From Stephanie Cooperman's, "The Velvet Hammer," Fall '98 From Stephanie Cooperman's, "The Velvet Hammer," Fall '98Stephanie Cooperman says racial slurs must go before racial thoughts can be readicated. From Stephanie Cooperman's, "The Velvet Hammer," Fall '98Stephanie Cooperman says racial slurs must go before racial thoughts can be readicated.It may have been Mark Fuhrman and his defensive testimony. Or perhaps Chris Rock and his loud humor. But from whichever mouth it came, the word "nigger" substituted African-American, black and even Negro. The two syllables that standup comedian Rock confidently ranted in his HBO special, "Bring the Pain," don't mean to offend or berate. Yet they remain the same as those the NAACP and civil rights leaders called for Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary to rephrase or delete in 1997 because its presence gave the word "undeserved legitimacy." The hypocrisy of the usage of a word whose origins lay in racism and hatred relies on the idea that a separation among black people in this country exists: the good versus the bad, the educated versus the illiterate, the hard-working versus the lazy. And Rock is successful in illustrating this division with a smart, rousing style his Def Comedy Jam counterparts cannot grasp. He brings us into the hidden world of American blacks, and we laugh? hesitantly. Such unspoken camaraderie is also present between myself and my black friends. I call them "darkie" and "blackie," while they respond with "whitie" or "little Jew." We laugh, assured of our own friendships and comfortable with our ethnicities. But when one of my black friends asked me recently if I ever thought the word nigger when I became angry with him, it wasn't so funny. In truth, the word nigger has never been part of my vocabulary. Rock and others, however, who choose to use the word as a comedic measure or an insider's description fail to realize its detrimental affects. The slur is brought to our ears and soon to our mouths. Americans must be made to see the word as part of Ku Klux Klan rhetoric, not as a description of a portion of blacks in this country because the defining characteristics of the subgroup are vague if not entirely blurry. On a larger scale, the use of the word nigger may affect the treatment of other groups. A Dictionary of International Slurs published by Sci-Art Publishers in Harvard Square cites 28 other national stocks. Rue the day when "spic," "dago," "kyke" or "dike" are accepted by those they are meant to discriminate against. African-Americans still are not equally represented in the workforce and earn less than white males in the jobs they do have. There has yet to be a black President or even a candidate to compete in anything more than a primary. Minority permanence across the nation's college campuses struggles every year. The civil rights movement that began with Martin Luther King Jr. has not been fully realized, but when he used the now outdated word Negro, no one flinched. It was with the vocabulary of his time that King called upon other African-Americans as "Negros" to end the racial discrimination that divided this country. And it was with the vocabulary of his time that Mark Twain used the word nigger in his classic Huckleberry Finn. But we must look at both these examples as references that were influenced by their individual era in time. When Richard Nixon stood next to Hubert Humphrey in adjacent urinals on the eve of the 1968 Democratic Convention and asked, "Hubert, you guys going to nigger it up in Chicago?" the answer was already clear: a people referred to by a term with racist implications would never have equal standing in the public's eyes. Perhaps, then, people find Chris Rock's "Niggas vs. Black People" bit so funny not because he enlightens them with insider information, but because someone in the audience is already thinking the word nigger. In that case, Rock's intention to have races come together in comedic realization fails miserably. He says for them what is no longer acceptable in our society, not due to politically correct rules but the reality that the words of King and Twain are as penetrating as those of two friends that call each other "blackie" and "little Jew." Such words should not be spoken since those with hate in their hearts will not have the wherewithal to differentiate between the term of camaraderie and the slur spoken by Fuhrman. Only when each American erases the word nigger from his vocabulary can the thoughts behind the racial slur be eliminated. And the word can only disappear if there is a concerted effort by blacks as well as whites to not use the term as one of affection or to distinguish one black from another. It was just three years ago that a black man in San Diego returned a translator from Radio Shack and demanded an apology because it translated the word Negro into nigger. Hopefully in another three years the translator will mark the term obsolete.
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