Letting go of words and history
“That’s our word and you can’t have it back,” the actor-rapper Ice Cube told comedian Bill Maher recently on Maher’s HBO show.
Maher apologized again and was scolded by his guests for using the n-word during the previous week’s show, when a Republican senator from Nebraska invited Maher to visit his state.
“We’d love to have you work in the fields with us,” Sen. Ben Sasse said.
Maher’s response was swift.
“Work in the fields?” he asked incredulously. “Senator, I’m a house n---.”
Ice Cube accepted Maher’s explanation that the comedian meant no malice but he wasn’t letting him off the hook, either.
“It’s not cool because when I hear my homie say it, it don’t feel like venom,” Ice Cube said. “When I hear a white person say it, it feel like that knife stabbing you, even if they don’t mean to.”
The n-word has been fully appropriated by the African-American community, where the word is used in-house as the cruelest of putdowns, suggesting someone is enslaved and an embarrassment to other African-Americans. Ice Cube can say it and he can rap it, but it’s off limits to Eminem.
Increasingly, at both the individual and community level, words and history are fair game for this kind of reinterpretation.
Words are flexible but history less so. As a result, more people are digging in their heels in opposition to revised narratives. In New Orleans, some people protested the removal of the statues of four Confederate generals.
In Vancouver last week, controversy erupted after the statue of Sir Matthew Begbie was removed from the lobby of the Law Society of B.C.’s headquarters in Vancouver.
Begbie was the judge who ordered the hanging of six Tsilhqot’in chiefs after 19 colonial settlers were killed in a remote area west of 100 Mile House in 1864. The provincial government has already apologized twice for the incident, most recently by Premier Christy Clark in 2014.
Amateur historians and the Vancouver Sun’s Ian Mulgrew are furious, pointing out that Begbie’s career writings as B.C.’s first chief justice show a man frequently sympathetic to aboriginal causes, especially around land and indigenous women receiving portions of the estate left behind by their white partners.
They also point out to other historical data showing that these chiefs weren’t noble leaders trying to protect their people and their territory, they were murderous thieves.
“Just as we must understand First Nations’ perspectives and their heroes, so they must understand the values and champions of the nation’s Euro-North American founders,” Mulgrew wrote in his column.
Oh, dear. The “values and champions” of white society have been the only history told for so long that any challenging of that history is seen as an imminent threat to civilization.
Apologists like Mulgrew call for equality and a balanced historical perspective under the veil of fairness, refusing to accept that First Nations not only have the right to speak their own language, they get to tell their own history, too.
The Law Society has respectfully acknowledged that history and has removed the Begbie statue.
Somehow, despite all the righteous indignation, white society, history, culture and law remain intact, allowing Maher the privilege to make his offensive comment and Mulgrew the privilege to claim the natives are coming to take history away.