The N-word is like no other in the English language.

Hateful, toxic, dehumanizing — and enduring.

And in recent weeks, its use has sparked controversy in Indiana, costing well-known people like Indianapolis Colts announcer Bob Lamey, Papa John’s founder John Schnatter and others their jobs and prestige even as it inflamed an already heated debate over whether such actions reflect justice or politically correct overreach.

“There’s no word that’s comparable,” said Neal Lester, a professor of English at Arizona State University who created a course called “The N-word: An Anatomy Lesson.”

Hackney: Dear white people, stop using the N-word

Corporate backlash: Conor Daly's Lilly sponsorship decals removed because of father's use of racial slur in 1980s

Whether it’s in a hip-hop song, repeated in a joke, used as a term of endearment or whispered in a corporate boardroom, the word has an ugly past and a divisive present, say those who study history, workplace behavior, and language.

Fifty years after the civil rights movement, the word still finds its way into conversation — publicly and privately — among blacks and whites in the 21st century.

And when the word — which isn't spelled out on purpose in this article — comes out of the mouth of a white person, it offends like no other word.

Yet, at a time when the consequences for using the word and its variations have never been more severe for some, its use among some African Americans continues.

'I don't want to be afraid to use it'

Ezekiel Walker, 33, a black author and a care coordinator for a social services agency in Indianapolis, uses the word a handful of times in his most recent book, "Seventy Moons,” which follows his journey from homelessness to independence.

In one reference with the word fully spelled out, he speculates that people around him could smell the desperation he felt when he was homeless: "... like I was a rabid animal, like I was nothing more than just another n-----."

In another, he writes about how a friend encouraged him during a phone call when he was depressed: "After that conversation, I felt so much lighter and capable of anything I put my mind to," he wrote. "A true friend. My n----." Here, he uses a shortened form of the word ending in an "a."

It's part of his vocabulary, and he makes no apologies for it.

"It's the most powerful word in our dialect, and I don't want to be afraid to use it," he told IndyStar. At the same time, he said, you can't use it without knowing its history. 

As far back as he can remember, the word has been in a regular rotation among himself, his peers, even older adults, Walker said.

"As a kid, it used to be cool to say it without any context or purpose," he said. "At that time, It was more of a conversation filler word like 'so,' 'yeah,' 'maybe' or 'whatever.' It was just a word leading to a bigger point or idea, and it was also commonly used as a punchline to a joke or in casual conversation."

Word's use among whites has cost jobs, prestige

White people who use the word, however, risk angering blacks and whites.

Lamey resigned after news broke that he had, according to his attorney, used "an inappropriate word" while recounting an episode from the early 1980s in which racing analyst Derek Daly had said the N-word. Daly was subsequently fired from his job at WISH-TV, and the fallout extended to his son, Conor Daly, when Eli Lilly and Co. pulled its sponsorship decal from a race car he was driving.

Ball State University alumnus Schnatter was forced to resign in July as chairman of Papa Johns after he was heard using the word in a phone call. In response, Purdue University and Schnatter's alma mater removed his name from campus buildings. Roncalli High School Principal Chuck Weisenbach spoke the word in front of the student body last month during an assembly while instructing students not to use the word. He apologized and still leads the south-side school. 


Such a broad reaction to theuse of the word, even regarding episodes that occurred decades ago, reflects in part where we are as a society, said Leora Eisenstadt, an assistant professor at Temple University who has written about the potential legal fallout of using the word in the workplace.

The #MeToo movement — which has called out numerous people for sexual harassment, many from decades earlier — has helped shape the way we think about the past, she said.

"This is sort of a moment of reckoning, and people are being held to account for things that they did in the past," said Eisenstadt, who teaches in Temple's Fox School of Business, in its department of legal studies.

Many other words, once widely used, have been discarded, slurs that could be used against groups of people. Some may mock this shift as the political correctness police having a heyday, but that ignores the need for respectful, “people first” language, said Tim Nation, director of the Peace Learning Center in Indianapolis, which offers conflict resolution and implicit bias training for students and adults. 

“It’s not only the N-word but other types of sexist language and homophobic language and stuff targeted toward people of religions outside of Christianity,” he said.

But no word provokes as immediate or as outraged a response as the N-word, perhaps because of its long history as a word meant to sting and debase.

Charlene Fletcher, 37, is an Indiana University Ph.D. student in U.S. history with a focus on the American South in the 19th century. She said variations of the word were commonly used by slave traders in the 17th and 18th centuries as descriptors for captured and enslaved Africans. Its roots lie in the Latin word "niger," for "black."

By the 19th century, the N-word was fully incorporated and widely used in the United States as a derogatory term for African-Americans, Fletcher said. In 1864, it appeared in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary as a synonym for the word "Negro," and the dictionary also noted its derision.

It was only in the 1970s that it became taboo in “polite society,” she said, but it never went away. It found its way into private spaces more so than public, she said, but it still holds the same power. 

While the word may not be used more today, stories of its use as an epithet spread quickly in this day of social media and cellphone videos, Fletcher said. “You’re looking at experiences that people have had for centuries, but now you’re seeing it in real time.”

Word is still 'poison' for many

For Naeemah Jackson, 67, the word is "poison."

She still remembers how, as a young teen walking home from St. Mary’s High School in Downtown Indianapolis, she was shocked when a white man approached her on the street, yelled “you black n- bitch” and spat on her new blue pants, then ran away.

Jackson, who went on to become active in the black power movement and joined the Black Panthers in the late '60s, is also a founding board member of the Peace Learning Center, where today she leads implicit bias workshops.

Young black peopletoday, she said, have tried to reclaim the word, tried to take away its power by using it themselves — almost like a vaccine, but it’s counterproductive, she said.

No matter how it is pronounced, with the hard “r” or a soft “a”, no matter who says it or sings it, the N-word is a slave word that symbolizes oppression, she said.

“There is no way to make that word right,” said Jackson, a mother, grandmother and great-grandmother who says she has never allowed it to be used in her home. “For me, it’s a term of derision and dehumanization. I could no more call a black person that name than I would call that name to myself.”

Walker said he recognizes its painful history but likens its more popular use to a cuisine born out of scraps of food given to slaves by their owners.

"It's possibly the last word my ancestors heard before they were lynched,” he said. “But in my opinion, we flipped it the way we did soul food. We made it our own."

'We never buried it'

Other racial slurs have come and gone.  Many if used today would sound decidedly anachronistic.

The N-word, however, has lasted, said Lester, the Arizona State English professor.

“We never buried it, for one thing. That’s what makes it different from other words. It has persisted as racism has persisted,” said Lester. “You can’t bury the word if the attitudes and the meanings of the word still exist in people."

Not that people haven’t tried. In 2007, the NAACP moved to extinguish the pejorative by holding a symbolic public burial during the group's annual convention in Detroit.

Yet, the word lives on, often in the mouths of the people it's used to debase. Critics of the word in any context say people who think they can dilute its stigma or turn it into a point of empowerment and keep using it are doing a disservice.

Fletcher, who doesn't say it or allow it in her house, said she has challenged black students in the criminal justice class she has taught to think about how it is expressed so freely in the songs they listen to.

"You don't think twice about it until a white person wants to sing the song with you."

That, she said, makes them pause and think. "It's about having the conversation," she said.

While its use might be more common in the black community, Walker said, he knows that white teens say it too, "however, they typically do it in a clandestine way or around other kids who also say the word."

"Even at a young age, he said, "they understand that misusing it or using it around the wrong people, could bring them harm."

White people who opt to use the word in full may argue that they do not espouse racist beliefs so they can use the word without ill intent. Such thinking, however, ignores the inherent unearned privilege that white people enjoy just by dint of the color of their skin, Jackson said.

Legacy of slavery shapes present

The U.S. era of slavery may be more than a century in the past, but its legacystill shapes the different ways white and black experience the idea of equality today.

White people need to realize that even if they were not slave owners, they still enjoy a privilege handed down through the ages that black people do not, Jackson said.

"You didn't have slaves, and I wasn't a slave, but I still deal with the ramifications, and you still deal with the privilege. Just don't use your privilege to oppress somebody else. It's as simple as that."

When it comes to reading historical texts in which the word appears, some have argued that the best approach lies in forgoing those books all together.

Rather than shelving "Huckleberry Finn" and "To Kill a Mockingbird," however, academics like Lester simply refuse to use the word, no matter the situation.

In his classes, Lester won’t repeat it even if he’s recounting something that another person said.

“I don’t want it coming out of my mouth,” he said.

Nation says there is no need to ever use the word in its potentially hurtful entirety, which is part of what makes it so offensive when someone does, even when quoting another person.

“Everybody understands what you mean when you say the N-word," he said. "You don’t need to say the word.”

Why do white people use it?

Some white people who hear black people using the word point to that as justification for their own use.

Polls conducted by YouGov and The Economist as well as Huffpost during the week of Aug. 14-21 and reported by The Washington Post found that just a fraction (18 percent) of Donald Trump voters think that using the N-word makes white people racist. Less than half (42 percent) found the slur offensive.

Within this context, the word remains as powerful as ever, an all too easy way to connote that the speaker basks in the feeling of superiority, some say. No surprise, then, that the word’s resurgence in popularity comes at a period of heightened racial tension, said Tommy J. Curry, a professor of philosophy at Texas A&M University.

"There's a recirculation of white pride. You have ethno-nationalist wings that are fanning the flames of the racism and xenophobia that drive the use of things like the N-word," he said. "You're not just saying it to offend; you're saying it to socialize other Americans to believe, 'Yeah, that's their place.' "

The courts, however, are increasingly less likely to agree. In fact, over the past decade, the courts have become quicker to view the use of the word as a placeholder for discrimination on the part of race, said Eisenstadt, author of “The N-Word at Work: Contextualizing Language in the Workplace,” an article that appeared in 2012 in the Berkeley Journal of Employment and Labor Law.

In the piece, Eisenstadt looked at a number of cases in which courts tackled questions about the use of language. A precedent-setting case, finally settled in 2011, involved the use of the word “boy,” as applied to African-American employees, who did not get promotions that they sought. Eventually a federal appeals court determined the word itself could be a proxy for an overt racial epithet and serve as proof of bias.

Yet, people continue to use the word in the workplace, as recent events have shown. In June, Netflix fired its chief communications officer after he allegedly used the word in meetings with his colleagues.

The one thing that has changed over time, Eisenstadt said, has been employers’ response.

“Individuals are still using the word, but employers realize that’s not acceptable,” she said. “Maybe that is a sign of progress.”

While some may also see the public outrage at the use of the word as another sign of progress, others caution not to view such a response as the end of systemic racism.

Liberals who never use the word may reduce it to bellwether of who is or who is not racist, while failing to see that racism involves far more than language, Curry said. These liberals may be quick to harshly condemn those who use the word but fail to speak out against racial inequalities, such as profiling by law enforcement, stereotypes that portray black men as rapists and abusers or the dehumanization of immigrant populations.

"I think there's a swiftness to rebuke the word because that offends the liberal sensitivities," Curry said. "It's a call-out culture now, but we're not as critical with other things."

Others, however, argue that it’s precisely because those bigger problems still exist that we should not look the other way when the word bubbles up in public discourse.

African-Americans who argue they have repurposed and reclaimed the word inadvertently ignore the history it carries with it, Fletcher said.

"It's still attached to the same bloody history, and when you have this casual usage of it, it doesn't separate the word from its history, it erases that history," she said.

Will it ever die? Fletcher said the word is not going anywhere.

"Not until we as Americans can have true conversations about our racial history will we be able to move forward." 

Call IndyStar reporter Shari Rudavsky at 317-444-6354. Follow her on Twitter: @srudavsky.

Contact IndyStar reporter Maureen Gilmer at 317-444-6879 or Follow her on Twitter: @MaureenCGilmer.





Read or Share this story: