September
17, 2002 9:00 a.m. Niggling
Doubts
PC
kills words.
he
issue of the word "niggardly" has raised its head once again.
Stephanie Bell, a fourth-grade teacher in Wilmington, North Carolina,
has been reprimanded for using that word in a classroom discussion about
literary characters. A parent, one Akwana Walker, declared herself offended
by the usage. Ms. Bell has been hustled off to "sensitivity training,"
Ms. Walker's daughter has been transferred to another class, and the rest
of us are left pondering what modern civility demands of us in cases like
this.
The beginnings of
this little controversy were, to the best of my knowledge, back in 1995.
In June of that year, The Economist, discussing the impact of computers
on the productivity of office workers, said the following thing: "During
the 1980s, when service industries consumed about 85% of the $1 trillion
invested in I.T. in the United States, productivity growth averaged a
niggardly 0.8% a year." In a subsequent issue, the editors of the
magazine noted with amusement that this harmless statement of an econo-factoid
had drawn a letter of protest from a reader in Boston who thought the
word "niggardly" inappropriate in a respectable publication.
The editors yoked this together with another letter, this one from New
York, which objected to their saying, in a piece about second-generation
Hispanic Americans, that: "spicing their language with a little Spanish
is the easiest way of being cool." Unfortunately the compositorial
software had split the word "spicing" with a hyphen to make
a line break. Sighed The Economist in mock exasperation: "Why
do we get such letters only from America?" (Though widely read here,
The Economist is a British magazine.)
A great deal of political
correctness has flowed under the bridge since 1995, of course. Yesterday's
joke is today's outrage, and probably tomorrow's lawsuit. In 1999 the
mayor of Washington, D.C., fired (but later rehired) an aide who used
"niggardly" in conversation. Shortly afterwards, a student at
the University of Wisconsin called for the banning of the word on campus
after a professor used it in a discussion of Chaucer. ("So parfite
joye may no negarde have." — Troylus and Cryseyde.) There
have probably been some other sightings I don't know about.
On a topic like this,
of course, the sarcasm comes thick and fast. When will the Anti-Defamation
League of B'nai B'rith take on "juice" and "jewelry"?
When will the legions of G.L.A.A.D. assemble to stamp out "query,"
"faggot" (the kind that burns, but not with homoerotic passion),
and "dike" (like the one the little Dutch boy stuck his finger
in)? How do Puerto Ricans feel about it when we say "spick and span"?
Should we still be serving crackers with our cheese? And so on, ad
infinitum. I do think that there is actually a serious issue here,
though — at any rate, there is if you take manners seriously,
as I do, and as I think conservatives, above all people, should.
In the first place,
black people are a special case, and "nigger" is a special word.
I have commented before in this space that there are only two races in
the U.S.A.: blacks, and nonblacks. All attempts to make parallels between
the black experience in America and that of (say) Chinese laborers, or
(say) homosexuals, ring hollow, it seems to me. Whatever worthy things
these latter people have to say, however sound the case they want to make,
their ancestors were not chattel slaves, bought and sold by the boatload
like so much pig iron. I have heard it said that when these other groups
try to draw such parallels, black people get angry. I can certainly understand
that; I think I'd be angry, too. This consideration, supposing I am right,
effectively kills all the jokes about "juice" and "cracker."
Let me say, as a
digression before proceeding further, that I do not cringe at the word
"nigger." I am not in awe of it. I grew up with it, actually.
Not the way low-class white southerners used to grow up with it, as a
term of bitter contempt for people believed to be inferior; nor even as
educated white northerners used to grow up with it, as a signifier of
the supposed stupidity, backwardness, and cruelty of southern whites;
but as an ordinary noun free of any emotional content. As a child, I used
to pick teams for street games by chanting: "Eeeny meeny miny mo,
catch a nigger by his toe." The school uniform for the girls-only
secondary school in my provincial English town came in two prescribed
colors, spelt out in a booklet handed out to parents of new students at
least as late as the early 1960s: "sky blue and nigger brown."
This is just a British-American
difference in sensibility. I believe the word "nigger" was always
considered unpleasant by educated Americans, certainly in the 20th century.
A common fixture on English bookshelves 50 years ago was Agatha Christie's
great 1939 thriller Ten Little Niggers. When an American publisher
brought out the book over here in 1940, though, they changed the title
to And Then There Were None, considering that the original simply
would not do. (They kept the story's locale as "Nigger Island,"
though.) A brisk search of the web shows Christie's masterpiece being
produced in England as a play, with the original title, as
late as 1962. It was only in the mid-1960s, I think, that it began
to dawn on English people that the N-word might give offense, and that
"Nigger" stopped being used routinely — as routinely as
"Prince" or "Fido" — as a name for any dog that
happened to be black. (There is one in the 1954 British movie The Dam
Busters. The last words spoken in that movie are, in fact: "Nigger's
dead.")
Remember These Derb Lines? — Pop Culture Is Filth — Let America's enemies crow today: Tomorrow they will tremble, and weep. — I don't see how you can ever have enough nukes
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he
issue of the word "niggardly" has raised its head once again.
Stephanie Bell, a fourth-grade teacher in Wilmington, North Carolina,
has been reprimanded for using that word in a classroom discussion about
literary characters. A parent, one Akwana Walker, declared herself offended
by the usage. Ms. Bell has been hustled off to "sensitivity training,"
Ms. Walker's daughter has been transferred to another class, and the rest
of us are left pondering what modern civility demands of us in cases like
this.
