Historian Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor leads a thoughtful and history-backed examination of one of the most divisive words in the English language: the N-word. Drawing from personal experience, she explains how reflecting on our points of encounter with the word can help promote productive discussions and, ultimately, create a framework that reshapes education around the complicated history of racism in the US.
The minute she said it, the temperature in my classroom dropped. My students are usually laser-focused on me, but they shifted in their seats and looked away.
I'm a black woman who teaches the histories of race and US slavery. I'm aware that my social identity is always on display.And my students are vulnerable too, so I'm careful. I try to anticipate what part of my lesson might go wrong. But honestly, I didn't even see this one coming. None of my years of graduate school prepared me for what to do when the N-word entered my classroom.
I was in my first year of teaching when the student said the N-word in my class. She was not calling anyone a name. She was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. She came to class with her readings done, she sat in the front row and she was always on my team. When she said it, she was actually making a point about my lecture, by quoting a line from a 1970s movie, a comedy, that had two racist slurs. One for people of Chinese descent and the other the N-word. As soon as she said it, I held up my hands, said, "Whoa, whoa." But she assured me, "It's a joke from 'Blazing Saddles,'" and then she repeated it.
This all happened 10 years ago, and how I handled it haunted me for a long time. It wasn't the first time I thought about the word in an academic setting. I'm a professor of US history, it's in a lot of the documents that I teach. So I had to make a choice. After consulting with someone I trusted, I decided to never say it. Not even to quote it. But instead to use the euphemistic phrase, "the N-word." Even this decision was complicated. I didn't have tenure yet, and I worried that senior colleagues would think that by using the phrase I wasn't a serious scholar. But saying the actual word still felt worse.