “very biased” if it disagrees with him. There is also no risk in saying so.

Several weeks back I wrote about the speech Walter Cronkite gave on CBS news entitled We Are Mired in Stalemate.  Part of the ongoing appeal and interest of this speech is that it was one of the first times a newsman like Cronkite allowed his personal opinions or assessments to come through in his reporting.  This is not so uncommon today, in fact it’s so common it borders on obnoxious.  Watching programs like Hannity, The O’Reily Factor, Legal View with B & B, or even anything involving Keith Olberman that isn’t about sports, one becomes buried beneath the weight of personal opinions of newscasters that it becomes so nauseating one has to change the channel or turn off the T.V. and meditate to Stomp to reclaim one’s sense of composure.  Watching these shows in bulk is about the equivalent of a years’ worth of self-inflicted papercuts to the webs between the fingers, yet despite this I still find myself watching the news and reading the newspaper.

At the core of this is always my romantic patriotism.

I worry sometimes that I wrap myself up in the American flag, and that despite my supposed dedication to pure, unfettered reason I am actually an emotional gerrymanderer.  In my own defense I tend to read a lot of Walt Whitman a man who also had a rather large hard-on for liberty and the inherent nobility of the American populace, identity, and territory.  But if I can strip everything down though, and find the purest kernel of honesty to explain the reason why I believe so much in the importance and dedication to a free press is because I really do believe democracy is the best we, as a human species, have got philosophically.

The ages of man have been a constant effort and experiment to co-exist as peacefully as humanly possible and in our time we have constructed governmental-philosophies which have ranged in form from totalitarianism to a level of republic bordering on hippie communes.  At the end of this democracy is the one system that, while it doesn’t make everyone happy, leaves at least a modicum of equilibrium.  Before I start to sound like fucking NPR, which I appreciate as a news media source, my point is that by studying history it becomes clear that if human beings want a society in which people are equally protected by the law and from the government which is supposed to execute the law, the republic and democracy have been the most successful in accommodating that environment.

But in order for that to exists there has to be a system which monitors government because, to use an old platitude, power corrupts absolutely, or to put it another way, politicians are butt-fucking cowards and thieves and they need to be monitored and transparent because corruption is easily acquired and can quickly become a comfortable vice.

While I was considering this idea, and watching the Journalism episode of Last Week Tonight, I remembered a consistent impression, one moment in the video which kept gnawing at me because it seemed as best as I could describe as “right.”  In the video John Oliver introduces a clip from CSPAN which appeared to be some panel or news coverage over the state and future of newspapers and in the clip a man by the name of David Simon explained that the next decade will be a “Halcyon Error” for local and state political corruption due to the pronounced lack of journalism covering simple governmental activities likes zoning board meetings.  It wasn’t the diction that sold me on Simon as an important figure in this particular argument however, it was his level of confidence.  Interested in the man I did a little digging, starting on Wikipedia.  I know I’m supposed to hate that website because it’s the scourge of academic integrity but in reality it has helped me discover sources I never would have.  Including the article David Simon wrote for The Washington Post entitled Does the News Matter to Anyone Anymore?

I read the article in one sitting, it’s not that difficult to finish in one session due largely to the fact that Simon is a fantastic writer for his ability to weave gorgeous prose without going up his own ass.  Simon begins his article with a personal and effective opening:

Is there a separate elegy to be written for that generation of newspapermen and women who came of age after Vietnam, after the Pentagon Papers and Watergate? For us starry-eyed acolytes of a glorious new church, all of us secular and cynical and dedicated to the notion that though we would still be stained with ink, we were no longer quite wretches? Where is our special requiem?

Bright and shiny we were in the late 1970s, packed into our bursting journalism schools, dog-eared paperback copies of “All the President’s Men” and “The Powers That Be” atop our Associated Press stylebooks. No business school called to us, no engineering lab, no information-age computer degree — we had seen a future of substance in bylines and column inches. Immortality lay in a five-part series with sidebars in the Tribune, the Sun, the Register, the Post, the Express.

What the hell happened?

It’s an honest question and after reading Thompson’s article I’m tempted to answer it quickly.  The simple answer is the American public became disenfranchised with newspapers and news organizations.    While on some level this is largely attributed to people simply believing the news is boring or else just really depressing (for the record I’m almost quoting verbatim a friend of mine here) perhaps the largest reason is because journalism has become subject to the pitfalls of capitalism, or really hyper-capitalism.  John Oliver expresses and analyzes this far better than I ever could, and so I would recommend my reader actually take the time to find the video on YouTube, but the simplest explanation is that because newspapers are looked on more and more as, and Simon even calls them such in his articles, an anachronism people are looking more to digital content for information and that’s a problem because anyone can contribute to digital media.  And I mean Anyone.

I’m an example of this.  The reason I began White Tower Musings was because nobody would publish my creative work and so I began writing “essays,” really a charitable word for my early diatribes about power and freedom and Orwell, and publishing them here on WordPress for free.  I pay nothing to host my site apart from internet provider, and my wife pays that bill so in fact I really do pay nothing.  I can write whatever I want, when I want, and publish it, and while I personally try to make sure each article is well thought out and well researched and written to the best of my ability the real unbiased truth is I’m just some jackass with a blog.  And with that knowledge in hand I remember that there are dozens of jackasses with blogs who can write and say whatever they want about current events without having to worry about any kind of oversight or editorial board to make sure their writings are supported by solid sources and facts.

This isn’t meant to be morbid self-loathing, which is my usual same old song and dance, but instead just an honest reflection upon the institution of the news as a force in this country and how a writer like Simon makes it seem not just important but necessary even as it’s dying.  Simon offers a glimpse at the contemporary position:

In Baltimore, the newspaper now has 300 newsroom staffers, and it is run by some fellows in Chicago who think that number sufficient to the task. And the locally run company that was once willing to pay for a 500-reporter newsroom, to moderate its own profits in some basic regard and put money back into the product? Turns out it wasn’t willing to do so to build a great newspaper, but merely to clear the field of rivals, to make Baltimore safe for Gremlins and Pacers. And at no point in the transition from one to the other did anyone seriously consider the true cost of building something comprehensive, essential and great.

And now, no profits. No advertising. No new readers. Now, the great gray ladies are reduced to throwing what’s left of their best stuff out there on the Web, unable to charge enough for online advertising, or anything at all for the journalism itself.

Simon wrote Does the News Matter to Anyone Anymore? in 2008, and I can already sense the reader’s objection.  This seems like a moaning diatribe of whining about American Newspapers that doesn’t reflect reality.  Plenty of newspapers are writing material old-school journalists would be proud of.  And this is a fair objection which Simon actually acknowledges in his article before pointing out the flaw:

Is there still high-end journalism? Of course. A lot of fine journalists are still laboring in the vineyard, some of them in Baltimore. But at even the more serious newspapers in most markets, high-end journalism doesn’t take the form of consistent and sophisticated coverage of issues, but of special projects and five-part series on selected topics — a distraction designed not to convince readers that a newspaper aggressively brings the world to them each day, but to convince a prize committee that someone, somewhere, deserves a plaque.

Newspapers are not just about heroism and I recognize how I sound writing that out after preaching about their inherent necessity and nobility.  Newspapers are first and foremost about community.  Simon points out that often newspapers are in the market for young, hungry, and most importantly cheap employees to produce media content and the conflict with this position is the divorce from their reality.  If you don’t have any history with a town, it’s going to be difficult to understand the dynamic and history of the city when you have to report on it.  There is a local paper in my own home city but I never read preferring instead to read articles on NPR or else the Washington Post and this in itself reveals the larger bad habit of certain readers.  I should not say that I represent a microcosm, but I do believe it’s fair to admit that a portion of news readers in this country take a rather abstract view of news because the news that we do receive tends to concern the larger national or international events, and while these most certainly possess real relevance the problem is that the real impact of such occurrences is always felt at the local level and manifests in different ways.

A question emerges and Simon writes it out plainly and perfectly:

What I don’t understand is this:

Isn’t the news itself still valuable to anyone? In any format, through any medium — isn’t an understanding of the events of the day still a salable commodity? Or were we kidding ourselves? Was a newspaper a viable entity only so long as it had classifieds, comics and the latest sports scores?

It’s hard to say that, even harder to think it. By that premise, what all of us pretended to regard as a viable commodity — indeed, as the source of all that was purposeful and heroic — was, in fact, an intellectual vanity.

Newsprint itself is an anachronism. But was there a moment before the deluge of the Internet when news organizations might have better protected themselves and their product? When they might have — as one, industry-wide — declared that their online advertising would be profitable, that their Web sites would, in fact, charge for providing a rare and worthy service?

This final point is reiterated by John Oliver in the Last Week Tonight Special, and echoes in my own summation of the “service” I provide my readers for this site (the difference being that what journalist provide possesses a more immediate utilitarian purpose than my intellectual musings).  Freedom of the press is not just a given by the first amendment because the individuals who provide the information citizens need to be informed do not work for free.  Reporters are working people who need food, living space, and entertainment commodities the same as every and any citizen of the United States and the problem is their line of work is increasingly being dwindled by the hyper-capitalist system in which media too often given away for free.

The reason people enjoy free internet pornography is because people have grown accustomed to having it at their fingertips, but beneath that is a deeper understanding that the media they’re consuming isn’t worth their money.  The conflict with the internet is that too often the content being generated is rarely designed to be a valuable physical commodity from which the consumer can acquire some kind of emotional or personal investment.  It’s something to be consumed and then abandoned.  My reader may argue that newspapers, even when they weren’t purely digital, existed in the same way for after all a newspaper is produced for one day and then would often be thrown away and in fairness that is a fair criticism.

However even before newspapers moved to a digital market, consumers and readers were willing to pay for the paper.  Some of them, and I include myself in this crowd, simply read the paper for the comics or the sports pages, but there are consistent readers who are genuinely concerned and should be genuinely concerned about what is taking place in their local government: whether public money is being used for nefarious purposes, whether or not public projects have actually benefitted their community, and simply to figure out whether their elected officials are crooks.

Simon, Oliver, and Thompson have all offered me a chance to decide whether or not my local newspaper matters or not.  In all honesty my local paper probably doesn’t because anyone willing to actually write anything negative about local politics or history would either be silenced or exiled, but that shouldn’t be the norm.  It may be my clinging to the romanticism of the Watergate-era, but I do believe the news, whether it’s digital or paper-bound, does matter, and should be trusted, and does play a crucial role in our democracy.

I am just some asshole with a blog, but like Simon I know a great newspaper from a good one.  And those few gems are worth reading, and more importantly worth paying for.

 

 

 

 

 

*Writer’s Note*

Below the reader can find links to the sources for this article.  The first is Thompson’s article published in the Atlantic:

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/09/why-do-americans-distrust-the-media/500252/

The second is the Last Week Tonight special over journalism:

And finally here is the article Does the News Matter to Anyone Anymore? Published originally in The Washington Post on January 20, 2008.  I hope you enjoy:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/18/AR2008011802874.html

 

Nigger: A White Tower Review

Tags

Absalom, Absalom, Academic Book, Barack Obama, Book Review, Larry Wilmore, Light in August, Mark Twain, Merrium-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, nigger v. nigga, Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word, Political Discourse, Politics, Public speech, race, Race relations, Randall Kennedy, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Nightly Show, White House Correspondance Dinner, William Faulkner

“Don’t re-nig 2012.”  Imagine reading that.

I’ve written before, on several occasions, about issues of race often using my experience of East Texas as my example.  I feel this is unfortunate for my reader who begins to assume that Texas is a state filled with racist bastards who do nothing but listen to Toby Keith on repeat but only the second half of that sentence is true.  Texas is a state of fine people who, while they may at times seem cartoonish in their eccentricity, are possessed with a quality that evades description.  Texas is a beautiful state and the people are unlike any the reader is likely to meet in their lifetimes, but this essay isn’t about defending my state, because alas while I love it and live it I do have to suffer the presence of a few assholes.

I watched the words through a kind of haze.  The bumper-sticker was on the back window of a White Toyota and was just a white background with Black Impact font.  I was used to the “One-Big-Ass-Mistake-America” stickers as well as the “NO” that used the cloudy “O” from President Obama’s first campaign.  Living in Texas you get used to such rhetoric because Obama is a Democrat and democrats, like communists and liberals, are ghoulish creatures that emerge from the black pit of Washington D.C. to come and devour our children, freedom, health-care, businesses, and, if we’re especially unlucky, our guns too.  I wasn’t bothered by the partisan bullshit because every asshole believes expressing his individuality through a bumper-sticker makes him part of the discourse.

I was outraged by the fact that the driver was white and seemed completely apathetic to the fact that there’s a difference between calling the President an idiot and being a racist.

It wasn’t this bumper-sticker however that lead me to Randall Kennedy’s book Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word.  It was actually William Faulkner.

This semester I received my second chance to read Faulkner in Graduate School, and given the fact the last book was Absalom, Absalom I was nervous as fucking hell.  I only in the last few weeks have completed the exhausted physical and psychological recovery of such a long painful affair that left me stimulated and devastated intellectually.  Light in August however was actually an amazing read, and true to Faulknerian style, the book was ultimately demonstrating the atmosphere of the post-Civil War south as a scene of internal corruption mixed with the complicated nature of race embodied in the character of Joe Christmas.  Faulkner and nigger tend to go hand in hand (he was a white man writing in Mississippi, it was gonna happen) and the first real recognition of the word struck me.  Christmas is an orphan who steals into the orphanage’s dietician’s office to grab some toothpaste when he is interrupted.  The dietician, a 26 year old woman, begins to have sex with a man until she hears Christmas coughing and when she finds him she says:

“’You little rat!’ the thin, furious voice hissed; “you little rat! Spying on me!  You little nigger bastard!” (LIA 122).

It would have been enough to just say the dietician was a white woman from the south therefore she’s racist, but I needed a paper topic, as well as a viable excuse for spending my parent’s money on yet another book.  My father’s keeping a tab.  He denies it but I know he is.  One of my other professor’s had introduced me to the book, and given my background attending a lily-white private Christian school, and then attending a public university where most of the students and faculty are white I was curious about Nigger.

Kennedy is an academic, specifically a law professor at Harvard University, and before the reader believes that that means Kennedy’s book in one of the many dense unreadable texts produced by academics I’m happy to disappoint them.  Nigger is readable and written in a way that anyone with the ability to read can approach the book and come away secure in the knowledge that they have understood the material.  Part of the reason for this is Kennedy’s careful strategy of approaching the word with curiosity along with agenda.  He says in one opening passage:

To be ignorant of its meanings and effects is to make oneself vulnerable to all manner of perils, including the loss of a job, a reputation, a friend, even one’s life.

Let’s turn first to etymology.  Nigger is derived from the latin word for the color black, niger.  According to the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang, it did not originate as a slur but took on a derogatory connotation over time.  Nigger and other words related to it have been spelled in a variety of ways, including niggah, nigguh, niggur, and nigger.  When John Rolfe recorded in his journal the first shipment of Africans to Virginia in 1619, he listed them as “negars.”  A 1689 inventory of an estate in Brooklyn, New York, made mention of an enslaved “niggor” boy.  The seminal lexicographer Noah Webster referred to Negroes as “negars.”  […]  No one knows precisely when or how niger turned derisively into nigger and attained a pejorative meaning.  We do know, however, that by the end of first third of nineteenth century, nigger had already become a familiar and influential insult.  (4)

Kennedy later goes to list how the word Nigger has become a fluid term and an almost unifying form of insult as the Irish are sometimes referred to as the “niggers” of Europe, and arabs, when described casually by bigots, are sometimes referred to as “sand-niggers.”  These are just two of the numerous examples Kennedy provides and that itself is revealing enough about the potency of the word.

Kennedy’s book is vital reading to any and all who are left puzzled to the nature of the word nigger, specifically whether or not they are really allowed to say it.  Before the reader thinks I can answer that question, allow me to clarify: I CAN’T.  I am a white man writing a review of the book and not in fact commenting on the existence of the word or my freedom to use it.  I don’t use it, but that is partly because I’ve read this book, as well as commentary and testimony by numerous African Americans, and realized that it just doesn’t hold any relevance or usefulness in my lexicon.

That, and I try to avoid being a dick to the best of my ability.

I myself recognize this conflict for writing this review is in fact a form of cowardice on my part.  A white man verbally dissecting the complexities inherent to the use of the word nigger is a needfully careful, and let’s be honest, tricky as fucking-fuck dance that leaves many impaled on their own good intentions.  Writing the word however allows some buffering, but even so, my regular use of the word can and should be questioned.  The conflict of being white is a guard against the potency of this word, and growing up surrounded by privileged white rich kids I became painfully aware of this fact.  I would hear the word from time to time, always in purely white environments, and it was clear that as long as black people couldn’t hear nobody would mind, and the larger problem was there wasn’t a word to refer to us that had the same level of bite.  Some would protest pathetically that “honkey” or “cracker” was just as bad as nigger but this fell flat and even the regular abusers of the word would recognize that that shit didn’t fly.

For the record, the only contemporary word on record that can sting a white person is the word “racist.”

Kennedy’s book doesn’t try to account or explain methods to eliminate this conflict, for ultimately the book aims to follow the use of the term in popular, cultural, and historical record.  The book is divided into three sections: the first tries to establish the history of the word, the second section observes how the use of this word has become entangled with legal arguments, and finally the third and final section covers the public fight against the use of the word and the attempted eradication of it.  It is in this third section, aptly titled “Pitfalls in Fighting Nigger: Perils of Deception, Censoriousness and Excessive Anger,” that Kennedy tackles two public instances of the word and the fight around them: the inclusion of the word in the Merrium-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, and the regular arguments surrounding Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn.

In the first case he explains the significance of the inclusion:

Deciding whether to not or how to define a deeply controversial word is an inescapably “political” act, and claims to the contrary are either naïve 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 Merrium-Webster’s critics have condemned the editors’ decision to include any reference at all to nigger.  […]  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 fund linguistic means of expression, even if some avenues are blocked.  There are, after all, numerous ways of insulting people. (108)

Kennedy follows this paragraph with a smaller summation in the last line of the subsequent paragraph:

Nigger should have a place in any serious dictionary.  The word is simply too important to ignore.  (108).

After this Kennedy addresses a conflict that is about at least a century old at this point: the use of the word nigger in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.  There have been entire books written about this subject, and rather than list out every position taken I’d rather just quote Kennedy because he speaks much clearer and with less pathetic attempt at humor.  Addressing the argument that Huckleberry Finn proliferates racism by using the word nigger frequently Kennedy contends that:

That interpretation, however, is ludicrous, a frightening exhibition of how thought becomes stunted in the absence of any sense of irony.  Twain is not willfully buttressing racism here; he is seeking ruthlessly to unveil and ridicule it.  But putting nigger in white character’s mouths, the author is not branding blacks, but rather branding the whites.  (109).

Many authors both black and white have argued this position effectively and the scores of activists that have attempted to censor the novel have often been left revealed as people who don’t get the joke.  Having read and studied Mark Twain in depth, and having read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn this entire argument is hilarious to watch.  Yes white men use the word nigger ad nauseum (fancy-pants way of saying too much) but if you observe many of these white characters they tend to be crooks, thieves, bloodthirsty murderers, idiots, or just genuinely ridiculous fools.  It would be one thing if Twain had his intelligent characters, or morally virtuous characters spouting that word at length, but when the individuals using that word tend to be morons it becomes a dubious proposition to argue that white’s using this word demonstrates Twain trying to argue for genetic or innate superiority of the white race.  Simply put, if a murderer is using the word nigger then it becomes difficult to romanticize that vocabulary choice.

Kennedy concludes this argument later when he notes:

It is undoubtedly true, moreover, that regardless of Twain’s intentions, Huckleberry Finn (like any work of art) can be handled in a way that is not only stupid but downright destructive of the educational and emotional well-being of students.  (111).

Having taught myself I understand this position because the classroom is a fragile space.  The possibility to lose students to emotion or ego is a careful balance and when teachers sacrifice the opportunity to foster real growth by relenting to the idea that something is difficult therefore not worth my, or the student’s, time then a great tragedy has ensued.

It’s at this point though that the reader may be wondering what relevance any of this has to their life.  Nigger is just a bad word and so we shouldn’t talk or write about it because it will either just make people angry or else jeopardize people’s careers.  What good does it do talking about it?

The conflict with this position is that it is defeatist, but more importantly it’s just not practical given the current political and cultural climate.  It’s been barely two years since Michael Brown was shot, and in that space of time the United States has suffered more and more tragedy and the conversation about black/white relations in America has become a more pressing subject.  In our current atmosphere where conservatives are telling jokes about Black Lives Matter groups, and self-hating-self-aggrandizing liberals are bashing cops on twitter hoping they can be “cool” it’s easy to lose track of what the real problem is, and a perfect microcosm of this is Larry Wilmore’s half hour appearance at the White House Correspondent’s dinner.

Willmore is the host of the program The Nightly Show, the half hour political comedy program that takes place after The Daily Show, and since he took over Stephen Colbert’s spot Wilmore’s humor has tended to focus more and more on the political atmosphere for African Americans and perceptions of race in media at large.  At the White House Correspondence dinner he was introduced by the President and made a few jokes, some funny, some not so funny, but it was the last line of the evening that broke the media because before he left the stage he placed his fist to his heart and called President Obama “My nigga.”  There was laughter, some horror, but then also the President doing the same and embracing Wilmore before the man left.  NPR did a small article covering the affair and in it Wilmore laid out his artistic choice for using the word:

I’ve been called that word in my lifetime — the “-er” version — and I made a distinction between the use of “nigger” against us and the use of “nigga” that we’ve used with each other. On [The Nightly Show Monday] night, I said we conjugate the slur. …

The one in “-er” is unmistakable — it’s an attempt by white people to dehumanize and denigrate and demean black people, to make them less than human.

When we turned it around, it was our way of having camaraderie with each other, of taking the power out of that word, stamping [out its] ability to dehumanize. It isn’t always the easiest thing to translate to people who aren’t in that experience. … And not all blacks agree with that, and I acknowledge that. … I understand why people would be upset about it. I have no quarrel or criticism of that. … But part of it is a generational thing, and it is possibly a different way of just viewing who has the power to say what. Who has the right to be in charge of the narrative? Who gets to control what’s being said about us or how we get to say it?*

While I initially focused on the difference between nigger and nigga, rereading this article I focused more attention upon the last paragraph.  The ultimate problem with nigger is not just that white people use it, for I like some people have been in situations in which a white person may have said the word in the presence of a black person and there wasn’t a conflict, and likewise there have been moments where you could slice the tension with a knife.  It’s not just that white people use the word, it’s the way white people have used the word often to craft a rhetoric in which they are in a position of power.  This manifested in the past as whites, whether they were rich or poor, using nigger to remind black people that they were socially inferior.  In the environment of Post 1960s Civil-Rights the method of whites exerting power of their race over blacks has now morphed and often the idea of “reverse racism” has been employed to treat whites as “victims” of the real racism and that using that word really isn’t that bad.  Wilmore received criticism from both black and white commentators for a score of reasons, but like many scrambling to alight Twain’s Huckleberry Finn on fire, most of these critics were people who just didn’t get the joke.

Kennedy’s book is an important read, and while at times his style is a bit tedious and he spends lengthy passages listing off offenses rather than digging into an analysis of them, it is still a vital read to any and all people approaching the complicated nature of race, particularly how rhetoric of said races are constructed using language.

I understand that many are bothered by the word, and many will be left more confused about the nature of the word, but the sanest way of understanding this conflict is not by refusing talking about it, or being self-righteous about it.  The best means of beginning to understand and empathize people’s emotions is by talking it out and really listening to each other.

Kennedy’s book is a must-read and he concludes it by saying:

For bad and for good, nigger is thus destined to remain with us for many years to come—a reminder of the ironies and dilemmas, the tragedies and glories, of the American experience.  (139).

Nigger isn’t going anywhere, nor are stupid, racist bumper stickers. 

If people give up talking and really listening however then the issue will continue to inspire bad memes, shit emails your uncle sends you, and more unnecessary violence.  Kennedy’s book goes the long way of just starting the conversation, and books like that are worth people’s time because often the fear of asking questions leads to only further ignorance.  Nigger will remain on my bookshelf because as a white man I cannot possibly comprehend the emotion that word inspires, and so rather than trying to ignore the problem, or protest that one doesn’t exist, I can do only what I have always done: read the book, and try to consider another’s perspective.

I’m a white man, as such my job isn’t to tell anybody what to feel or what to think about this word.  My reality is to listen and try to understand so that when other people express confusion or anger I can try and communicate what I’ve read and heard.  Kennedy’s book goes a long way then to getting the conversation started.

 

 

 

*Writer’s Note*

Below is a link to the NPR article concerning Larry Wilmore’s use of the word nigga at the White house Correspondent’s dinner in case you would like to read the whole thing:

http://www.npr.org/2016/05/03/476598311/larry-wilmore-on-breaking-taboos-at-the-white-house-correspondents-dinner

 

**Writer’s Second Note**

If you’re still wondering if you’re allowed to use the word nigger in conversation or in public if you’re white the best answer I have is…No.

Just don’t use it.

If you believe that isn’t fair remember that it wasn’t fair that your older brother got a car for his birthday and you got a computer, and I know that isn’t a great metaphor but it’s simpler than the argument that because you’re white it will be seen that your character is immediately suspect in which case as a potential employee, friend, employer, etc you pose a risk because you’re using language that racists tend to use and nobody wants to work or be around racists except other racists and so job opportunities go out the window because you’re seen as unprofessional, your wife leaves you, and your kids think you’re a racist prick, but really the only reason you should need is that for the most part because everyone in the world doesn’t know who you are you’re just some random white guy saying the word nigger, so the nuance that might be able to help you will be ignored and you’ll be left looking like a gigantic douche.

If you’re still bitching about the fact that that isn’t fair remember the Grandfather in The Princess Bride who played Colombo for years: “Well who said life is fair?  Where is that written?”

Before you use the word ask yourself an important question: Do you really need to use the word?  If so why, and is that a legitimate reason to use it?