PEOPLE GETTING FIRED FOR REFERRING TO THE N-WORD - ACTIVISM OR PERFORMANCE ART?: One facet of our racial reckoning: putting a stamp of approval on pretending not to understand the difference between using it and referring to it
Dr. McWhorter has fairly short piece out on the n-word, that also goes along some with his new book
Nine Nasty Words, where he looks at profanity. His idea there is that what once was considered profane dealt with either sex, religion, or bodily excretions-- whereas today what is considered profane is slurs against groups. And he considers this a good thing and a mark of societal progress. None of that is discussed in the linked article-- that's based on an interview of his that I watched.
But on the n-word, McWhorter thinks that peak societal sophistication about it occurred in 1990s, and that what is occurring now where people cannot even refer to it
in reference, i.e. in contexts of discussion of racism or language-- is a step too far and shows the ways in which wokeism is now religion.
And there are a number of examples of professors getting fired for referring to it, like a law professor who used it on a exam on discrimination, in asterisked-out form, on a test he had given for over 10 years with no problems getting fired as a result of the fallout over it.
He writes that the n-word has gone not from being merely profane, but to being
taboo-- which has a technical definition within cultural anthropology/sociology with religious connotations.
The question is why we have become so extremely sensitive about that word since the 1990s, despite that our times are so much further from the ones where whites casually levelled the term with abandon. Why are we making a finger-cross and hanging garlic in the doorway against even any semblance or suggestion of a sequence of sounds?
Supposedly because the word recalls slavery, Jim Crow and horrific abuses. But then, even black people just a few decades ago didn’t typically think this meant that one cannot utter the word even to refer to it. That’s new, and it is, quite simply, a taboo -- as in what we associate with societies vastly different from our own.
There are languages in Australia where you use a separate vocabulary with your mother-in-law, and it is taboo to use the regular word equivalents for it with her. In one of the languages, there is a general word for moving that you use when talking to your mother-in-law about going, walking, sailing and crawling. To use the regular words for these things with her would be like hauling off with a curse word in English.
As an aside, seems like a disproportionate amount of interesting linguistic anecdotes come from Australian aboriginal languages but I don't recall hearing this one before.
McWhorter continues though by talking about how even the word 'negro' is coming under fire.
in the fall of 2020 at Bard College, freshmen began a campaign of shaming against a professor who read out not the word ****** but Negro in a discussion of Martin Luther King’s Letter From a Birmingham Jail. The new idea is that even that word is profane, in being an outdated one black people no longer consider appropriate. The pretended inability to distinguish between the abusive and the antique is an indication that 2020 had been a Sunday School in Electism for these kids. They are showing that they have learned their lesson in suspending basic intelligence in favor of virtue signalling, in the face of something that would not matter a whit to most black people themselves.
And McWhorter wonders if today's youth would even be able to sit through
Blazing Saddles-- which hopefully everyone here has seen-- without needing therapy.