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Become a member and go ad-free! Support Our Journalism. Privacy Policy. This Week's Issue. Marketing Coupons Promotions Newsletter Flipbooks. Do Not Sell My Info. According to one of the prosecutors in the OJ Simpson trial , there was no question. It's what many still dare refer to only as "the n-word". Deputy district attorney Christopher Darden submitted that learning that a detective had uttered this six-letter abomination would strip the jury of their judicial faculties.
Elsewhere, courts have ruled that letting slip this word is as understandable a provocation to violence as dealing a physical blow. Libraries and bookshops have purged their shelves of volumes such as Joseph Conrad's The Nigger of the Narcissus. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, in which the word appears times, has been banned from many schools; to overcome this problem, a new edition was published last year with the offending word changed to "slave" throughout.
In , New York's city council unanimously passed a resolution banning the use of the word "nigger" within the five boroughs theoretically, at least. That same year, giving voice to the lexeme was enough to get year-old Emily Parr thrown out of the Big Brother house. Against this background, the appearance of a major film in which it is to be heard more than times was bound to provoke comment.
Quentin Tarantino, the director of Django Unchained, maintains that the word has to be "part and parcel" of a truthful representation of life in the antebellum south. Still, he managed to intrude it 38 times even into Jackie Brown. Spike Lee thinks he's "infatuated" with it. Be that as it may, Tarantino's latest film invites a reappraisal of this oath's standing.
In Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word, Harvard professor Randall Kennedy sees his subject as "the nuclear bomb of racial epithets", a weapon that's been used to wound and degrade black people for three centuries. Some of those who still view it that way continue to want it banned completely from both public and private discourse. Yet the response to Django Unchained has been surprisingly mild. Some people suggest that the film's forthright vocabulary may even serve to enhance race relations.
The comedian Lenny Bruce shared Tarantino's infatuation. Julian Barry's Oscar-nominated screenplay for his biographical film, Lenny, has him justifying it thus: "It's the suppression of the word that gives it the power, the violence, the viciousness.
If President Kennedy would just go on television and say … 'Nigger, nigger, nigger, nigger, nigger' to every nigger he saw … till nigger didn't mean anything any more, then you could never make some six-year-old black kid cry because somebody called him a nigger at school. Others have argued that sheer repetition is the way to defang the word. Not everyone accepts that over-exposure is sufficient to destroy evil: some argue that "nigger" is too robust to be so easily disposed of.
Rapper Ashley Walters renounced his own infatuation with the word after hearing from a child victim of playground bullies. There are also those who believe the the removal of the taboo would trivialise the legacy of racial oppression. Other hate-labels have been eliminated successfully through a recognisable cycle of decontamination.
First, the target-group reclaims the insult and starts flaunting it as a badge of collective pride.
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