Aukeem Ballard, a friend and former student who is now a teacher himself, knows well the multiple and multivalent powers of language. His interest in how language works, how it shapes us even as we shape it, motivates much of his teaching. Recently over coffee we were talking about how odd it is that even today, after decades of work with, on, and around race, disturbingly many don’t get the basics of language’s power, nor what it means to reclaim the terms that can oppress. We were discussing how many people don’t seem to understand what is happening, say, when an African American person uses the n-word. The question will sometimes arise: “If I can’t say it, why can they?”—and that final pronoun hangs there like a cloud of ignorance or bad faith. Stories of such misunderstandings still appear in the news.
Maybe there needs to be a widely available course in remedial rhetoric to remind us that the force and meaning of words are deeply influenced not only by their histories (which they trail like roiling clouds), but also by who is speaking them, when, where, and how. But then habitual patterns of meaning, habit, and practice also emerge. I cannot think of one instance in which an African American using the n-word has not been somehow reclaiming language that she or he has every right to own. This kind of thing has been going on for a long time, probably longer than anyone can say—nor does one need to awaken one day and announce, Now I’m going to reclaim as my own the words that have been used to hurt me and others who look like me. Often it happens more intuitively than that, like finding oneself swimming after falling into the pool’s deep end.
As a teenager in southern Indiana, I would go to the outdoor basketball courts to play pick-up games with whoever happened to be there, many of whom were African Americans around my age, who often referred to each other by the n-word during our games. Even in my state of naïve stupidity, I had two inklings about what was going on there: 1) it was profoundly not okay for me, a white guy, to use that word; and 2) whatever it was that my fellow players were doing, it was powerful and important.
As it happened, when Aukeem and I were talking about these things, I was in the midst of research into critical reactions through the centuries to Shakespeare’s Othello, a play all about the power of language to fix and formulate a person’s identity, even against that person’s will. One of the great achievements of this scholarship is its array of insights into how the play shows its title character caught in a language web that articulates who he is in terms of subjection, otherness, the outsider, an “extravagant and wheeling stranger.” It is thus a play about, among other things, the constructions, inscriptions, depictions, encryptions, and other creations of both blackness and the Muslim other in European imagination. Much of the play’s tragedy derives not only from how Iago uses his considerable language skill to lead Othello to misread Desdemona, but also from how he leads Othello to misread himself. When I sent an earlier draft of this piece to Aukeem, he challenged me to reflect on what Othello might want to say to a young African American today. I think the answer would urge improvisation against the grain of the social script, claiming as one’s own the freedom to work toward a new language of identity. But such improvisation happens with the materials at hand, which is why the labor of language reclamation is required.
The process should be by now familiar. The word “queer” used to be a real hurt word, and it often still is, though now it’s also used to define an area of literary study, as in the phrases “queer theory,” “queer method,” and “queer matter,” all of which can be found on the Modern Language Association website. Similarly, the word “bitch” has been reclaimed to such an extent that based here in Portland, Oregon, we have a magazine called Bitch: Feminist Response to Pop Culture. As a white, straight male, I’m careful about how I used these terms, and generally I don’t use them at all unless I’m referring to the field of study or the magazine. But then, these words have very different meanings depending on who is using them, and I don’t occupy the social or subject position to claim the kind of ownership of these words that others can. The same is true of the word that I refer to here obliquely as the n-word. For me to use that word would be an act of violence, as it would be were I to presume to police an African American’s right to take ownership of it.
As Aukeem and I spoke over coffee, we reflected on how much work there remains to do in renewing the language that hurts and holds us back. It is, after all, the work of every generation of language users—writers, readers, editors, teachers, everyone who speaks—to participate in this ongoing endeavor. We also realized that we’ll probably collaborate on some kind of writing about this constellation of issues. What shape this writing will take is yet to come.