That Word

I’ve been called a nigger to my face by a white person two times in my 55 years on this earth.

The first time was a drive by, sometime in the mid-1980s. Harold Washington was elected the first black mayor of Chicago in 1983 a couple of years earlier. I went to Luther South High School, which at the time was 95 percent black but located in the white part of town.

We black students knew we were in enemy territory. Western Avenue back then was the dividing line. West of it lived the white folks, east of it stayed the blacks.

East of it is where Washington got the majority of his votes, west of it was where people desperately tried to keep him out of office. Desperately. So strong were these people’s dislike and mistrust for Washington, a Democrat and well-respected politician, that most of them switched allegiance, voting for Republican Bernard Epton even though white Chicago, because of proud Irishman Richard J. Daley and the power and influence he wielded in the 1960s and ’70s, was notoriously blue.

Luther South, now defunct and demolished, stood at 87^th and Kedzie, about a mile or so west of Western. Across the street from the school was were you waited to catch the 87^th and Commercial Avenue CTA bus back home to the black part of town.

And it was one day that a bunch of us black students stood there and a car drove by. The boy in the passenger’s seat, who looked about our age, rolled down his window and screamed, “Go home, niggers!”

Considering the climate at the time, I can’t say that any of us were surprised.

The next time I was called a nigger was sometime in the mid-1990s when I was covering a high school baseball tournament in Abilene, Texas, for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Two other Star-Telegram reporters covered it to, and we rode together. After the games that evening, we stopped at a gas station to buy some beer. We were going to go to one of our hotel rooms and wind down together. I went in to buy the beer, and a young white man with tears in his eyes was being consoled by another white man about the same age. I’d never met either in my life.

As I walked by, the one crying kept glaring at me. I walked by and then he said it.

“Fuckin’ nigger.”

It was jolting and totally confusing.

So, I turned around to approach the guy – I wasn’t really sure he was even talking to me – and his buddy waved me off, like it’d be in my best interest to leave whoever he was with alone. I don’t know if dude lost his girl to a black guy or what, but he was really angry.

I bought the beer and told my colleagues, who were white, what happened. They apologized for the guy. When we got to the hotel, I had lost my thirst and appetite. I went straight to bed.

This next incident receives honorable mention because the white kid who slurred wasn’t directing the insult at me. I was covering yet another baseball game at Arlington Bowie High School. In between innings, the public address announcer, a student at the school, played rap songs from the press box on the loud speaker. At one point, one of Bowie’s football players came into the box, wearing a cut-off t-shirt, creased Wrangler jeans and cowboy boots (no cowboy hat), and jokingly said, “Turn that nigger music off.”

It was when he sat down that he noticed that a black man was in the room with him.

He was so embarrassed. He muttered that he was sorry, grew very red in the face and scampered out quickly and quietly, trying to not be noticed. The PA announcer and I had chatted each other up before the football player entered. We did not talk the rest of the game, and it was wonderfully awkward.

Over the years, white folks have amused me in regards to the words nigger/nigga. They get more offended at its usage than blacks. Example: When I was at the Dayton Daily News in the early 2000s, the Colonel White High School football coach, a white man, stepped down from his job through pressure after calling one of his players a nigga.

This coach was very comfortable around blacks, to the point that he thought he was one himself. One of his players failed to show up for practice. Surrounded by the team, which was all-black, the coach (who was always nice and professional to me) said in disgust, “That nigga don’t wanna play no football.”

I wrote a column about the incident. Do you know one of our white copy editors changed the word nigga to n-word throughout the story? I was incensed.

How’s a white man going to stop a nigga from using the word nigga? It must have been the first time in mankind that it happened.

I bring all this up because of what happened when I was teaching in an Alaskan bush village. I had a middle school Inupiat student named Calvin. All of the other teachers loathed him because he could be a knucklehead and was well below grade level in just about everything.

Here’s my interaction with him, an excerpt from chapter 9 of my new book:

“Calvin was already in a bad mood when he entered class. At least that’s what I gathered from the way he stormed in frowning, headphones on ear, rap music on full blast. He took a seat in his seventh grade reading class without turning his music off, his long and stringy hair half covering his eyes. I sat next to him. The first activity was a writing prompt, which he didn’t answer, but at least he was writing something.

I gave the class another prompt. I often like to answer the prompts myself while the students do. I tell them that I’m answering the prompt, too, and that I am old and need complete silence to write something intelligible. I said all this and sat at my desk to write. Headphones and music still on, Calvin propped his feet on his desk. I told him to put his feet back on the floor and he asked why. I let it go.

But he didn’t.

He started swearing, and he is as good at it as his sister. Fuck this and fuck that. I told him if he wanted to keep cursing that he could leave. I told him that everyone in the class had heard all of this from him before and to introduce us to some new words.

And then half under his breath, he said it.

“Dumb-ass nigger.”

I wish he hadn’t called me that. That word tends to leave a bruise. But you know what? I wasn’t fighting mad like I thought I would be. If you’re something other than black and you call one a nigger, there’s a strong likelihood he or she will, on reflex, start swinging. It never occurred to me, and not just because he was 12.

The strongest emotion I felt was disappointment. Why couldn’t he choose from the vast variety of go-to student insults directed at me in the lower 48? Why couldn’t I just be a bitch? Or a pussy. Or a motherfucker, dick or someone who sucks dick. Those are hard words.

Nigger is the hardest.

“Now I’m a nigger?” I asked him. The rest of the class sat still and silent, no longer writing, watching to see what would happen next.

Calvin threw his phone into his desk, kicked the legs on the desk and then shoved the desk. He then called me a “dumb-ass teacher” twice and stalked out of class, the same way he had entered it.

She doesn’t even know it, but I owe the black female teacher from the previous year an apology. She up and left the school during winter break. Went to the Lower 48 and never returned. She didn’t tell anyone she wasn’t coming back. I blamed her for her problems. A couple of students called her a nigger, too, and I reasoned that it was all her fault.

I’m now embarrassed that I ever did. Everyone I’ve asked, adult or student, said that the woman was an antagonistic racist and got what she deserved. I bought in. When the students insulted her, they said, it was in retaliation. Yeah, I bet.

I told Calvin to take his feet off the desk (He was lounging, y’all. Headphones and music on, as if my class was the kick-it spot.). And for that, I deserved what happened next?

That black teacher sued the school district for racial discrimination, and Laura was named in the lawsuit for being negligent. She asked me a few times if I thought the Inupiat had a race problem. I was so confident that they didn’t that I told her the week before I was slurred that I’d be her character witness. I would explain to the jurors that the natives have never insulted me based on my color.

I must have been out of my skull.

I truly felt like a fool.

I thought Calvin and I had a good relationship. I let him work out with the high school kids in the after-school weight-lifting class. I’d bought him snacks like I do for all of my students. He did the work in my class, with my help of course, almost all the time. I was disappointed.

Disappointed because I felt betrayed. All of the staff remarked that Calvin’s behavior had improved dramatically since he was a sixth grader. I’ll bet I had something to do with it.

And for inviting this kid into my personal space, this was the thanks I got.

I’m not sure Calvin knew the history behind the word. I hope he didn’t; I never asked. It’s possible that it boiled down to ignorance, because many of the Inupiat don’t even know their own history. I had taught Alaska Studies, Inupiat Lit and North Slope history. The Duck-In, Elizabeth Peratrovich and Project Chariot were all revelations to these kids and to the few adults who dared break their silence with me. So, why would I expect them to know “nigger” is fighting words?

Have you ever heard of Elizabeth Peratrovich? Or I should better phrase the question this way: Do you know a Martin Luther King existed before Martin Luther King? And this person was Alaskan?

Introducing Elizabeth Peratrovich, a Tlingit orphan who was born July 4, 1911, and raised in Peterburg, Alaska. She worked tirelessly on behalf of all Alaska natives to ensure that they received their civil rights. She died from breast cancer at 47 in 1958, 13 years after her baby, the Anti-Discrimination Act, was passed.

Having moved to Juneau in 1941, Peratrovich and husband Roy were outraged at the city’s various racist practices, including housing access. During this era, public facilities across Alaska posted signs in their front windows that warned “No dogs or Natives allowed.” The Peratroviches wrote a letter to Governor Ernest H. Gruening voicing their displeasure. From there, a revolutionist was born. Elizabeth traveled the country to gather support in getting an anti-discrimination law passed. Put to a House vote in 1943, the bill was rejected, although the votes were split. It passed in 1945, as the House now included two Natives.

Like MLK, Peratrovich was immensely quotable. Senator Allen Shattuck, who opposed the anti-discrimination law, asked, “Who are these people, barely out of savagery, who want to associate with us whites with 5,000 years of recorded civilization behind us?” Peratrovich’s response: “I would not have expected that I, who am barely out of savagery, would have to remind the gentlemen with 5,000 years of recorded civilization behind them of our Bill of Rights.”

Peratrovich checked Shattuck more than once. When he rhetorically asked her if she thought the bill would end discrimination, for he was convinced it wouldn’t, she dryly responded: “Do your laws against larceny and even murder prevent those crimes? No law will eliminate crimes. But at least you as legislators can assert to the world that you recognize the evil of the present situation and speak your intent to help us overcome discrimination.”

The woman was cool. As all of the legislative sessions on anti-discrimination predictably droned on, Peratrovich knitted until called upon to testify.

I taught Peratrovich to my Alaskan Studies class in the third quarter. None of the students had heard of her, as I’m sure the kids in the technical writing class hadn’t either. As soon as Calvin muttered nigger, I should have told the class that black people’s struggles in the lower 48 were similar to theirs in Alaska. That we were both dismissed as second-class citizens.

Did you know that the Air Force gave 102 Alaska native civilians and 19 servicemen doses of iodine-131 from 1955 to 1957 without telling them the drink contained small amounts of radiation? With Americans stationed in Alaska, near the Soviet Union, the Air Force hoped to determine if the thyroid gland, which can be traced by iodine-131, helped people adapt to low temperatures.

I learned this from the young adult novel I taught in the Inupiat Literature class, My Name is Not Easy. I asked the class what they knew about the Tuskegee Experiment. Crickets, of course, so I enlightened them. And they agreed that clinicians willfully not treating people with syphilis – in the name of research – did, in fact, sound a lot like willfully feeding folks radiation – also in the name of research.

You’re familiar with the sit-in movement of the 1960s at lunch counters across the South. What about the Barrow Duck-In that happened around the same time?

For centuries, Alaskans were able to hunt birds at will. That changed in 1959, when Alaska became a U.S. state. It would have to abide by federal hunting regulations that outlawed duck hunting from March 10^th to Sept. 1 every year, with the punishment for breaking the law being jail time. The law was primarily passed to fight sports hunting. Had the country’s lawmakers known anything about the Inupiat, they would have known the people here do not hunt for fun, only for subsistence. The Inupiat diet in 1961 consisted largely of whale and duck, but there weren’t enough whales to feed the city that spring. So, the natives hunted more duck. On May 20, a native was arrested for hunting geese out of season.

Outraged, Barrow natives formulated a plan. On May 20, 138 hunters from Barrow formed a line at the warden’s office while holding dead ducks – some killed during the hunting season, some not – claiming that they, too, should be arrested for hunting out of season. Realizing the logistics nightmare that jailing an entire community of people would present, the hunters were allowed to go home, though the 600 pounds of dead birds were taken to Fairbanks as evidence. The hunters would serve no time and by 1962, the law was relaxed.

A quote from Charlie Edwardsen Jr., one of the Duck-In protesters, summed up his people’s feelings best. “We were not about to change our diet,” he said, according to an online article by Michael Burwell. “We just have an ecological clock that says: ‘Hey, the ducks are here again. Let’s eat them.’ Our clock is stronger than law, which is not our law. We were still going to eat – we were saying we’re still going to be Eskimos.”

MLK wrote about the idea of going to jail through peaceful protest in Letter from Birmingham Jail in 1963. “An individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law.”

This particular dispatch from King is also called “The Negro is Your Brother.” I should have told that to Calvin’s classmates. Or I should have just kept it plain and shouted to the mountain tops, “All the shit y’all been through, why you’re more nigga than this nigga, niggas!”

I stuck it out for the rest of the day. But I was somewhere else the whole time. Later in the day, I had a question for Laura unrelated to the incident. As I left her office, she gave me the details about her talk with Calvin.

“I told him to write an apology,” Laura said. “And I told him if it happens again, he’s going to get suspended.”

This is his jive-ass, coached-up or ghost-written unedited apology:

“Mr. Lance I am sorry Mr. Lance for calling you nigga and fuck you and dumb ass and everything for kicking the trash

Next time I will do better and do my work and not call you names

Is there anything I can do to make it up to you

Nah, I’m good.