I stepped outside the restaurant (take out place), considering it rude to talk on a cell phone inside an eatery. One night as I was waiting to pick up Chinese food, I called my little brother on my cell phone. I’ve learned not to talk in my neighborhood. There’s another reasons that I’m silent, that I work out my thoughts on paper, and not with the people that I’m writing about. I’m quite sure it wasn’t my place to correct him. I don’t regret not asking him not to use the word. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to separate the word “nigger” and violence, and even if he seems to intend no harm, it still scares me. I tend to the think that if I had approached him his response to me would have been violent. Or he might just have seen me as one more white person telling him what to do. He might have told me of how he grew up using the word and how my perspective is a very white perspective, and that can only think of black people in terms of how white people view them. So what should I have done? Ask him to stop using the word “nigger”? Perhaps if I had we would have discussed the word, and how we each view it differently. They’re faces show nothing, but if I was successful, my face also showed nothing. I wonder if the woman and the man behind the counter feel the way that I do. I knew that I wasn’t in danger, but still, I couldn’t turn off the fear or the shame. I know I’m not in danger, but he’s fouling the air. As I was stuck in this enclosed space, with the word “nigger” being tossed around, my feelings were roughly what they would be were this man to have defecated on the floor. To me, the very word “nigger” is an act of violence-or rather, I have a hard time believing that the word “nigger” is not either the encouragement and the prelude to violence. I still believe that the word “nigger” is used to dehumanize black people, to suggest that they deserve violence.
I was raised to believe that “nigger”-like “kike” or “gook”-is a fighting word. I was raised to believe that word “nigger” must never be uttered out loud. My forehead pinches, and my stomach tenses. The word “nigger” makes me extremely uncomfortable. In the places where I might use the words “guy”, “person” or “dude,” he was using the word “nigger.” One, went down an aisle, out of my sight, began talking loudly on his cell phone. There was an elderly white man behind the counter, along with a younger black woman. My husband and I were in a hardware store trying to have some keys copies.