In a useless move, the New York City Council passed a resolution Wednesday banning the public use of the word “nigger” (or “nigga,” “niggas” and any other variation of the word).
Well, they didn’t ban it exactly, as making it illegal for people to use a particular word in public violates the First Amendment. They just suggested that people not use it. They discouraged people from using it.
Passing a symbolic ban, as the city council called it, is not a good way for councilmembers to be spending their time.
How would they actually enforce this ban? Would they issue symbolic tickets to be paid with symbolic money? And we hardly think that a big statement by the city will actually deter someone from changing their minds one way or the other about the word.
It seems the council should be spending its time passing actual bans and laws that it can actually enforce. But that’s only the first problem with the city council’s decision. Putting the implications of the n-word aside for a moment, why would the council single it out as an offensive word that should be banned?
Is the word “nigger” somehow more offensive than the words “faggot,” “dyke,” “chink,” “spic,” “gook” or “kike”?
By specifically banning a racial slur against one group, the city council fails to address the problems faced by various other groups.
Why should it be acceptable to use slurs against gays, lesbians, Chicanos, Hispanics, Asians and Jews, but not blacks? In a city comprised of many different racial groups, who all face problems with racism and stereotypes, it is highly inappropriate for the city council to specifically condemn the use of racist terms against only one.
But it hardly seems likely that a symbolic ban of a single word will do much to address racism anyway.
According to The New York Times, New York City Councilman Leroy G. Comrie Jr., who sponsored the resolution, said he was prompted to address the use of the word “nigger” after he observed the widespread use of the term among black youth.
“People are … denigrating themselves by using the word and disrespecting their history ““ disrespecting the history of a people and a country and also putting themselves in a negative light that we need to correct,” he said.
Comrie’s intentions seem to be noble, but he is addressing the problem of racism in entirely the wrong way: Eliminating the use of a word is not an effective way to eliminate the racism behind it.
If the New York City Council, and the dozen or so other councils across the state which passed similar resolutions following Manhattan’s move to ban the word, wants to address racism in their cities and among their youth, there are much better ways to do so than passing an unenforceable ban on a single word.
Instead of passing a ban on a word, city leaders should be enacting campaigns that are actually meaningful.
There is much more to racism than racial slurs. People continue to hold stereotypes and hatreds based on race and symbolically banning a word does not address those.
Councilmembers should be working to increase educational efforts to end tensions between races at the root instead of making grand empty gestures.
While there is a long history of racism and violence associated with the use of the word “nigger,” it is not the word alone that allows racism to continue today.