Taru Taylor: Taking the heat out of a spirited debate

Censorship has ruined "Tupac Shakur," a course I am taking at the University of Pennsylvania.

On Tuesday, Feb. 25, Penn professor Michael Eric Dyson facilitated a debate on use of the N-word in class. By Tupac's self-definition, the N-word is the crux of his vocabulary. Indeed, his second album is called "Strictly for My Niggaz."

Because the N-word is so pivotal to Tupac's identity, Dyson should never have opened the debate. If a person can't handle the N-word, he doesn't belong in the class. Just as Tupac's albums warned "Parental Advisory: Explicit Lyrics," Dyson should have warned, "Student Advisory: the N-word."

Alas, the censors won the day. No more N-word. By censoring the N-word, Dyson has negated Tupac's identity. His voice has been silent throughout, for we study none of his rap songs.

I chimed into the debate by describing an English course I once took that studied an August Wilson play set in black Pittsburgh called The Piano Lesson. We read the book and watched the movie. The N-word jumped off every page, but it was not used in the movie. By censoring the N-word, Hallmark, the production company, whitewashed Wilson's voice. Hallmark euphemized his characters and thus anaesthetized his audience.

We read as Wilson's audience. We watched as Hallmark's audience. A "Tupac Shakur" class without the N-word is just like that Hallmark movie: whitewashed. We've been anaesthetized in this class.

During the debate, some got hysterical. Some blacks claimed that the N-word, the most powerful word in the English language, is beyond redemption, laden with too much emotion. That begs the question, why take a class on a man who wrote strictly for his "Niggaz"? Those same blacks hypocritically defend their use of the N-word by saying that it is a term of endearment, and one really hysterical student added that her use of the N-word, like Tupac's, was symptomatic of a black American inferiority complex not yet over slavery. Didn't Tupac use the N-word to get over it?

Anyway, a double standard was set that blacks could use the N-word, but not whites. One white student asked, "If it's okay for blacks to use the N-word all the time and whites to use it none of the time, what about mulattoes? Half the time?" Dyson suggested "nig." Their playful exchange revealed the debate's absurdity.

The N-word is emotional. I challenge blacks to make it volitional. The secret to black power is to thrust the N-word on a trajectory much like Northern whites have thrust the Y-word, much like others have thrust the Q-word. Northern white conquest of "Yankee" and Society of Friends conquest of "Quaker" are both instructive.

"Yankee," according to British officer Thomas Anburey, derives from Cherokee "eankke," meaning "slave or coward." Following the Oct. 17, 1777 British surrender to Continental troops, Anburey wrote, "The soldiers at Boston used [Yankee] as a term of reproach, but after the affair at Bunker's Hill, the Americans gloried in it. Yankee Doodle is now their paean... it was not a little mortifying to hear them play this tune, when their army marched down to our surrender."

"Yankee Doodle" was written by a British army surgeon to ridicule American troops. Yet, when Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown on Oct. 19, 1781, the Americans played "Yankee Doodle." Thus did the Yankees command respect.

"Quaker" was originally an insult alluding to the shaking fits supposedly suffered by Friends moved by the spirit. Swarthmore doesn't demand respect by insisting that people refer to it as a Friends school. Swarthmore commands respect as a Quaker school.

By insisting that non-blacks not use the N-word, blacks have demanded respect. Only by conquering the N-word, by embracing its black as well as its white use, will blacks command respect.

Taru Taylor is a junior at Swarthmore College.

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