Val and the Curious Case of the N-Word
It’s one of those moments that you look back on later regretting how it happened. You replay it in your mind on repeat and all the most cringe-worthy parts reenact themselves in slow motion. It was that time Val kept saying the N-word in the fitting room. It started out innocently enough. Prior to Val’s outburst, it was a regular day. I was in the fitting room folding all the clothes that had been tried on by customers at Joe Fresh’s flagship store where I was then employed, on 43rd and 5th Avenue in Manhattan, a now defunct location. Other employees were constantly in and out, running, or gathering the articles of clothing customers had lost interest in otherwise known as “go-backs” in the retail world and taking them out onto the floor to be once again sifted through and perused by our shoppers. This location was a multi-level building and Val had been tasked on this shift with running the first floor go-backs from the second floor fitting room where I was and taking them back downstairs.
We were busy and focused on our individual assignments working both independently and in tandem as the store was soon to close. The last of the customers were filing out. That’s when, without warning, it happened. “What’s good my niggas?!” Val burst into the fitting room with a Cheshire cat smile at once greeting, stunning and disturbing us all. And I was all alone. There were several other employees in the fitting room from different ethnic backgrounds, but I was the only Black woman so, I was alone. On top of being the only person of African descent in the dressing room, I had established myself as the black woman of that location. I proudly don long locs, assert my heritage freely and from daily banter among the staff it was known that I’d majored in Africana Studies in college. If there was anyone in that moment that should have put Val in his place, it was me. Kenny, a Guyanese-Indian, Ruth, an Asian and Jozette, a Dominican from Washington Heights — all looked at me wondering what would happen next.
“What?!” “What’s wrong? What? I can’t say that? Fuck that. I can say what I want. It’s just a word. It’s in all the rap lyrics. It’s a free country…and it’s been 400 years!!” Val kept saying that. He kept shouting 400 years. “Slavery has been over for 400 years!” This arbitrary number is something I’d heard thrown out before. This was 5 years ago. We are actually just coming upon the 400 year anniversary of when the first enslaved African stepped foot onto American land. Perhaps that’s where the confusion lies. Chattel slavery ended in the United States in 1865. That was less than 200 years ago. The Voting Rights Act of 1964 was enacted after decades of lynching, protest and segregation. My grandparents have gut-wrenching tales they could tell of how their humanity was daily challenged and denied. Black Americans are still recovering from slavery. I can spout this bevy of knowledge I have at my disposal now, but in that moment, I felt choked. I was flummoxed by Val’s reckless pronouncement. It was as if Val had a machine gun fully-loaded with every reason white people feel the need to say the N-word and I was being hit with the barrage all at once. It was the first time I’d been in the presence of a white person who so openly used the word without apology or concern for the feelings of the others around him.
The dichotomy of the word is imprecise. It is both a black pronoun and a pejorative term depending on who it is that you are talking to and to what degree. There are many variables to its use. On one hand, the N-word saturates Black rap music, comedy and entertainment. It can serve as both a colloquial greeting and an accusatory epithet. As a part of the Black lexicon, the expletive can start a fight or be a battle cry for freedom. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, or the NAACP, held a symbolic funeral for the word. Oprah Winfrey has been extremely vocal about eliminating it from Black parlance much to the chagrin of it’s proponents found mostly in younger Black generations, although a quote from elder comedian Paul Mooney resonates, “everybody wanna be a nigga, but don’t nobody wanna be a nigga”. Rappers, refuse to not use it, Eminem, notwithstanding, defending our re-appropriation of the word to the death. I say it a lot. It made me wonder if Val had heard me say it and thought it was okay. Or was it just Kanye West’s song “Golddigger” that made him feel like saying this word that we Blackfolk had demanded he never say was now permitted. There were so many thoughts cascading through my mind as it was happening. I thought about Val and where he’d come from. In speaking to him previously I knew that he was a second-generation immigrant of Bulgarian descent.
I didn’t know that there were social tiers to whiteness until seeing Titanic. Since Black people are, more often than not, on the lowest rung of any stratification anywhere in the world, these kinds of distinctions don’t naturally occur to us. In Titanic, Leo and his Italian friend are treated poorly by the wealthier whites that took passage on the doomed vessel. I’d never seen white people treat other white people with such disdain and disgust. Bringing it back to my blackness, I thought well, Leo and his friend may have been among the first to be cast off in the bowels of the ship, but at least they were on the boat — and unchained no less. There were no Black people on the Titanic. America for immigrants is a symbol of freedom. The streets are paved with gold in American myth until they arrive and see what’s true. The Statue of Liberty symbolizes a new and unencumbered opportunity to pursue happiness. For Black people in America, born citizens, the daily fight for our humanity and equality is something we still grapple with today. I can see now why Val thought it was okay to use this pejorative so freely. Freedom is different for his kind. Val, a 2nd generation Bulgarian-American, was one of these types of whites. He was proud and adamant and ignorant to the struggle of Black people in America. He thought he knew what he was talking about. His people had fled here and prevailed. I really considered what it might be like to be an immigrant — to face adversity and yet still have your own language, culture and community as a buttress for your survival in an unknown place. I thought about having ancestors that were paid for their work, underpaid perhaps, but paid nonetheless. I thought about having ancestors that spoke a different language from those they’d come to serve, but were allowed to read. There were huge institutional differences. The space between us was vast. It was on the laurels of this space that Val rested. I got hot inside and remained silent.
This incursion left me weak. It was far beyond the discomfort I’d witnessed among whites in my AP English class as we read Mark Twain with caution. They knew not to say it. They knew not merely because of some societal stronghold that grasped at their primal urge to say it. It was deeper than the talking to I had to give my white roommate Jason, a self-professed “wigger” for quoting DMX’s song “Ruff Ryder’s Anthem”, which is one of the most nigga-laced songs one might ever hear. Val’s audacity caused me to question everything. Was he right? Should it be okay for him to say? Had having it so inextricably woven into the fabric of our jargon come back to bite us in our collective asses at this moment in the fitting room at Joe Fresh?
Recently, Bette Midler tweeted that the “woman is the N-word of the world”. The tweet was met with so much criticism and upset that she later apologized and deleted the tweet which she revealed had been a quote from John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s song of the same name. Women have it bad in the world, yes, but the niggers are still the niggers of the world. Black is still the new black. Calling another group “the N-word” of anything is proof of same. The use of the word is something Black folk have yet to fully unpack and for good reason. We did not create the word. Our oppressors did that and they did it out of hate, contempt and scorn. For that reason alone, Val should not have uttered it, even though, I now understand that from his position on the totem pole of whiteness, why he thought should be allowed. If I could go back in time, I would explain all of this to Val. Or maybe not. Maybe Val is just an asshole and nothing I would have said to him in that moment would have mattered anyway. We’ll never know.
