Symbolic silliness

The “n-word” has experienced a turbulent year. New York City banned the word in February, and in July the NAACP held a public burial for the word complete with coffin and headstone in a Detroit cemetery. Now the word has been exiled from the nation’s second-largest city.\nLast Friday, the Los Angeles City Council unanimously approved a resolution that symbolically banned the “n-word.” The nonbinding resolution calls on residents to stop using the slur “and to encourage all others whom they may encounter in their daily routine to cease from using the word as well.”\nIn order to ensure thorough enforcement, perhaps they should also encourage schools and libraries to burn all copies of “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” and encourage all teens to smash every hip-hop and rap album that includes any variant of the word. Good luck, Los Angeles.\nCity Councilman Bernard Parks proposed the measure partly because of recent situations carrying racial overtones and in order to bring attention to the anniversary of the Michael Richards incident. “We should celebrate that as an opportunity to bring attention to it,” Parks said.\nHowever, it’s counter-intuitive to abolish a word in order to call attention to a horrible encounter with it. Far from eliminating the effect of the-word-that-must-not-be-named, bans and fear of the word give it more power and control over us. Simply pretending the word does not exist will not destroy its power.\nThe Los Angeles City Council also called attention to the “trauma and violence” that the “n-word” produces. Councilmember Jan Perry said she was traumatized after hearing the “toxic” word directed at her many years ago. “It affected me so much psychologically that to this day, I remember the name and the place of the person who used that word,” Perry said. “Even 25, 30 years later, I still remember it like it happened Thursday.”\nUnfortunately, a symbolic ban won’t erase the trauma of past experiences. Nor will it abolish the word or prevent trauma from other words. Unless the Los Angeles City Council approves more resolutions, plenty of other inflammatory words are still fair game: “coon,” “spearchucker,” “tar baby,” not to mention “spic,” “gook,” “chink,” “kike” or “faggot.” We all know them, and city council resolutions won’t produce collective amnesia. For that matter, if we seriously wish to prevent painful experiences that cause psychological trauma, we ought to ban the word “stupid.” Plenty of parents and teachers hiss that destructive name at children each day and it arguably degrades and does as much psychological damage as any racial epithet could.\nI whole-heartedly agree the word “nigger” – among others – is destructive and damaging, but bans and moratoriums won’t eliminate its effect in our society. On the contrary, they might prevent educated conversations about the history and context of these words because they scare us away from serious dialogues about race and create paralyzing fear about saying the wrong thing, especially for white folks.\nLos Angeles has merely applied an ineffective “banned”-aid to a deep social wound that requires much more serious, careful treatment.