Dropping the N-Bomb

Riley Cooper says he does not understand how he allowed himself to yell the "N word" at a black security guard at a country music concert. His apologies sound sincere to me, and his confusion real. At least one teammate has said that Cooper was not an obvious candidate for dropping the bomb, and that he had been a reasonably good teammate to that point.

At least Cooper himself recognizes that we do not live in a "post-racial" world. In the wake of the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the killing of an unarmed young black kid, African-Americans are a little raw. As they see it, had the roles been reversed, Trayvon Martin would be in jail right now. They have reason to believe so, since Marissa Alexander was sentenced to 20 years in prison for firing warning shots at her husband; a black woman is not permitted to stand her ground, I guess.

As I begin to plan for the teaching of Huckleberry Finn this fall, this storm is instructive. The word has power, even with a black man in the White House. It conjures not distant memories but current injustices, and is not easily to be dismissed.

A column published on Foxnews.com (but without an obvious author, strangely enough) had this to say about the furor:

Since I'm not a African American, I don't feel comfortable telling a race of people to ignore an issue they might feel passionate about. What I am able to say unequivocally is that a word only has power if you allow it to have power and we as a society have given the word Cooper used far too much potency and authority during a time of substantial progress in race relations.

Whoever this author is, he is entirely right. But it's not the African-American community that has imbued the word with so much power. It is the pervasively racist society in which we live; it's the violence against young black men and women going back centuries; it's the indignities even the President of the United States must endure because of the racial label with which he lives. 

The "substantial progress" is real, but let's not forget who we really are and have been.