Posted on 01/25/2008 7:09:45 AM PST by dr.zaeus
ST. PETERSBURG -- James Ham approached his history teacher with purpose.
The 17-year-old had found a topic for his group's history project. He held up a tan book that screamed its title in big black letters. The N Word.
Michelle Luckett took a deep breath.
The Gibbs High senior was filled with questions. Why was the word used so casually among his generation of African-Americans? Where did it even come from?
It took a minute for Luckett, who is white, to find words.
Her approval was the beginning of a five-month journey filled with spirited discussions, and a few surprises, that have changed attitudes at the racially diverse school of more than 2,000 students.
* * *
It's a powerful word, with the ability to be a verbal atomic bomb or an easy way for rappers to connect with fans.
Civil rights leaders have tried to bury the word, even as young black kids resurrect it with a pound handshake and a "wassup my n-----."
Teens like James and his classmates -- Jo Scotti, Delores Milton and David Washington -- fall somewhere in between.
They attend an urban high school, where they say the word is delivered between acquaintances like text messages.
The group admits it is their age-group that most uses the word, whether in songs or among one another. But they blame ignorance. That's why their project was so important.
"The n-word has become just another word," said Jo, 16. "But we wanted to show that it didn't start out that way."
Luckett, the daughter of a Cuban immigrant, could understand why they wanted to explore the word. But she was apprehensive at first.
"I could have said 'No, you can't do that,'" Luckett said. "But ... we should never hinder a child because we, the adults, are uncomfortable with the questions they're asking."
The students spent hours scouring Library of Congress documents, reading Washington Post columnist Jabari Asim's book The N Word: Who Can Say It, Who Shouldn't, and Why, and doing exhaustive Internet searches on the word's dichotomous existence.
Luckett watched as their attitudes shifted along the way. The project became a conversation among not just that small group, but the entire school.
"This is about getting people out of using a word they don't know anything about," Jo said.
The journey will culminate today, when the group present its eight-minute video at the National History Day competition in Largo. This year's theme is "Conflict and Compromise."
* * *
Most scholars agree the n-word was derived from negro, a word Spaniards assigned to blacks they encountered in Africa. Early references by Dutch colonists in the United States spelled it negar or neggar.
But the Gibbs group wanted to go back even further.
According to Asim's book, "It was the name for an Egyptian God," said Jo, who has the word "vocab" written on his left hand in ink pen.
The group also was surprised to learn that the word was not always considered an insult. During the 1700s, it was merely a neutral noun used to describe a person of color.
"The process of time overall changed the word," James said. "It went through three or four stages of different meanings."
When plantation owners in the South began to use the word to refer to slaves, it took a turn for the worse.
Patrice Hubbard, 35, James' mom, recalls being called the n-word while riding her bike as a child in northeast St. Petersburg.
"He hasn't had to encounter that," said Hubbard, a St. Petersburg police officer. "But he's educated himself."
The students' video treads backward, beginning with examples of the modern interpretation of the word with snippets from the Cartoon Network show Boondocks, which uses the word liberally.
The video then flashes back to images of lynchings in the South to explain how the word began to subjugate blacks.
"We wanted to show how people have exploited the word and taken it and made it funny and profited off of it," Jo explained. "It's popular today and everybody watches those shows, but they don't know what it means."
As the project began to take shape, so did the students' own understanding. In the end, they all reached their own conclusions.
"It was more than just the grade," James said. "It was something we could relate to."
Jo and James have sworn off the word. Delores never used it much anyway, she said. And David, somewhat of a quiet radical in the group, has a completely different take.
"Before, I believed that not everyone could use it," said David, a receiver on the varsity football team. "Now I feel anybody can use it ... that makes it less about black people."
Luckett couldn't be happier.
"You always struggle as a teacher to teach life realities in a way that you allow a young person to discover their own voice," she said. "I might be partial, but I think they found theirs."
“Why was the word used so casually among his generation of African-Americans?”
Chris Rock can explain.
Sounds like a very cool and well researched project. Good for that teacher. I watched Glory over the weekend. I wasn’t terribly impressed with the movie on several levels and I thought that they took the N word and used it in a 20 21st century way and I was pretty sure it didn’t have the meaning in the 18th century it does now. I grew up in the Sound and saying that word was a spanking offense in my family where there were very few spanking offenses.
What word are they talking about? The author seems to be wanting to have an intelligent and mature discussion about the history and use/misuse of some word, but is neither intelligent nor mature enough to actually state what the word is.
When someone is too much a coward to actually say what they are wanting to say, they need to go back to reviewing restaurants or writing obituaries.
Otherwise, they're just childish and insulting.
They should sue Spain.
It is communist PC at it’s best. Remove parts of one group of peoples rights while keeping the others intact.
I agree. Having grown up in the South as well, I can attest to the undeniably pejorative context in which the word can be used. I applaud the students for having the guts to approach such a taboo subject. While I disagree with the obvious double standards regarding its fair use, I think that this type of educational exercise might just soften some of the hard-line rhetoric that is used to discuss the subject.
Sticks and stones...
To be fair, the author was probably constrained by the newspaper’s editorial policies.
SO it’s just another word... try saying it if you are white, and have any sort of job that deals with the public. Oh, and have a team of lawyers ready, because you are about to see just how neutral a word it is these days.
He hires a German man, a Polish man, and a black man to watch his parrot each day that he is gone.
When the man returns, he finds his parrot all mangled and beat up, just barely alive. He asks the parrot, “Polly! Who did this to you?!? Was it the Kraut? Did he do this to you?”
The parrot simply shakes his head, no.
“Was it the Pollack? Did that no-good Pollack do this to you?”
Again, the parrot shakes his head, no.
“Was it the (insert ‘N-word’ here)? Did he do this to you?”
The parrot said “we don’t use that word anymore”.
No excuses.
Just when I thought that I had heard them all...
Thanks for making me almost pee my pants.
Also, you can’t be offended if you are a white male, which may be a good thing. Maybe we are secure enough in who we are that we recognized we are not honkies, soda crackers, sob’s etc.
Well, can we use “it” on FR?
Somebody - try. I’m chicken
I am glad to hear this. Students actually learning something from their own research for the better.
Go ahead, try it kid. Apparently this project taught you nothing.
A whole project on the N word and no references to Blazing Saddles?
Not really. English word history research pretty much begins and ends with the Oxford English Dictionary. At least it should begin there. It's not even mentioned here. The OED says nigger is an alteration of neger. The first usage examples of nigger come from Burns in 1786 and Byron in 1811. Neger is first given as an adaptation of the French nègre and second as an adaptation of the Spanish negro. (The first seems more likely to me, but what do I know.) The first historical example given for neger is from a manuscript in the British Museum written by Robert Leng in 1587. (He spelled it neeger.)
ML/NJ
If we use it our enemies (like Bill O'Reilly) will scan for it and use it, out of context, against us.
You can just see it, can't you... "We found hundreds of instance of the word on the forum, they are obviously the mouth piece of the KKK"
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