By Lee R. Haven
“You cheap Jew!”
“You’re a cheap Jew!”
They were Jewish themselves, the two of them, and they were laughing. I witnessed the exchange at a social justice type summer camp we attended way back in the mid-1960s, located in a small college in a small town in Kentucky (a state in dire need of social justice during those times).
As I recall, the boys were best friends. They were from New York and I the lone participant from Savannah.
When they were done, I don’t recall feeling that I had the right, from that moment on, to tag either of them with the same epithet with which they’d smeared each other, not even in the joking way they had.
“Uh, hey, cheap Jew, is it time for dinner yet, you think?”
What they did was what black psychiatrists like William Grier, Price Cobbs and Nathan Hare have called an “in-house” thing. As far as it concerned me, or anyone else who was not Jewish, or who was not MOT (Member of the Tribe), it was a fam thing, or something groups did among themselves.
Like many of you, I’ve also heard other tribes such as Italians and Puerto Ricans, not to mention homosexuals and women call each other the very derogatory names the larger society has smeared them with.
And no, I’ve not felt license or (perhaps more telling, the desire) to do the same.
Dr. Laura Schlessinger—she whose syndicated radio talk show came to a halt because of her frequent use of the n-word with an African American caller— said she couldn’t understand why people with different “ pigmentation” from blacks couldn’t use the n-word the way blacks themselves do.
A lot of whites profess confusion about this seemingly contradictory behavior. Take our good friend Paula Deen, she in the center of a $1.2 million lawsuit alleging racial discrimination in her Savannah restaurants. The Food Network and most sponsors have since dropped her. Paula was sobbing when apologizing recently on the “Today” show for admittedly using the n-word in what she said was an earlier life. But she still slipped in there, skillfully, I’d add, how upset she’d get when she heard her black employees calling each other the n-word.
White comedian Gary Owens has a routine in which he decides his chances of bonding with his black male friends would improve if he called them what he had so often heard them call themselves. Simulating his black friends’ subsequent reaction, Owens, with accompanying sound effect, raps his mike against his head and falls to the floor just as he’s saying “n.” White political scientist and author Tim Wise said he actually found fellow Southerner Jeff Foxworthy’s “redneck” jokes funny but would be offended if Jerry Seinfeld performed an identical act.
Why is it that so many whites don’t get this?
I suspect they’re lying and do know the dif. They don’t have to know. The American narrative-governing race these days is that racism is no longer a problem for blacks, not a real one—- this despite evidence from researchers such as Tim Wise and the National Urban League showing that it is. These folks also point out that, hey, we have a black president now. Yes, these are the same folks who did everything in their power to make sure we didn’t, but why quibble? The racism-is-dead meme—or worse, blacks are just as racist if not more racist than whites– has gathered steam since the Reagan years, after the turmoil of the sixties and seventies brought into uncomfortable view images of America’s treatment toward blacks.
It’s the Great Wall of a lie preventing sight of the obvious truth behind it. The majority culture simply wanted the issue over and declared it so. It beat putting any serious effort into eradicating the problem. Blacks, as is the practice of many a survivor, read the writing on the metaphorical barrier.
Many quit “complaining,” some even running to organizations like Fox “News” to declare their new racial vision. Far too many blacks, period, parrot whites in averring that black use of the n-word is just as bad as white use of it.
For the record, I hate the word. I agree with Al Sharpton; I also don’t see record company honchos green lighting other ethnic groups to record epithets used by others to smear their own peeps, the way they grant such license to black rappers. I believe it’s a worthy goal to have everyone stop using the n-word altogether—at least publicly. Until then, though, it will remain what it is, off limits to outsiders, no matter how much those on the inside cringingly toss it about.
Lee R. Haven is a writer in Stone Mountain, Georgia
