A Guest Post by David Anthony- The 'N' Word

I think for most of us- for me anyway- we blog partly to exchange ideas and be provoked in to doing some thinking.

Which is why I think it's a good idea to surrender the chair sometimes and give someone else a turn. There are a lot of things to be said for it.

Now we've had some posts by dead guys here, tonight we have one from a living thinker, to be found at David Anthony Republic, linked below.

David has some thought provoking words to offer on taking away the power of words to wound.

This is David Anthony, on the 'N' word.

Much has changed in Western society since Martin Luther King, Jr. led 250,000 people up to the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC and delivered his ‘I have a dream’ speech. Gone are the segregated buses that trawled through the streets of Atlanta, gone are the separated water fountains, and gone, by and large, are the social divisions maintained by oppressive white people to separate themselves from the black community. We now live in a world that recognises the iniquity and immorality of those manufactured social separations from an age past to history. But one festering relic of those dark days still remains … the N word.

The word that embodied all of the - self-proclaimed – superiority and hate of the white man over black still sifts low over the doldrums of modern society. In a world in which ethnic and social divisions are being eroded away, why does this word still exist and still contain so much hatred and cause for offence?


In my opinion, it is precisely because the word is stigmatised within the modern vernacular that it continues to exist within its own self-made cesspool. Like the last stocks of Smallpox maintained in securely-kept laboratories, so the N word is locked away from public usage and continues to linger.

By removing it from public discourse we are removing its ability to morph and change as all other words do. The way things are at the moment, only the hate-mongers in our society have access to the word, everyone else is terrified to even utter its sound. The hatred attached to the word is therefore heightened and those wishing to hate feel, somehow, vindicated in their distasteful beliefs.


Words are simply labels which access thoughts and emotions within our own minds. It is not the word itself that causes offence, it is the associations we all have of it in our collective unconscious. By storing away the word, we a denying its ability to change into something more positive. Also by storing it away, we are maintaining its hate-filled associations within our own minds.

Gay people learned long ago that the way to remove hatred and venom from a word was to claim it as their own and ridicule it. It's at a point now where the people hurling those abusive words at gay people are made to look ridiculous, rather than their desired intent. The same can be true for racists too; if we – as a society and as individuals – have the courage to open up the proverbial Pandora’s Box and allow the word freedom to claim back its rightful identity, we can allow it to grow into something positive.

I realise that some words are harder to claim back from the haters than others (and this is undoubtedly the hardest) but locking away anything, whether it be words or swastikas will not heal anything, it only serves to preserve the hate speech and paraphernalia of those wishing to continue hating.


Black people have, in a way, taken back ownership of the word, but not in a positive way. The word is now used by people such as 50cent in a derogatory manner, highlighting the sub-gang culture that has developed within America’s inner-cities. This is also offensive to other Black people who do not wish to be associated with this culture. Also, all other ethnic groups are still denied usage of the word and the stigma remains.


You may have noticed that I have avoided using the word in this article. This is because it is still such an emotive word and has enormous capacity to cause offence. I hope, that one day in the future, we are able to free the word from its hate-filled prison and allow it to grow as a flower… and not as a weed.