John Bonnell, the Macomb Community College English professor who has been suspended several times for his use of profanity in the classroom, writes with some trenchant thoughts on my post about how speech codes teach us to revile words at the expense of comprehending context:

Your entry for November 22 is accurate, to say the least. Conniption fits over utterances of the word "nigger" indeed tell "a disturbing story of collective incomprehension in which the desire to root out and punish racist speech has reached such a hysterical pitch that reason and context have fallen by the wayside." An article in today's Detroit Free Press's "Entertainment" section by Terry Lawson is similarly on point. Mr. Lawson writes:

The Source charges ['that Eminem was, or is, a racist'] remind me of nothing more than what a friend calls the Two Detroits. The old Detroit looks for every signal of racism and seizes on examples and slanders, and waves around the bloody shirt of past injustices. The new Detroit looks at this sadly, like an abandoned building that we can't get torn down.

Just a few days ago. A friend was telling me his daughter had informed him that she didn't spend one minute a day thinking about race and that, as a black man who had spent his formative years preoccupied with prejudice, he didn't know whether to be concerned or happy. [Ed. note: Eminem has recently been accused of racism for using the word "nigger" in a rap song he recorded a decade ago]

Try "happy," if we are ever to exit the valley of darkness. In the meantime, Julian Bond style race-prospectors continue to do enormous damage not only to hopes for reconciliation but also to the nation's fundamental freedoms. An absurd ruling in the Sixth Circuit, DAMBROT v CENTRAL MICHIGAN (1995), let stand the firing of a basketball coach for using the word "nigger" with his players, black and white. The coach had first requested the players' permission, stating that his usage was on analogy with those who utter "my niggah" as a term of endearment. The players found the usage curious, but harmless. All but one indignantly defended the coach's prerogative. Not so the University and "black" federal judge Damon Keith, who ruled that the word was no part of any "public concern" and therefore perfectly punishable by any censorious official. In making this call, the judge also did incalculable damage to the "academic freedom" of all professors, claiming that the desire to motivate students is also no part of "public concern." (The partisan plasticity called "public concern" and "political correctness" are both PC variants.) Never mind how this undercuts the "how" teachers teach, the only aspect of traditional academic freedom once said to belong inviolably to the teacher's discretion. Hell, teachers who care about their profession are constantly talking about, and tinkering with, ways to motivate their charges! ("Hell," all by its singular heft, is one of the words I have been warned can terminate my career.)

This same benighted ruling was used against me by the same court in 2001, despite its wholesale irrelevancy. Another "black" judge, a protÈgÈ of Judge Keith, wrote that my diction was proscriptive because the university wishes it so. He conveniently forgot that his mentor tried to isolate coaches from classroom instructors, however ill advised such a prejudice may be. As with DAMBROT, considerable weight was placed upon another bit of judicial foolishness called MARTIN v PARRISH (1986) wherein a college teacher was punished based upon Supreme Court suppression of a high schooler's speech (BETHEL SCHOOL DISTRICT v FRASER, 1986). One vicious act of censorship inspires another, and another, and another. Like PLESSY v FERGUSON revisited, "dark" words and "light" words are not allowed to ride the same train of discourse.

With considerable trepidation, I teach a story on occasion (last week, for instance) that has met with de facto suppression: Flannery O'Connor's "Artificial Nigger." I doubt that there is an anthology in print anywhere in America that still offers this superb work of art, despite the fact that it is one of the most penetrating studies of the psychology of racism ever penned. The loss of its sense, of its beauty, is precisely a reflection of the hypocrisy and opportunism that now plagues a confused nation. I claim a right to teach this story as an American and as a lifelong CaulkedAsian, my sobriquet for myself. My students, most of them, clearly appreciate an opportunity to talk and write frankly about a subject so taboo that the correlative tension guarantees that "nigger" will enjoy a vigorous, if underground, survival for generations to come.

We are becoming a nation of linguistic prudes, so uptight about the mere mention of certain words that we cannot distinguish the how and the why of their usage. Along the way, we lose not only our sense of language and our understanding of art, but also our minds: we seem to think that we can ban racism by banning words, that punishing people for saying the word "nigger"--no matter what the context--will somehow purge our culture of racial injustice. In reality, as the case of the traumatized high school students reveals, we are just increasing our problems by consecrating the related notions that words can wound, that the mere aural experience of certain terms can be traumatic, and that those who are most vulnerable to such trauma (and who are, by extension, least capable of living in the real world), are women and people of non-white descent. Nobody gains from such condescension.

Note: Flannery O'Connor's "The Artificial Nigger" may have been silently pushed out of anthologies. But it's still in print, and it's also available online. If you have not read it--or other work by this remarkable writer--you should. I recommend The Complete Stories, which I was assigned in college. We discussed "The Artificial Nigger" at length in class. No one thought it was racist. Everyone understood that the story is a powerful analysis of where racism comes from and how it works.