Racial slur takes center stage at Stillman
Shompa Datta-Kimball, an assistant professor of English at Stillman College speaks on double standards and the use of racial slurs in the community at the 2007 NSurrection Conference Friday.
Staff photo | Dusty ComptonPublished: Saturday, February 24, 2007 at 3:30 a.m.
Last Modified: Friday, February 23, 2007 at 11:00 p.m.
TUSCALOOSA | With a debate swirling nationwide over the most offensive of racial slurs -- the word “Nigger" -- a historically black college is setting aside four days to discuss the notorious word.
Stillman College is the site of a gathering called the N’Surrection Conference, with discussion ranging from the origins of the epithet to whether juggling a few letters makes it socially acceptable.
Clarence Sutton Sr. one of three young black men walking home from a movie in Anniston in 1960, knew trouble was afoot when a white youth slapped him across the face. As Sutton recalled, the white youth said “n--, you wanna fight?" as he held a knife.
Ever since, Sutton said, he’s taken deep offense at the word.
“From that time on in my life the word 'nigger’ was personal. I associated it with the hate and the very deep disdain that this gentleman had perpetrated on me at the time," said Sutton, president of the Tuscaloosa chapter of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
Community activist Tim Robinson said the word “nigga" is different and is considered a term of endearment, but is only acceptable in the black community.
“It’s just like grandmama and her friends back in the slave days when the masters used to get the good part of the pig and throw the slops to grandmama," he said.
“Grandmama started making pig’s feet, grandmama started making neckbones. She started making something good out of it. That’s the same thing with that word. It was nigger which was the bad word, but you’ve got our people that just went and changed it up a bit," said Robinson.
Organizers say the goal of the event, which began Thursday and ends Sunday, is to rebel against using the offensive word “through the use of intelligent dialogue and a thorough examination of black history."
Debate over the slur has escalated in recent months with comedian Michael Richards’ racial rant prompting black leaders such as the Rev. Jesse Jackson and California Rep. Maxine Waters to urge the public and the entertainment industry to stop using the insult.
Sutton said the childhood incident wasn’t the first time the racial slur was used against him, but it forever changed the way he reacts to the word. Now he fights back, he said, only these days it’s often against people whose skin is the same color as his.
“I’m fighting now because we have lost a generation of young people who don’t know the history associated with that word," Sutton said.
Some city councils, including ones in New York and New Jersey, have joined a nationwide effort to get people to stop using the word and the AbolishTheNword.com web site was launched last April.
Andrew Hacker, a political science professor at Queens College and author of “Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal," said just getting rid of the word isn’t necessarily enough.
“I really think that as far as white people are concerned, the word is almost on its way out," said Hacker, who is white. “That said, there are a lot of white people who still in the privacy of their own minds think the word even if they don’t use it because they regard black people as genetically inferior and that word categorizes that. In other words, the thing we call racism has not disappeared."
Kovan Flowers is a co-founder of AbolishTheNWord.com where visitors can download contracts pledging to stop using the slur. While he agrees that striking the word from use won’t solve all the problems affecting the black community, he says it will help set an example for other races.
“We can’t say anything to Hispanics, or whites or whoever unless we stop using it ourselves," he said. “It’s the root of the mind-set that’s affecting why people are low, from housing to jobs to education."
Stillman senior Maurice Williams said he organized the conference hoping to educate his peers about the history of the word. The event includes a community fair, charity basketball game, unity march and discussions ranging from the slur’s origin to its use among various ethnic groups.
“I had to understand that a lot of the images that we portray in television, in the media, in the hip-hop environment -- all of those things have the same connotations as the N-word itself, so therefore it’s the N-word personified," Williams said. “Where do you see another culture portraying some of these same images?"
Rapper Tupac Shakur was credited with legitimizing the term “nigga" when he came out with the song “N.I.G.G.A.," which he said stood for “Never Ignorant Getting Goals Accomplished." But Stillman English professor Alisea McLeod doesn’t buy it.
“It’s hogwash. What this is really indicative of is a heart problem," she said. “What is coming out of mouths is what is coming out of souls. These are not words that are uplifting and I think point to a bigger problem -- a lack of self-love."
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