Debates about whether Whites in academia — professors or students — are entitled to sling and fling the N-word with abandon, be it in a song, a “lesson” or some sort of speculative “thought experiment” (as seems to be the case with the most recent incident) are not a bug, but a feature of a society structured by racial dominance, oppression and exploitation.
Such debates are a function of centuries-old conditioning, reinforcing and upholding — both by legal and cultural decree — the notion that Whites have a right to, quite literally, everything. Internet comment forums on this topic — seemingly dominated by frothing White men — are a reflection of this same toxic belief system.
The concepts of property and ownership in relation to whiteness warrant sustained attention in discussions about these “debates.” For Ta-Nehisi Coates, Whites’ expectations for untethered ownership and access extends to language. As has been illustrated in recent news coverage, this expectation has implications for not only teaching and learning, but inclusion and exclusion.
Prominent civil rights scholar and teacher Cheryl Harris long ago illustrated how the emergence of whiteness as property began as a function of racial domination over Black bodies. Notions of property range from physical (i.e., “tangible”) people, places and things, to intangible (e.g. laws that protected whiteness and White identity and cultural expectations for said protections). Although Harris does not cover language specifically in her discussion of whiteness as property, she does analyze the relationship between property and expectations, and argues that “[i]n a society structured on racial subordination, White privilege became an expectation and…whiteness became the quintessential property for personhood.”
Expectations, in the context of whiteness and White privilege, apply to language use. Whites have come to expect that even casual, well-intended or perhaps “instructive” use of language that was created to enslave, oppress, batter and disenfranchise people of color is their inalienable right. All educators, all students and all institutions of higher education should have a problem with this misguided and dangerous expectation.
“What is worse: A White man punching a Black man or calling him the N-word?”
There is a lot wrong with speculative exercises about racism and oppression. In their most basic form, speculative thought experiments such as these presume that both sides of the “debate” can effectively be argued for or against —that both sides of the argument have equal merit, and that all people at all times can, will and are in a position to engage the “debate” objectively.
