How Netflix F-d Up the N-word

If you believe the headlines, and I will share just a few random selections, you too would probably conclude that (now former) Netflix PR executive Jonathan Friedland is an unrepentant racist.

“Netflix executive fired over repeated use of racial slur in front of colleagues” (USA Today)

“Netflix communications chief fired for repeated use of N-word” (NY Daily News)

“Netflix PR chief fired for repeatedly using the n-word” (The Verge)

I do not know Mr. Friedland. It is possible a white robe and hood lie somewhere in his closet, but I strongly suspect not.

Of all the news stories that followed his termination after seven years of employment at Netflix, previous executive-level experience at The Walt Disney Co. and time as an editor and foreign correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, there was not a single instance cited or suggested by any current or former employee that Friedland ever acted with prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism toward anyone of any race. Not one.

So if Friedland is not a racist, and even in 2018, I think we still give people the benefit of the doubt on this, was his use of the n-word racist?

According to media reports, Friedland used the n-word on two occasions. The first was during an internal PR discussion about the use of “sensitive words”. Friedland did not use the phrase as a hateful epithet. The word was not directed at either a specific individual or a group of individuals.

I think most everyone would agree that the n-word, absent the hyphen, is a “sensitive word”. Given the context of using the specific word during a meeting precisely about sensitive words, and (ostensibly) the harm they may cause others, using the n-word in its complete form does not seem either out of place or inappropriate.

In fact, it would seem that the use of the n-word in a descriptive manner in a meeting about the use of sensitive words is exactly, and perhaps one of the very few places on earth, where the word is appropriate. At least as appropriate as the gratuitous use of the n-word in a Netflix comedy special or any Tarantino movie (also streaming on Netflix) — not that I am suggesting censoring either.

The second time Friedland used the n-word was during an HR meeting held several days after the first use of the n-word, when two black employees in Netflix’s HR department met with Friedland “trying to help him deal with the original offense,” according to CEO Reed Hastings’s explanation.

If you believe the first use of the word was acceptable, even though it might have offended certain people present, there was no need to patronizingly help him “deal with the original offense” since using the word in the appropriate context was not an offense to begin with and Friedland actually apologized to those he may have offended. But some people are more sensitive than others and a little extra sensitivity training never hurt anyone, right?

So let’s try and better understand this second use of the word, for which he was fired and publicly excoriated. In explaining his first use of the word, in a meeting about the use of “sensitive words” Friedland used the word a second time. This second use, considering the context, was much like the first use, entirely acceptable, but in the cursory judgment of some at Netflix, lacking sensitivity.

As with the first use of the word, Friedland did not use the word this second time with hate or malice, did not direct the potentially offensive thrust of the word toward any individuals or group. By all accounts, Friedland’s second use was neither dismissive nor derisive of a race of people or the black employees to whom he apologized. However, concerned about PR (but not their PR chief), Netflix concluded that Friedland lacked sufficient contrition. Friedland’s second offense was, at worst, only dismissive and derisive of the suggestion that using the word in the previous context was categorically wrong.

Hastings, in a memo to employees explaining Friedland’s termination said that, in his view, there is “not a way to neutralize the emotion and history behind the word in any context.”

I beg to differ. Context matters. African-Americans have precisely found a way to “neutralize the emotion and history” of the word. By using the n-word in its unhyphenated form they have stripped it of its hateful origins and reappropriated it as a “badge of honor” as Ice Cube described it in a 2004 documentary.

Of course, depending on your viewpoint (and employer), Ice Cube may not be the best spokesperson for transformative speech. As a member of N.W.A, (an abbreviation for Niggaz Wit Attitudes) Ice Cube’s 1988 song “Fuck the Police” glamorized the murder of white Los Angeles police officers as collective punishment for the treatment of black youth, without even a hint of irony.

A song like “Fuck the Police” would almost certainly meet the definition of violent, extremist racism that would get you branded a racist and unceremoniously excommunicated from the entertainment business, right?

Not at Netflix, which picked up Humbug, Ice Cube’s reimagining of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol just a couple of months ago.

I guess “fuck the police” isn’t such a sensitive phrase anymore…

The late George Carlin, one of America’s greatest poet-philosophers, easily saw through the self-righteous hypocrisy behind America’s Puritanical obsession with purging bad words, as if this cleanse might somehow excise our history of intolerance. Not so fast.

“There is absolutely nothing wrong with any of those words in and of themselves. They’re only words, it’s the context that counts. It’s the user, it’s the intention behind the words that makes them good or bad. The words are completely neutral, the words are innocent. I get tired of people talking about bad words and bad language. Bullshit. It’s the context that makes them good or bad. Take the word ‘nigger’. There is absolutely nothing wrong with the word ‘nigger’ in and of itself, it’s the racist asshole who’s using it that you ought to be concerned about.”

As a white man, there are few if any times where using the n-word (with or without a hyphen) might ever be appropriate and I don’t think I am missing much. But I do know that it is only in its raw, visceral, unhyphenated version that it can have or give power.

However, when we focus on the word itself and who “gets” to use it (John Lennon? Bill Maher? Quentin Tarantino? Jonathan Friedland?), rather than its context and how the word is being used, we lose sight of the very problem of racism we want to eliminate. Instead, we further a false divide between white and black and who is “entitled” to use a word that is, for better and worse, an important remembrance of America’s tortured and ugly history on race.

Either as a teaching moment when reading Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, when watching a film about segregation, or in a closed-door meeting about “sensitive words”, the n-word should only be used in the very rarest of circumstances, but we should not sacrifice words on the altar of political correctness out of a fear that it might (or does) offend someone.

Instead, we should consider the purpose and intent behind how words are actually used, before deciding when, how, or if to destroy a man’s career and personal and professional reputation.

It’s not too much to ask of the network that will be bringing us Humbug this Christmas.