"nigger"

My first vivid memory of the word "nigger" goes back to when I was 7 years old. I had just finished second grade, and my parents sent me to day camp at St. Francis Xavier Cabrini parish in the city that summer. Cabrini had hired a couple of bus drivers to get kids to-and-from camp, one of which drove for my momma's school, J. C. Ellis (my mom was principal there). She would bring my sister and I to the bus driver's house (I'm deliberately leaving his name out of this, btw) and we'd run in from Metairie to Gentilly. The route he took to Cabrini took us down St. Bernard Avenue and past the project. The first time we passed the project, he said, "Be careful now, we're going past 'Nigger Town.' They'll throw rock at you if you're not careful, so don't wave or anything."

I remember thinking that the kids on the street weren't doing anything all that different from what we did by our house.

I can't think of many other times when the word was spoken to me directly as a child, but that's because kids didn't use it, adults did. Adults knew it was a derogatory term even then and would change their speech when it dawned on them that kids were around. Even in Boy Scouts, that word was taboo, and that was a bunch of pre-adolescent white kids from the suburbs. There aren't many more fertile grounds for racism than that. Still, I didn't start using the word myself regularly until I got to high school. Maybe that's a factor of age, and maybe it was a factor of being around more boys who used it themselves, it's hard to tell. As an eighth grader in an 8-12 school, you heard a lot of stuff. When I was a freshman, though, I moved into a bigger world. I joined the debate team that year, and it was 50-50 black/white. All of a sudden, "nigger" didn't work for me, particularly since Mark Clanton was also a basketball player. (I remember, once, a guy came up to Clanton in the mall and asked, "Hey, Clanton, you know a nigger named Victor?" Mark turned, handed his books to another guy walking with us, and posted said questioner up against the wall.) My first debate partner was Glenn Ferdinand, a guy who can pass the "schwegmann bag" test, but wrote the most profound oratory on racism I've ever heard in my life. Later, I debated with Earl Bridges, who was one of the coolest guys I ever met. He loved War and CSNY, dated white girls, and got as pissed off as Mark did when someone used da word.

Then I got to uni and joined a fraternity. The racial divide that blurred when I was in high school returned in a huge way. Fraternities can be extremely racist, since they're almost excluslvely all-black or all-white. Remind me to tell you about one guy's plan for urban renewal. I think it's the one time I've heard the word "nigger" mentioned more in a single conversation than other time. Richard Pryor was coming into his own at this time and one of my best friends ran for student government president against a very racist black guy.

Then the 80s came, and I became a teacher. The school where I student taught was 95% black students, and Redeemer High (where I taught after graduation) was 50-50 black/white. Da word wasn't spoken at either, at all, at all. By the 90s, black folks were "taking ownership" of da word, and that's that...

Anyway, if I heard and used Da Word as much as I did, it's pretty much a no-brainer that a cracker bastard with a Confederate flag and a noose behind his desk did as well. Lying sack of shit.