Stephen Colbert and Philosophy - Aaron Allen Schiller [109]
Stephen’s License to Offend
But perhaps we’re being too hasty. Perhaps the relevant issue isn’t whether or not Stephen is really Alan’s friend but the mere fact that Stephen is trying—in his own self-absorbed way, to be sure—to be his friend. The trying itself, we might think, gives Stephen the license to offer his skewed view of Rosa Parks as overrated.
Maybe this is right. Maybe not. The question is complicated. Linguistic license is tricky precisely because community involvement is so squishy (which is a technical term, by the way!). To see what I mean, consider the uniquely American debate about the use of what has been described as “the most hateful word in the English language,” a word that many will never say and refer to as the “N-word.” Much of the debate is driven by a clash between the existence of a seeming double standard over the use of the N-word and the popularity of that term among African-American performers, at least since Richard Pryor. After an early career that Jabari Asim describes as an “amicable Cosby-esque performer,” Pryor drastically changed his comedy act in the late 1960s with monologues such as “Super Nigger,” the first track off of his self-titled debut comedy album. In these and other performances for over a decade, Pryor used the N-word in his act as a way to confront his audience’s views about race, until, during a 1979 visit to Kenya, he decided to abandon the word.185
Many on the long list of performers influenced by Pryor, however, have not taken his lead. Countless comedians, actors, directors, musicians and others have adopted the confrontational use of the N-word so central to Pryor’s comedy from those years: Chris Rock, Samuel L. Jackson, Spike Lee, and Tupac Shakur, just to name a few. Not surprisingly, their fans have adopted their use of that word as well, sometimes without the self-reflective philosophy that might explain why they use the N-word. It’s partly because of the proliferation of unreflective users of the N-word that there is debate now over how the N-word should be used, if it should be used at all.
In his book Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word (Pantheon, 2002), Harvard Law School Professor Randall Kennedy takes up this debate and argues against what he calls the “Regulationists” and the “Eradicationists.” As Kennedy lays it out, Regulationists believe that the N-word can only be used by a select group of people (though just who belongs to this select group is matter of some debate). For many who hold to this way of thinking, the N-word should be taken back by the African-American community. Only then will the sting be taken out of it. To Eradicationists, however, the N-word is irredeemable and, as such, should be eradicated from the English language.
But why is it irredeemable? And what should we say about the free use of the N-word made by, for example, black entertainers? Noted cultural critic and scholar Jabari Asim takes up just these questions in what amounts to an extended defense of the Eradicationist position: his 2007 book The N Word: Who Can Say It, Who Shouldn’t, and Why (Houghton Mifflin, 2007). He makes his case through a detailed history of the use of N-word in the service of white racism. The book is difficult, sometimes painful reading. As Asim shows, the N-word has a long and ugly history. It begins with a quote from Abraham Lincoln saying, “I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race”186 and traces the origins of the white supremacist image of “the nigger” to Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia. Asim’s view