A euphemism stifles our conversation on race

Forty years ago, I thought I had all the answers. There was a lot of that going around in the late 1960s and early '70s.

The years I attended college, 1968 to 1972, weren't a specific era so much as a historic time capsule in real time. Every week, it seemed, some new injustice would be exposed, some national assassination horror would be relived, another 600 American boys would die in Vietnam, and men would walk on the surface of the moon.

Those years were the very embodiment of the phrase "May you live in interesting times." We were a nation divided by racial strife, antiwar demonstrations, counter-marches by patriotic hard hats, and a widening chasm between the Pepsi generation and anyone over 30.

As a student columnist for the Temple News, the daily newspaper, I rode those seemingly inexhaustible issues - feminism, environmental awareness, revolutionary sloganeering, farm-worker boycotts, arrests of antiwar activists for break-ins at government facilities - like a string of saddled-up broncos waiting for me to leap on top of, grab hold with one hand, and shout, "Yee-haw!"

During my senior year, in a twice-weekly column called For What It's Worth, I carved out a unique commentary niche by writing about the issue of race - the politics, the posturing, the hypocrisy of blacks and whites, and the seemingly impossible standard that truth should matter more than racial loyalty.

It wasn't an easy sell. Talking frankly about race made people nervous then - just like today. I wrote that I found black racism (toward whites, Asians, and other blacks) more appalling because they had felt the pain but hadn't learned the lesson.

One column, on Nov. 24, 1971, was headlined, "To be white, conscious and confused," which echoed James Baldwin's famous "constant state of rage" poem about what it feels like to be "black and conscious in America today."

Accompanying that column was an ad for a new book called How To Get Along With Black People: A Handbook for White Folks And Some Black Folks Too! I saw this as cynical marketing of the racial divide that targeted the awkward shyness of well-meaning white people who would buy such a book.

"I can't stop thinking that there is something happening here which is just not right," I wrote. "When white people institute a racially exclusive policy it's called racism; when a similar policy is initiated by Blacks it is called awareness.

"In a few short years Black segregation has replaced white segregation, using the guise of education as the premise."

You'll note that the newspaper referred to Blacks with an uppercase B and whites with a lowercase w. That was a new style rule instituted by Temple News editors that semester. Their rationale was that being Black was more than a skin color. It was a recognizable culture and identity worthy of a proper noun. Whereas white folks, well, it seems they were just too busy reading books about how to get along with Black people.

One thing was certain when I wrote those columns. I believed at we young people would have successfully navigated the racial shoals of American culture by the time we became grandparents.

But, 44 years later, we live in an age when a Philadelphia TV news reporter is suing Fox 29, claiming he was fired for using the n-word in a newsroom meeting regarding a story about the NAACP's symbolically burying the word. The on-air reporter had used the term the n-word.

In February 1972, I wrote a Temple News column in which the n-word appeared in the headline as well as 35 times in the column. I was describing a famous comedy bit by Lenny Bruce, who shocked a nightclub audience by asking: "Are there any [n-words] here tonight?" He then asks if there are any spics, micks, kikes, chinks, guineas, and greaseballs. It's a classic satirical bit about how the suppression of a word is what gives it its power to hurt.

I remember the first time I heard the n-word used as a euphemism in the mid-1970s. I thought it was cute. Playful. Almost childlike. And politically correct to the point of perfection. Its overall effect was so pitch-perfect, you had to wonder if a tuning fork was involved.

But the n-word grew tiresome after it lost its coy wink in the decades that followed. It was like the n-word had suddenly become the lingua franca of unspeakable epithets. But its Sesame Street cadences and matronly usage by overly sincere TV news anchors, parents, and educators gives me the creeps.

It's like all the adults in the Harry Potter books who secretly took the Hogwarts pledge never to mention you-know-who's name out loud. Meanwhile, the neighborhood wizardly deejays are cranking the explicit and forbidden lyrics like, "Voldemort rules!" at top volume.

The n-word itself may be in need of a beard. South Philadelphia carpenter Ric Almeida nailed the reason. "Anyone who uses the n-word is looking for an excuse to use the n-word." He actually said the n-word twice, but the second time he used body language italics.