Eloquent words to use instead of nigger how to#
Eloquent words to use instead of nigger skin#
Eloquent words to use instead of nigger full#
Eloquent words to use instead of nigger free#

It can stifle a student’s willingness to engage. Offending a professor comes with risks, real and perceived, because of the imbalance of power.

Eloquent words to use instead of nigger how to#

Learning how to navigate peers’ reactions-figuring out when it’s best to rethink and reconsider after receiving feedback or to hold firm-is a skill that will serve them well. But a non-Black professor would be treading treacherous waters if they taught the way I did. Non-Black professors should decide how they teach divisive concepts, even that word.

Eloquent words to use instead of nigger free#

I’ve learned that students learn best when they feel free to explore knowing that sometimes they might mess up, even badly. And I had promised I wouldn’t be offended by anything any student said, a pledge I make in all my classes. I also knew we had spent weeks establishing firm ground rules: no harsh judgments, no matter how intense the discussions.

Eloquent words to use instead of nigger skin#

I was able to explore the perplexities of that word-which had been conjured up to terrorize people with skin the color of mine, including through public lynchings during which white mobs burned Black people alive in the public square- because of the color of my skin. The social construct that is race, with us since before the founding of this country, doesn’t flow in a straight line.

It’s one of the rare occurrences in which my skin color has provided me a kind of perverse privilege, one birthed from white supremacy and Black pain. I knew I had the latitude to press, in part, because I am Black. The difference between N-word and that word reminded me of Mark Twain’s admonition that the difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug. “ That word,” he said again before retreating to “the N-word.” “You know, that word,” he said before quickly reengaging his classmate in debate. I interjected during one of their uncomfortably passionate exchanges and asked to which word he was referring. Curiously, though, he had never said the word. (Courtesy of Davidson College)ĭebates he had with a Black classmate were legendary. Context and intent must be considered, a principle I adhere to in my journalism as much as in my teaching. He was fond of reminding classmates what I had taught. He had spent the semester adamantly arguing everyone should be able to say the word. That’s how I ended up challenging one of my white students. During that period, I learned that my son and daughter were being slurred with that word more than I had been-even though I had grown up in the shadow of Jim Crow and they were born in the New South. “Every time I read that word I squirm because I know it carries so much weight and invokes so much hate,” one white student wrote in a post-semester note. White students have told me they’ve felt uncomfortable typing the book’s title into a search engine to order it, have hidden it from roommates, and have covered it up when reading in public, afraid someone might accidentally see the title and think badly of them.

Eloquent words to use instead of nigger full#

In other semesters, I said it, unfurling it in all its ugly verbal splendor, knowing those classes needed the full excruciating lesson, sometimes with the help of a clip of Chris Rock’s now infamous 1996 Bring the Pain tour in which he uses the word to step on racial land mine after racial land mine. It felt unnecessary because of the flow of those classes and the feedback I was receiving from students. Some semesters, I didn’t utter the word once. He’s a Black man from South Carolina, just as I am.

I briefly studied under Kennedy at Harvard Law during my year in Boston as a Nieman Fellow. I had assigned Randall Kennedy’s Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word. After those six letters slipped from between his lips, his body ever so subtly melted into the plastic chair, his complexion transforming into an odd mixture of ghost white and red, with a touch of purple and blue. He had uttered the word not as a slur but at my urging. Bugged-eyes of surprised students looked for comfort in the bugged-eyes of other surprised students. There was no outrage, no cries of harm, though shock hovered like a dark cloud. “ Nigger,” one of my white students uttered in the most unoffensive way possible.Ī stunned silence fell over the classroom.