A Short Story about Running and the N-Bomb
I was out running about half an hour ago, only half a mile to go, feeling a little worn out and looking forward to stopping. Running through the summer will acquaint one quickly with the atmospheric patterns of a place: in Portland, no matter how hot it’s going to get, if you’re out before 9 AM, you’re fine; in New York, you’d better leave before the sun comes up or you’re going to suffocate. I had failed to make the 9 AM cutoff and was sweltering pretty badly as I came down 33rd Ave behind Cleveland High School, just entering my neighborhood.
That’s when I saw a guy across the street waving at me. He called out something that I didn’t quite hear through the music I was listening to. Under better circumstances — if my legs were feeling better, or it were about ten degrees cooler — I would not have stopped, certainly not so close to home. But honestly? I was glad to have an excuse today. So I pulled up, took out my headphones, and made obvious from my body language that I was listening.
“Hey my nigga!” called the guy. He was ill-dressed, standing next to a broken down Trans Am that wore every one of its 30-odd years in its paint job. “Do you know where Martins Street is?”
Now. This is not the first time I’ve been called nigga. But it’s not the tenth, either. If you haven’t looked at the photograph on the front page of this website, I’ll just tell you that I’m a pasty-faced white dude with hair that was reddish-brown until it started going prematurely white, at which point all the red iced over. I don’t tend to run with packs of white people who are so clueless as to think it’s cool to refer to one another in this way, though I do know those people exist. The only times I can remember being called nigga before this were by black friends of mine, who were mostly doing it to glean humor from how uncomfortable it made me. And they were right, it probably was pretty funny to watch this whiteboy squirm when confronted with a word so larded up with meaning.
All of this is tumbling through my mind in the split second after the dude across the street asks for directions, and — simultaneously — I’m trying to figure out if my interlocutor is white or black. I’m wearing sunglasses, non-prescription, and he’s pretty far away.
“Uh, Martins Street?” I say.
By now the dude is crossing the street. A couple of things are becoming clearer: (1) he is definitely also white; (2) he’s in much rougher shape than I initially realized — unbathed, clothes dirty.
“Yeah, my nigga.” He’s also inebriated in some way — probably not drunk, because he smells overwhelmingly of cigarettes without a whiff of alcohol anywhere — and he’s gaining some kind of weird pleasure in using this word. The count of times I’ve been called it in my life skyrockets past 20 as I look up Martins Street on my phone.
“Yeah, there are these huge trees down there, 34th and Martins, they’re cutting them down,” he says.
Here I bang into some more bad mental calculus: I’m guessing that this dude is homeless and intends to use the wood from the fallen tree for . . . something? But then:
“I guess there’s gonna be a big protest down there, nigga.”
I’m thinking maybe I should say something about this dude’s casual use of the word, but my innate social awkwardness leads me to fear his reaction, so I keep staring at my phone, wondering if this is just some clueless guy or what — wondering what that relish is in his voice, when he’s saying nigga over and over again. But then he says, with radiant enthusiasm:
“Did you hear that Obama said it on television yesterday?”
There’s no question what it is. It actually wasn’t on television, it was on Marc Maron’s WTF podcast, and he didn’t just casually toss out the word for funsies. This is what he said:
“Racism, we are not cured of it. And it’s not just a matter of it not being polite to say nigger* in public . . . That’s not the measure of whether racism still exists or not. It’s not just a matter of overt discrimination. Societies don’t, overnight, completely erase everything that happened 200 to 300 years prior.”
*I put a lot of thought into whether or not to blankety-blank out this word, spelled this way, and I decided not to. There are a host of reasons, but the main one is this: dashes, asterisks, n-words or no, we all know what it is. And the point I’m going to make below kind of depends on that.
When I heard that n-bomb drop while listening to WTF yesterday, I kinda knew what was coming. I think a lot of us did. Probably the President did. A huge amount of the coverage of the interview has been about Obama’s use of that word. (Let’s be clear — the interview was a little boring. But I doubt it would have changed that much if the President had just opened up his brain and let all the crazy out. This was the easy soundbite.) A lot of the right-wing media reacted with OUTRAGE — “double standard” is a phrase I saw thrown around some.
Of course, this is all missing the point, in the most depressingly typical way possible. Because the other operative word in that sentence, as fas as I can tell, is polite. These people don’t really believe that Obama said or did anything racist. And if they desperately want to use racist language themselves, they’ll actually find — surprise surprise — that if they use it in an abstracted, thoughtful way, the way Obama did, it will probably make some people blanch, but the cavalry of bleeding hearts and PC warriors they’re worried about won’t actually show up. What’s got them up in arms, really, is how impolite it is for anyone to say the word nigger out loud. It just makes you take a deep breath. You can feel the floor sinking away from you, and it seems like the drop — into culture, class, history and race — might be infinite.
*
Some inchoate version of all of these thoughts bloomed in my mind over the course of this interaction, along with the dawning realization that this dude had got the wrong message, somehow, too — that because the most famous black guy on earth said it, now we all get to (should?) say it all the time. That’s clearly not the point, either. But somehow this feels less insidious. I guess because it’s less calculated. Or more correctable? But then, someone would have to step up and correct the guy.
I sure didn’t do that. I gave him directions — possibly wrong — to Martins Street. Then he shook my hand. His skin was callused and cracked. Then he decided to hug me, which brought me in close contact with his powerful tobacco smell. Then he told me, “You’re doing a good job, man!”
As I was jogging away, wondering idly if I’d given him the wrong directions, I glanced back to where he was crossing the street. His traveling companion was a woman in a gray sweatshirt, who I hadn’t seen before. She was leaning up against the Trans-Am, smoking. She was also black. And that, ladies and germs — that, I have no idea what to make of.