The History of the N-word

For the past few months the N-word has crept up in conversations. The controversy over the word that is forbidden to white people, hated by many older black people, and a term of endearment among young black people has grown to monumental proportions.

With congressional hearings over the use of the word, a public outcry to assassinate the word, and a desire to transform the meaning of the word, few have ventured to look into the meaning of the word.

That is until now.

Author Jabari Asim exams the use of the n-word throughout U.S. history in his new book, The N Word: Who Can Say It, Who Shouldn't, and Why.

Asim, a former editor at the Washington Post, was interviewed by the Toronto Star recently. Here's what he had to say:

Q. In July, a month before you started at The Crisis, the NAACP held a mock funeral for the N-word during its annual convention in Detroit. Were you at that?

A. No, I wasn't. It was just a weird coincidence. But I appreciated the symbolic power of the gesture.

Q. It's not dead and buried?

A. No, it was purely symbolic and in some ways cathartic for the people who were involved. We can't realistically expect that that will put the N-word to rest.

Q. Was there a specific motivation for writing this book?

A. It was curiosity more than anything else. It is not a word that I used. I grew up in one of those houses where there was a long list of words that we couldn't say. And that was one of them.

Q. People who haven't read the book might not understand that you're advocating civility rather than censorship.

A. That's exactly it. I'm totally opposed to censorship. I'm not someone who thinks that people should be prosecuted for hate speech and that sort of thing. Free speech is more important and takes precedence, no matter how hateful or painful the word may be. We can't legislate better behaviour, but we can encourage it and exemplify it in our interactions.

Q. The subtitle implies there are people who shouldn't use the word. Who are they, besides almost everyone?

A. You've got it. Almost everyone. The word has no place in casual conversation or what I usually call the public square. There is this defence of the word in the African-American community where people say that it's okay for African-Americans to use the word, whereas it's not okay for whites, Latinos, Asians and others, as if we somehow own this word. I take a very different view. If there's a word in the English language that we want to own, it's not that one.

Q. Who has licence to use it then?

A. There are cases when its use is defensible. And that is generally in art, scholarship, journalism, history and areas like that. It's impossible to tell the complete story in certain contexts without in some way addressing or acknowledging the language that was used.

Asim's book was published earlier this year and has been seen on The Colbert Report and The Late, Late Show with Craig Ferguson. He is also the author of four children's books and has recently taken over as editor-in-chief of The Crisis, a publication of long-standing U.S. lobby group the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).