Who Gets To Be Innocent?
On the n-word, and its real, painful impact
On December 26, 2020, The New York Times published “A Racial Slur, a Viral Video, and a Reckoning,” a story about two students in Leesburg, Virginia. In 2016, a 15-year-old white high school student named Mimi recorded a Snapchat video of herself saying “I can drive, n****rs.” The video resurfaced during the 2019–20 school year, and a black schoolmate named Jimmy (now 18) received it. When protests broke out in May after Minneapolis police killed George Floyd, Jimmy posted the video and it went viral. As a result of the controversy, Mimi withdrew her acceptance at the University of Tennessee under pressure from university administrators.
The Times story made waves on Twitter after a viral tweet referred to Jimmy as a “psychopathic teenager” and associated his actions with “tyrannical regimes who have gone after children.” The comments came hard and fast.
In a now-deleted tweet, Blaze TV host Lauren Chen called Jimmy a “cockroach.” Many of the more civil comments argued that Jimmy’s actions were worse than anything Mimi did, and hoped that he learns a lesson, including from the blowback he’s getting in response to the Times article.
One line of argument said Jimmy should have simply found the young lady and engaged her in a polite conversation about the word — and if she wasn’t receptive, then he should drop the matter and be resilient. Another argued that a word can cause offense only if the person chooses to let it bother them, which means the fault for Jimmy feeling bothered by hearing “n****r” lies with Jimmy, not with the white person who said it.
That wrongly understates the damage that saying the n-word — and treating people like an n-word — can do, especially to children.
A Story of Learning and Growth
From my perspective as an advocate of social justice, Mimi comes across well in the Times story, expressing disgust that the words came out of her mouth. Though she says she was young, heard the word frequently, and didn’t understand its severity, she doesn’t claim these as excuses. Mimi apologized to her friends who called her out for using the word, and when she found out that the video was getting attention in 2020, it was while she was calling on her fellow students to support Black Lives Matter.
This is about as good as one can ask of someone who did something hurtful. She apologized, showed regret, and grew. I think she deserves to attend a university, where she can continue that growth as a student.
Others could learn from her example.
Many reactions to the story falsely stated that Mimi was singing along to a song. Some suggested she learned the word from rappers. Others went further, claiming that since black people use the word, no one should be upset when a white person uses it. Some even went as far as to claim it was racist to expect white people not to use a word that’s so popular, or even “cool.”
But in the video, it’s clear she didn’t even use the word you’d typically hear in rap songs: “n***a.” She used a hard “r.” That makes the rush to excuse her actions even less defensible, but if she used the softer “a” ending, that still wouldn’t excuse it.
Other attempts to defend Mimi’s original action argued that she hadn’t used the word with racist intent, and that it wasn’t directed at a specific person. Basically, her word choice was just an indiscretion, it’s clear she didn’t mean anything offensive by it, and black people were wrong to criticize her for saying “n****r” because we made the word cool.
What’s in a Word?
For some people, the n-word is just a word. They don’t understand why some black folks would be okay with other black people using the word, but then bothered when non-black people use it.
That said, even within black communities the n-word is pretty controversial. Some don’t think anyone should use it at all; others think it’s okay in some contexts. According to a 2019 Pew study, 38 percent of African-Americans think it’s never acceptable for a black person to use any variant of the n-word, and 71 percent think it’s never acceptable for a white person to use it.
“N****r” is a word, yes, but it’s more than just a word. Given the long, sordid history and present, it serves as a stand-in for the treatment of black people within racist systems. Black people haven’t just been called an n-word, they’ve been treated as an n-word, a practice which still continues when we “step out of place.” The word is more than simply rhetorical. It’s very much political.
For black people, the n-word can be used to express pain, survival, revolution, anger, fear, and most counterintuitively, joy and family. Black folks’ experience with it is complicated.
The Black Student Experience
James and Mimi’s school is in a town named after an ancestor of Confederate General Robert E. Lee. The town also fought against desegregating schools for more than 10 years after the Supreme Court ruled that they must. And parts of its racist legacy are, unfortunately, still going.
The New York Times story says black students at the school complained about frequently hearing the n-word, both in general and directed at them. A report commissioned by the school district “documented a pattern of school leaders ignoring the widespread use of racial slurs by both students and teachers.” In an elementary school in the district, gym teachers organized an “Underground Railroad” game, where students had to re-enact being run-away slaves. If they made any noise they got “caught” and had to start over. Black students reported being told to “go pick cotton.”
Jimmy says he was mocked with racial slurs and laughed at by a fellow student after an English teacher played an audio recording of the 1902 book Heart of Darkness that contained the n-word. (This was before he saw Mimi’s video). That same student made offensive comments about Muslims on Instagram, and when Jimmy spoke to the principal about it, the principal said the comments were free speech.
He also talked to teachers and administrators multiple times about hearing the n-word at school, and his complaints were consistently dismissed. This made Jimmy say he “just felt so hopeless” about his school environment.
And it wasn’t just him. Another student told the Times she felt uncomfortable being black in that atmosphere. To some students, the biggest surprise of the whole incident was that someone faced consequences for saying “n****r,” because it had long been tolerated at the school.
Who Gets to be Innocent
Though The New York Times story does a good job highlighting the school environment, many who criticized Jimmy ignored his and other black kids’ experiences. They lamented damage to Mimi’s educational opportunities, but didn’t have much to say about the damage to the educational opportunities of the school’s black students. Jimmy is at university now, but he grew up around adults who dismissed racism to the point that he felt the need to take matters into his own hands, and shared the video to, in his words, “teach someone a lesson” about the word’s severity.
Critics of that decision emphasized the years between when Mimi said the n-word and when Jimmy did something about it. They had little to say about the years black students had to hear students and even teachers use that word, including directed at them. Or about how Jimmy and other students brought the problem to administrators’ attention, but the school took no action, not even so much as talking to students and staff about using the word. Black students faced a hostile learning environment for years, with little comment on that from Jimmy’s critics.
Imagine being a black child told by a teacher to re-enact escaping from slavery. Imagine having a teacher play a recording that includes the n-word and then experiencing students treating it as a punchline with you as the butt of the joke, with no support from teachers or administrators. Things like that can have a lasting, negative impact on children.
Keep that in mind before saying it’s not “fair” that white people “can’t” say the n-word when singing along with songs. Or how it’s not “fair” to take issue with a white person using it without first determining that the speaker had “racist intent.” And objecting to rappers saying the n-word — and, remember, at least 38 percent of African-Americans object— is not a prerequisite to objecting when non-black people say it because they think the word is “cool.”
“N****r” is controversial for good reason, even in the reclaimed “n***a” version, because it also communicates treatment. Worse than being called an n-word is being treated like an n-word. Those black students in Virginia went years being called, and treated, like n-words. Jimmy posted Mimi’s video after years of being called and treated like an n-word. I can understand questioning if that was the right decision, but criticizing Jimmy without giving weight to how he and other black students were treated omits something essential. It omits the context in which Jimmy’s actions are rational, even innocent.
Commentators who defended Mimi as innocent and denounced Jimmy with terms like “psychopathic” and “cockroach” without considering the context of his decision show that not only was he treated like an n-word at school, but that he’s treated like an n-word outside school too. To many of Jimmy’s critics, the possibility that he was entitled to youthful innocence, inside school and out, was never factored in.
Being called an n-word and having one’s innocence denied go hand in hand, and that reflects the complex realities the word represents, for Jimmy and many other black students at that school and elsewhere. The ideas, messages, and impact of that word sadly don’t go away as we get older. We still see it play out time after time, from Jimmy’s story to George Floyd’s.
Mansa Keita is a pseudonym. He is a computer scientist working in the corporate world.
