“Nigger” or “What August Wilson taught me about the N-word”

You know what you are? It took me a while to figure it out. You a negro. White people will get confused and call you a nigger but they don’t know like I know. I know the truth of it. I’m a nigger.

-Sterling Johnson, from August Wilson’s Radio Golf

It’s a word we have become afraid even to talk about. A word used often in rap songs, but hidden in schools behind the ever popular and accepted N-word. A word that was originally used to belittle and humiliate people who were brought to this country solely to be used by other men.

In my whole life, I don’t think I’ve heard this word featured so powerfully and so poignantly and so often, as I did the other day when I filmed a presentation of monologues and short scenes from the playwright August Wilson. I was stunned by Wilson’s use of the word, as it has become, in my generation, a word best left alone.

When I asked several audience members (three black women) what they thought of the show, I couldn’t help but ask if anything in the show had shocked them. They said no, they hadn’t been shocked exactly, but they thought the issues that Wilson talked about through his characters were still very poignant today.

But did they not hear the abundance of that particular word? Or had I heard it differently, as a white woman who has been taught not to even say the word in discussion for fear of offending a black American.

And this is a major internal dilemma I have. Certainly, I don’t want to offend anybody—I don’t want any black Americans that I know and count as friends to think that I am using the word merely because it is within my power and right to use it. If even the use of the word hurts someone, then perhaps the word itself has taken on a power that needs to be checked.

My conclusion is that this is one of those things that has no real conclusion. The N-word is a part of our consciousness as Americans and represents a history of power struggles between blacks and whites. It has been used to hurt and it has been used, in the case of Wilson’s plays, to liberate and tell truths that sometimes would rather not be told.