Defending n-word opens up old wounds

Howard Manly

Once again, Randall Kennedy struck a nerve.

Last month, the Harvard Law School professor was asked to give expert testimony during the trial of Nicholas Minucci, a man charged with using a baseball bat to beat an African American man in Howard Beach, New York.

During the beating, witnesses heard Minucci use the n-word which elevated the simple assault charges to a hate crime, carrying with it a sentence of up to 25 years.

As the author of “nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word,” Kennedy was there to explain the usage of the word.

“I was being asked a very narrow question,” Kennedy said in an interview. “The question was not part of the facts of the case. The judge and the jury would determine the facts and I had no reason to question the propriety of the court. But the question that I was asked to answer was what can the n-word mean. The question was not what did the n-word mean in this case.”

During his testimony, Kennedy explained that the n-word is complex, has multiple meanings and is not necessarily associated with racism.

Quite naturally, that testimony for the defense in a hate-crime touched off massive heart palpitations throughout the black community. “Negro please,” screamed one headline.

Margeret Kimberly, a senior editor at Black Commentator, went even further.

“Kennedy doesn’t care much about black people and his intentions are the worst,” Kimberly wrote. “He is an opportunistic self-hater with all of the establishment’s top credentials, a very dangerous enemy indeed.”

Kennedy remains unmoved, and while he readily concedes that he was unaware of all of the media attention that his testimony would generate, he says that he would still make the same decision, largely because he wanted to defend the issues raised in his book.

“I do not feel I was championing somebody’s cause,” Kennedy told reporters outside of the courtroom shortly after he testified. “I was asked to speak as an expert witness about a particular issue. Somebody’s liberties are at stake here.”

And that issue was the n-word. “It’s still a troublesome word,” Kennedy said. “Part of it has to do with the relationship between blacks and whites which is still plagued with tension, anxiety, mistrust and hatred.”

Another part of the problem, Kennedy argues, is that while the word remains a terrible insult, it can also be used as a term of endearment. “Now people may be pissed about that or may not like it, but the fact remains,” Kennedy says. “Like it or not, the n-word does have different meanings.”

Kennedy was not the only one to testify on the n-word. Gary Jenkins, a black hip-hop music producer, volunteered his version. Defense attorney Albert Gaudelli asked Jenkins what it means to say, “What up, nigga?”

“That’s a common greeting in hip-hop parlance meaning ‘How are you,’ ‘How goes your day?” Jenkins answered during the trial. “It’s been permutated and morphed by a generation of younger people who moved it around and changed it into a matter of parlance.”

Prosecutor Michelle Goldstein asked if the definition changes if the speaker is swinging a bat.

“I don’t know what happened… did they try and rob him?” Jenkins answered, according to published reports. “I don’t know enough about it.”

Based on the testimony from Kennedy and Jenkins, Gaudelli concluded in his closing argument: “You don’t like that word. I don’t like that word, no one over 30 likes it but it’s a fact that people under 30 use the word differently. Ignore this word, it’s merely another descriptive word.”

The jury could neither ignore the word, nor the beating that Minucci handed out to Glenn Moore on June 29, 2005. By his own account, Moore was no saint: he and two of his friends wanted to steal a car in Howard Beach, a section of New York that was the scene of other racial attacks in the ‘80s. But not even he deserved the brutal attack that witnesses described as sounding like “Barry Bonds hitting a home run.”

Minucci was found guilty of second-degree assault as a hate crime for the baseball bat attack and first- and second-degree robbery as a hate crime for stealing Moore’s sneakers and several other items. His sentencing is scheduled for next week.

Left unclear is whether the n-word testimony affects the judge’s decision on Minucci’s sentencing. What remains clear, however, is that the n-word still divides not only white and black people, but also black and black people.

Many social activists have renewed their calls to abolish the word. But as Kennedy rightly asks, “What exactly does that really mean?

“Does it mean we go back and erase Dr. Martin Luther King’s use of the word in his ‘Letter from a Birmingham Jail?’ What should we do when students leave their classrooms and greet their friends by asking, ‘What up my nigga?’”

Kennedy is no fool. “People ought to remember that the most dangerous people would never use the n-word,” Kennedy said. “Take the authors of the Bell Curve, the book that basically concluded the blacks are intellectually inferior to whites. The authors wouldn’t be caught dead using the n-word, but their ideas were profoundly hurtful, racist and reactionary.”

For Kennedy the bottom line is clear. “People need to hear about all of this and act accordingly,” he said.

Kennedy tells the story of an interview he had several years ago on BBC. Also interviewed was an African who called himself MC Nigger. The rapper explained during the interview that it wasn’t until he came to America in search of a record deal that he learned that the word could be used as an insult and has an awful, hurtful history. In fact, the rapper explained, several record producers told him to change his name.

“Part of the reason ‘nigger’ has survived is because we, as a people, have refused to kill it,” writes columnist Anthony Asadullah Samad. “Black people can find a reason ‘to do’ or ‘not to do’ anything. From not spending time with each other, to not voting, to not taking care of ourselves (and our health), to not pulling our children out of failing schools, to not chasing drugs and gangs out of our communities, to reasons for using the word nigger — if there’s an excuse, some people will find it. Black America, in the collective, find reasons not to succeed.”

And demean each other. That point was underscored in a recent Washington Post story. In a case of mistaken identity, Elias Fishburne was arrested and taken from Prince George’s County, Maryland to an Atlanta jail. His month-long protest fell on deaf ears and the Post described the final humiliation:

“It was in Atlanta, where he remembers how a black female guard stood outside the cell at meal time and called inmates filthy names, Tamara Jones wrote. “When Fishburne didn’t respond, she zeroed in. ‘You going to eat or what, nigger?’ she demanded. The racial slur was the most common form of address, Fishburne said; that black guards were using it to address black inmates only made the humiliation worse.

“The transformation was complete,” Jones went on. “He was not Elias Fishburne, not Jarvis Tucker, the fugitive they thought he was, not even a case number. Not a homeowner, not a hairdresser, not a good citizen living a worthy life. Nigger. That’s who he was now.”

“So stripped was his identity, so thorough the loss of self, that he didn’t even recognize his own name — his real name — when a guard shouted it out.”