National Post (National Edition)
The `go-to-grenade'
IT IS NEVER OK FOR SOMEONE WHO IS NOT BLACK TO SAY THE N-WORD
AN AWFUL BASTARD OF A WORD THAT IS VACANT, HATEFUL AND TORTIOUS. — LLOYD WILKS
Words and actions matter. They teach, educate and shape minds; they are the ingredients of the future. St. Michael School educates children from Kindergarten to Grade 9 as part of the Calgary Catholic School District. Lianne Anderson, the school's principal, was recorded by students asking a group of Black students why it was OK for them to use the N-word — except she didn't abbreviate.
It was no different when one of the CBC's most respected journalists, Wendy Mesley, said the N-word during a story meeting. Now, we have Verushka Lieutenant-Duval, a part-time professor in the faculty of arts at the University of Ottawa, doing the same.
All three of these individuals apologized. But using the word, whatever your pursuit, embodies pure ignorance on all levels. I am surprised by the level of support each of them received, and disappointed, but not surprised, by the lack of solidarity that the Black community has received.
The N-word is the go-to-grenade that is synonymous with repulsive and hateful attributes — and Black people.
The only equality in the N-word is that it applies to all Black people — male, female, young, old, infirm, intellectually deficient, smart, handsome, big nosed, nappy haired, stud or weakling. It applies to all Black people equally, without discrimination or appreciation.
The use of the N-word, under any circumstances, by people who are not Black is contemptuous and out of step with the progress being made in rooting out systemic racism.
If you have no visceral response to the word, you can't know, don't know and won't ever know how the word makes a Black person feel.
No matter how great, how accomplished, how polite or wonderful a Black person can be, to some, we are and will always be just the N-word. The slur is used to replicate a relationship of dominance, a reminder to surrender.
As much as Black musicians try to make it cool, and teens sing-along to its troubling rhythms, the N-word is never OK.
Songs of emancipation detailing the struggles of Black people may bring new accolades of pride in using the N-word but that's a conversation reserved for Black people only — let's call it an unwritten convention (similar to the royal prerogative, another unwritten code we respect and follow) and move on.
I have never encountered another slur anywhere in the English language so pervasively dehumanizing. A reminder of servitude, and ownership of one human of another. Hearing the N-word is like being served a spoonful of shattered glass, it hurts all the way down, grinding and cutting along the way, a reminder of how others see and value Black people.
I've heard it used so many times, popular enough and accepted by some to vandalize the earliest schoolyard rhymes like “eney, meeny, miny, moe, catch the N-word by the toe.” Hearing it can dull the most enlightened and defeat the most celebrated. It has no remedial value, an awful bastard of a word that is vacant, hateful and tortious, a dedicated disparaging homage to Black people in their worst moments of difficulty. People need to know that if they use the N-word in any context, including socially, musically or even while abstractly discussing its use as a slur, it is not OK. Using it professionally should be as career limiting as it gets. Using it socially should be an opportunity for correction and repudiation. There should be no confusion and I expect better from those who defend it.
Quebec Premier François Legault believes that the use of the N-word is acceptable under the guise of academic freedom. By Legault's own public admission, he also doesn't believe systemic racism exists in Quebec. Wrong on both counts.
This is not a free-speech debate. It's not about academic freedom either, because you can neither castrate nor neuter its meaning, intention and impact in any setting. It is not like putting a virus in a lab for the benefit of humanity to be studied, locked away on a university campus or classroom for experiment.
Where is the movement to defend the Albertan Black children who were suspended from St. Michael School for breaking the code of conduct by recording their principal's racist and inappropriate reference to the N-word? Why haven't they received a formal apology and their academic records expunged of the suspension — removing any association with delinquency?
Perhaps others will see the hypocrisy in policing children standing up for themselves and reporting to the world that a school principal, an executive authority, feels comfortable to psychologically target, damage and traumatize Black children by using the N-word.
The administrators of the school have admitted that, upon reflection, they would have handled things differently, and that both the children and Anderson (I am told) have apologized to each other.
I am surprised Anderson is still responsible for these children.
At least in the case of Verushka Lieutenant-Duval's students, they have the option to withdraw from her university class; unfortunately these minors cannot.
The use of the N-word is the modern-day resurrection of oppression.
End instruments of enslavement and stop their use.
National Post
Lloyd Wilks is chief executive officer of CounselQuest Inc., a leader in litigation support and corporate investigations,
an active member of the Canadian Association of Black Lawyers and co-founder of Malachy's Soiree, an annual fundraiser dedicated to transforming the neonatal intensive care unit at St. Michael's
Hospital in Toronto.