While the indignity of individual racial discrimination is a part of racial oppression in America, it is by no means the only or most important part. You can treat someone like a nigger without ever using the word. Racism has always been about power and policy, and reducing the complex history of white supremacy in America-from slavery to convict leasing to Jim Crow to mass incarceration-to naughty words ensures that it can never be understood. Neither its use, nor its absence, are by themselves evidence of racism or non-racism. As always, the relevant factor is the context in which it is used. The use of the word, though, can be appropriate or inappropriate. That standard has even been weaponized-most typically against black Americans who use it in an entirely different context to refer to one another.
Most white Americans accept that using the word is racist, but many believe that no offense short of using the word really counts.
Since then, the word has marked a strange kind of red line. “The issue they are hiding is that there is racism in … the Police Department.” Fuhrman’s taped remarks said nothing about the LAPD that much of the black community in Los Angeles did not already believe. “They hired to smokescreen the issue,” Robin Waller, a barber, told the Los Angeles Times in 1995. The incident was a flash point for the city and the country, symbolizing not only police brutality, but police impunity, the sense that the LAPD could abuse its powers without consequence.
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The Simpson trial came a few short years after four white police officers were acquitted in the beating of Rodney King, despite being caught on video. residents saw the trial as related to something bigger-the LAPD’s discriminatory policing. The tape was ultimately played for the jurors, and Simpson was acquitted-Darden’s prediction that the tape would throw the case became something like conventional wisdom outside of the black community. “And yet they still believe in this country.” “African Americans live with offensive words, offensive looks, offensive treatment every day of their lives,” Cochran said at the time. It’ll issue a test, and the test will be: Whose side are you on? The side of the white prosecutors and the white policemen, or are you on the side of the black defendant and his very prominent and capable black lawyer?” Johnnie Cochran, Simpson’s defense attorney, said Darden’s remarks, implying that black jurors would be unable to handle hearing the word, were patronizing. The prosecutor Chris Darden argued that “the N word” was the “dirtiest, filthiest, nastiest word in the English language,” and that “it’ll upset the black jurors. Fuhrman had previously denied using the word in the past decade the defense tracked down a recording of Fuhrman using it in conversation with a scriptwriter who was working on a film about the LAPD. Simpson trial, as Simpson’s defense team fought to get a tape of Los Angeles Police Detective Mark Fuhrman using the word admitted as evidence. The dividing line is hard to find, but one pivotal moment came during the O. Sometime in the past 25 years, using that word became the only proof of racism that much of the country is willing to accept. In 1993, The New York Times published an article headlined “Rap’s Embrace of ‘Nigger’ Fires Bitter Debate.” It’s not a word likely to find its way into headlines today.
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