Nigger

“…where we think that information produces meaning, the opposite occurs.” — Jean Baudrillard

In 2008, Nas tried to title his album “Nigger.” After a lot of pushback from the record label and retailers, and some outcry from the public, he launched the album without a title. In 2016, Trump called Hillary Clinton a “nasty woman.” One day later, a graphic designer sold nearly ten thousand shirts with the words “Nasty Woman” printed over a heart.

Words are like knives. If you only use them for the specific purpose they were made for, if you use them only when necessary, they remain sharp and piercing. Use them too often, for different purposes, and you make them dull. You exhaust their meaning. If you want to preserve a word, such as love, cherish, adore, in order to best convey its intended meaning, if you want to keep a word’s strength and its effect on others, you use it sparsely and purposefully.

So how do we kill a word? Can words die? — Yes, they can. Once a word falls into obscurity and disuse, once it is forgotten, it dies. Yet, for that to happen, the word must fail to fulfill a purpose. While a word has a purpose, while a word can be weaponized, while it can evoke a meaning so nefarious, capable of causing emotional wounds, such a word will not only survive, but thrive.

Banning words has rarely, if ever, made words disappear. The curse words censored by one generation tend to gain strength in the next. As they become widely used, as people start to stretch and twist their meanings, giving them new ones, they lose the power they once had to disturb and dazzle. They lose their cutting edge. Once they become ordinary, less relevant, they lose traction, wane, dwindle, until their meanings change or until they become forgotten.

In any way, shape or form, we encourage the use of the word “nigger” to offend or hurt others. Yet, we believe it’s time we ask ourselves who we are protecting when we ban the use of this word from the media, or when we censor any thoughtful well-intended use of it. Who are retailers protecting, when they refuse to sell an album titled “Nigger”? Who are we protecting when we attempt to stop one of the most prolific African-American rappers of our time from owning such a word and giving a whole new meaning to it? Are we protecting people of color, or are we protecting the word itself and its current heinous meaning?