Let’s get this one thing clear. From here, through the end of this post I will be breaking a covenant. I’m going to use the N word…nigger. I’m going to use it more than once. Probably more times than I used it in the entire year. Get ready. If you have pearls, prepare to clutch them. Teeth? Get to gnashing.

But let’s start at the beginning. In the suburbs of Philadelphia, in the early 70’s. You see, my parents met in West Philadelphia, but my father was a truck driver and business man. They needed land for his trucks. A lot of land. So they moved to Lima Pennsylvania when I was around four.

I attended a string of schools where I was the only Black kid in the class. This is what that experience looked like in the 70’s and 80’s.

• On the bus to kindergarten there were a few kids who liked to shout that I was the same color as shit. This was a daily thing. So much so that after a while it lost its sting. I began to sleep through it. I guess they stopped.
• In elementary school, when the kids wanted to zing me, they said, “At least I’m not Black!” This was an established argument ender. No matter what I said afterwards it fell on deaf ears. Mic dropped. Stage owned. On to the next one…
• Middle school camping trip. A boy shouts, “Nigger!” as he pulls an Army knife from his red backpack. We had just left the bus. I was about to spend four days in the woods with this kid. Here he was, beet red, holding a 12 inch knife in my face. I don’t remember what the fight was about. I only have the vaguest memory of what he looked like, and I couldn’t tell you his name. But I remember that knife. I can tell you everything about it.

This was in the early 80’s. If political correctness was a thing, it hadn’t circulated down to us yet. The kids were like a stream of consciousness for the id of white America.

• In ninth grade I remember the Black jokes. One guy loved to tell them. He must have had a book. He would pull me to the side. Lay one on me. Look at the reaction. Did I ever laugh?

High school… I remember the Black kids. They weren’t in my classes but I remember them. My school district had a habit of putting children with my complexion into special ed; especially the boys. It happened quick; one day your in one class, the next your in a wing of the school that you didn’t know existed, talking about your feelings and reviewing basic algebra.

It happened to me twice; once in Middle school and once in High school. It happened to my brother, too. Each time our mother fought. But not everyone has a mother like ours. She was an educator herself, and she was fierce, like a lioness with an uzi.

But as a result, I was almost always the only Black boy in my classes. Segregation lite.

These schools weren’t in red states. They were in suburbs that are now considered to be affluent. Where the white folk are educated and liberal, and racism isn’t supposed to exist. But the bathroom walls were marked with the words “nigger” and KKK.

Then I went to an HBCU. Cheyney University, home of Ed Bradley and some of the fiercest thinkers in the world.

A strange thing happened on that campus. I began to hear the words, “nigger,” and “motherfucker”. A lot. And not as insults, either. They were, like, regular pronouns, to be used in place of he, she, they…

This was kind of a city thing – a hip hop thing. But my exposure to rap at that point was limited. I had cousins in West Philly who were all up in it. Once I met Kid Capri and KRS1 in my grandfather’s house. My cousin had brought them by. They were just standing there…being, themselves. Late 70’s I think. Early 80’s?

But they weren’t really playing rap on the radio. Yo MTV Raps was just becoming a thing. There was Rap City, but you had to stay up real late. And we didn’t have cable.

I was ill prepared. I had been called nigger a lot up til then. At school, hurled from truck windows, at the public pool… It was the fighting word. Same with motherfucker. I was cool with them as insults. Me and nigger and motherfucker had a fulfilling, though distant, relationship.

Now, nigger and motherfucker were all up in my space. With niggas shouting motherfucker like it wasn’t actually an insult to you and your mother. Bitch, on the other hand, hadn’t been corrupted yet. Call a woman bitch and the world would look on and understand why you just got slapped.

“What he do?!”

“Nigga called her a bitch!”

“Why’d that motherfucker do that!?”

I wonder if some of the Cheyney students had never been called “nigger” in anger. Although they could tell you, chapter and verse, about the affects of racism on American soil, police brutality and institutionalized racism, how much did they know about what it’s like to have a white kid shout nigger at you, just because you were Black and he was too frustrated to come up with anything better?

I fought it. I listened to conscious rap. Hung out with the kids from the pan african group. And when it became clear that nigger and motherfucker weren’t linguistic fads, but necessary components of the Black lexicon, I quietly tried to make peace with them.

But guess what. I couldn’t do it. And not just because the word makes me angry all up in my spine.

I could have lived with that. I would have used it sparingly, like sriracha hot sauce. I stood out as much at Cheyney, for being a “white talking” yellow, Black boy from the suburbs, as I had in primary school, for being the only Black kid on the playground. Making peace with nigger was a compromise that I was willing to make.

But I couldn’t say it. It wouldn’t come together right in my mouth. What came out didn’t sound at all like what the kids were saying at college, as a catchall pronoun for everyone. It sounded like “NIGGER.”

The only way I could say it was like a white dude, leaning out of a pickup truck. Same with motherfucker. When I say it, it isn’t Snoop Lion smooth. It’s Motherfuckerr. Like a nerdy white kid with braces. Or, like the Black dude that grew up next door to him.

That failed linguistic experiment ended decades ago. I watched the proliferation of “nigger” from the sidelines, both unable and unwilling to participate in its meteoric rise in popularity. There are people, both white and Black, who feel as if this is a handicap. My Blackness, already weakened by my light skin, is disfigured beyond recognition by my unwillingness to cozy up to the word nigger.

Now, I admit, my hood-pass is probationary at best. But when it comes to Blackness, your dead wrong. But somewhere along the way, Hood and Black became inverted. Instead of the inner city being one small aspect of what it is to be Black in America, it became accepted as the definition of all things Black. Which is bullshit. Blackness is bigger than all of the hoods in all of the cities in the country. We’re everywhere. Pop culture doesn’t reflect this, but it is truth.

I miss the days when nigger was a fighting word. Things were more simple then. There were boundaries that your white friends knew not to cross, not even when they were high and you were both listening to Mos Def and talking about the world.

It’s hard to demand respect when there aren’t clear boundaries. Instead, we wave nigger in their face, daring them to use it… Say it… And then we get them for it. I don’t care how funny it is when Dave Chapelle says, “Fuck yo couch, nigga!!!”, white person, it isn’t okay if you say it.

I miss the days when this was common knowledge. An irrevocable truth. Before Gwyneth Paltrow took to the stage singing Niggers in Paris, as if that’s fucking okay. As painful as High School was, at least I knew that when a white dude shouted nigger, he meant it. I didn’t have to sit there, trying to figure out their motives while they insulted me and my ancestors.

I try not to write too much about race. It makes me mad all up in my spine. But after the Trayvon Martin verdict, I wrote this. And this is what I had to say about The Butler. I will not be seeing it.