Racial Slur
Now I was eight and very small,
And he was no whit bigger,
And so I smiled, but he poked out
His tongue, and called me, “Nigger.”“Incident,” Countee Cullen
Earlier in the summer of 2017 during the controversy over Bill Maher’s use of a racial slur, I wrote a poem [1] that confronts the slur but also ends with an image that haunts me in the wake of Charlottesville and Barcelona.
The tyranny of the threat of being run over rests now in my bones after having been run over with a group of cyclists just 8 months ago.
But I have no direct personal understanding of what James Baldwin confronts about race in the U.S.: “To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time. ” [2]
Along with the pervasive threat of physical violence and death for any black body even or especially at the hands of the state (the crux of Colin Kaepernick’s protests), there remains the threat of the racial slur.
As Baldwin interrogated:
As witnessed in this video: Watch Out Loud: What Was It Like the 1st Time You Were Called the N-Word?
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My first grandchild is starting 3K in a bit more than a week from now. She is a vibrant and affectionate child who happens to be biracial.
She appears at 3 on a path to mostly pass for white — that itself a horrible thing to still be contemplating or acknowledging in 2017. In the dead of winter, people praise her lovely tan.
And she is attending a school in my hometown where my wife teaches; it is a solidly rural small town in the South that is far more white than when I attended those schools.
And when I look at my dear granddaughter, the engine I hear revving is when she will first encounter that racial slur, directed at her — to be defined — or at her father, a tall black man with dreads who, when then dating my daughter, used to leave our house in a hoodie in the time around Trayvon Martin‘s killing.
There is a powerful thing shared between parenting (and grand-parenting) and teaching — spending our time in the care of children and young people.
Parenting involves watching a baby grow into independence and the inevitability of kinds of loss.
But teaching is an ever-refreshed group of children and young people — a sort of permanent fountain of youth.
In that parenting and teaching, then, is a kind of hope. Intoxicating hope.
However, my dearest granddaughter is walking into the world of Trumplandia, and I am nearly bereft of hope, consumed instead by fear.
I am haunted now by a question: What is the critical mass of good people who will act on that goodness in any organization or society for it to matter?
I am haunted now by a realization: The critical mass of truly awful people needed to matter is incredibly few, often needing only one dominant figure head to render the whole organization or society essentially evil.
I am terrified by my midlife understanding of the term “gunning an engine.”
I cannot hold my granddaughter tight enough, long enough.
But all agon eventually reduces itself to human violence….
But then the world has always made violent use of children.
The Book of Joan, Lidia Yuknavitch
to apologists for Bill Maher
white folk carry “nigger” in their throats
like switchblades secreted in designer boots
there are no excuses for such dormant violences
like white men with slick-backed hair and dark suits
who will slit your throat in a white-hot second
like a volcano spewing lava swallowing barefoot children sleeping
beware these smiling white folk clearing their throats
like an engine cold cranking before plowing over you
[2] “The Negro in American Culture,” Cross Currents, XI (1961), p. 205.
