Through the Looking Glass

I work the dream. I work in an "integrated school", an institution which was at the core of the Civil Rights movement. The sad truth, however, is that when integration was forced upon America, whites fled for the suburbs.

"White Flight" is the crude anthropological term for this phenomenon. The end result is that schools are still segregated, by fact rather than law, de facto rather than de jure. But the truly fascinating thing for me to witness is the dominance of the N word in schools that are less than 5% white.

I hear the N word at least 100 times per day at school. Not 2, not 30, at LEAST 100. Every day. This word NEVER escapes the lips of a white person. There are very few white people in the school, and most of them are teachers.

The N word is the most common verbal currency in my school. It is simply how the huge majority of students refer to each other. They don't call each other by their names; everyone is simply "nigga".

And it's a flexible word. It means friend, enemy, stranger, and everything else. It is used by all types of students. Including the handful of white ones. I went through the looking glass of race this week when I first heard a white student refer to a black student as nigga in a conversation with him.

They were discussing the particulars of a fight that had occurred earlier in the day. and Lo, the white boy said to the black boy, "nigga, you're crazy". And there was no pause, no drama, no reaction, nothing. The pointless conversation simply continued.

It occurred to me that this was either very good news or very bad news. The most charitable explanation would be that our society is so non-racist, indeed so post-racial, that the ugliest slur of racism is used casually as an ironic dispersion of our hateful ancestors.

But the less charitable explanation, which I fear is closer to the truth, is that the inextricable tentacles of hatred and self-hatred that are wrapped up in the N word have simply expanded to other races.

The good news is that the N word is no longer uttered by white men to black men. The bad news is that it is instead used casually by an multi-ethnic underclass that is as large a disgrace to King's dream as the original sin of this nation.