The Persistent Use of the N-Word
It’s commonly thought that race is only a problem as long as we continue to perpetuate the conversation. That the constant pushing of racialized agendas drives division in our country. This argument falls apart when we see the ongoing bigotry and prejudice perpetuated and experienced with our K-12 aged children.
A pervasive issue among administrative staff at K-12 public schools and athletic programs is White kids’ use of the n-word to describe their Black classmates. These incidents do not invovle the complicated use of the n-word in urban slang often found in music or video and utilized within African American culture. Using the n-word within the pop-culture context has significant problems, but they are problems that African American culture will need to address for itself.
Studies are difficult to find on the subject of the use of the n-word in K-12 but a simple Google search is revealing. N-word in K-12 education will provide over 500 million search results with page after page of local news outlets describing incidents in regional schools. One study by the US Government Accountability Office highlights a particular number of cases in a Utah school district that the US Department of Justice investigated.
…In September 2021, Justice reported that school and district officials in Utah’s Davis School District “had actual knowledge of at least 212 incidents in which Black students were called the n-word across 27 schools, as well as additional incidents of race- based harassment of Black or Asian-American students.” 6 For example, according to Justice, Black students in the Davis School District reported that “White and other non-Black students routinely called Black students the n-word . . . [said] that their skin was dirty and looked like feces . . . taunted Black students with monkey noises, [and] touch[ed] and pull[ed] their hair.” 7 Justice also found that school and district officials ignored student and parent complaints about hostile behaviors, and “were deliberately indifferent to known racial harassment of students.” Justice’s investigation also “found that the district disregarded student witnesses who corroborated allegations and took no or minimal action to eliminate the hostile environment. For example, one school received a complaint that a teacher constantly ridiculed a Hispanic student and taunted him for working at a taco truck (though the student did not).” Justice’s investigation “uncovered systemic failures in the district’s handling of complaints of racial student-on-student and staff-on-student harassment.”
6 U.S. Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division, Education Opportunities Section, Letter to the Davis School District, DJ 169–77–26 SS:WP:AV:JJ and USAO:2019V00231 (2021).
7 Among other examples, Justice reported that “peers taunted Black students . . . repeatedly referencing slavery and lynching, and telling Black students’ go pick cotton’ and ‘you are my slave’” and that a “White student dressed as Hitler for Halloween, marched in a parade throughout his elementary school while performing the Nazi salute, and no school staff stopped him or reported his costume and behavior to school administration.”
Don’t be fooled; Utah doesn’t have an excessive number of incidents. They had a microscope put on them. This problem exists in your town, your schools, and your community. The question we should be asking ourselves is why does this exist?
We can’t heal what we don’t understand. To know why the perpetuation of the n-word exsits in our youth culture today, we need to understand where this ideology and paradigm come from. This is the story:
The n-word has a deep derogatory history, not simply used to describe individuals of African descent, but to demean their humanity to sub-human status. The prohibition of white people using the n-word exists to remove a cultural power dynamic that has been alive and well since the invention of chattel enslavement in 1680’s Virginia.
The n-word comes from the racialized moniker Negroid, which first emerged in 16th century Europe as the pseudoscience of race began to take form within that society. As the concepts of science and supremacy merge in the European psyche, academic papers began to circulate ideas about sub-species within the classification of homo sapiens (human beings). The Linnaean Biological Classification stopped at species for all flora and fauna on earth, but for homo sapiens the sub-category of race was created to affirm the false idea the Europeans were set apart from the rest of humanity.
Europeans strived to see themselves as something more-than. The deeply embedded biases that European architecture, art, mathematics, scientific endeavor, warfare, faith, and politics were supreme examples of human existence began to warp European identity. Nothing could be farther from the truth, as numerous cultures worldwide were far more advanced in almost all of these areas over the European countries of the time. Furthermore, much of European identity was rooted in Greek, Roman, Ptolemaic, and Arabic culture transplanted and appropriated by Christian Scribes in earlier centuries.
However, as 100 years of study in psychological and human behavior have taught us, traumatic events create riffs in the human psyche that cause individuals and groups affected by such circumstances to inflict trauma on others: Hurt people, hurt people. European history is rife with compounded traumatic histories dating back to the extermination of indigenous Northern European cultures by Julius Ceasar in 58 B.C.
The colonization of European Indigenous peoples were further compounded by centuries of atrocities within the European borders. Roman civil wars, the rise of the papacy, the assimilation of Christianity into pagan society, 800 years of crusades, power struggles of monarchy, invading armies, famines, plagues, ethnic cleansing in the Iberian Peninsula, and the rise of the inquisitions.
In the 16th century, these events collided with innovations in ship wrighting and cartography allowing Europeans to explore beyond the shores of the continent. The Doctrine of Discovery was drafted by Pope Nicholas V. in the Papal Bull of 1552, paving the way for global colonization. He instructed King Alfonso V of Portugal to sail to the west coast of Africa and;
Invade, capture, vanquish, and subdue all Saracens, pagans, and other enemies of Christ. To reduce their persons to perpetual enslavement and to take away all their possessions and property.
The Papal bulls would be reissued by Popes to validate new campaigns of colonization in 1455, 1456,1481,1493,1506, and 1514.
These junctions of events launched Christopher Columbus across the ocean forty years later and supplanted European trauma throughout the world in the form of European Global Colonization; a paradigm still very much alive today. This perpetual state of colonizing land, resources, ideology and human beings is known as #TheColonizedMind.
As humans colonize each other, dehumanizing those being colonized is necessary to justify such actions. The pseudoscientific concept of race festered in European academic society as the means of rationalizing the atrocities of colonization for a Christian continent.
European peoples were originally classified as a member of the Caucasian race. This name is derived from the mountain range dividing Europe from the Asian sub-continent, the Caucus Mountains. Words for the other races took various forms over several centuries. The final versions would include three divisive sub-human classifications: Negroid for African descent, Mongoloid for Asian descent, and Austrailoid for those in the southern Pacific regions. Each of these classifications came with cultural explainers and racially biased justifications for the maltreatment, enslavement, and subjugation of all other races under Caucasian dominion.
As Spanish colonization began to take hold in the Southern Americas, and diseases like smallpox systematically disseminated 90% of Indigenous populations, labor was needed to replace them and keep the economic machine of colonization alive. Portuguese enslavers met the demand for labor, with their West African enslavement economy established fifty years prior to Columbus’ sailing. The Negro people, as the Spanish referred to them, were forcibly transplanted into Spanish colonies of the new world.
The word negro means black in Spanish and came from the Latin word niger, which is the etymological root for the racial description of Nigroid. One hundred years later, when the invention of chattel enslavement arose in the English colony of Virginia, the slang word for negro that we’re all familiar with today would have already been well established. The n-word we hear in popular music and movies is a derivatized, racialized slur to describe people of African descent through the pseudoscience of race. It was designed to classify people of African descent as being less-than-human and, therefore, worthy of the enslavement enacted upon them by European colonizers.
In 2021, the Human Genome Project mapped the last sections of the human genome, an effort that took 32 years to complete. Early in the project, it became apparent that the genetic variation among members of the homo sapien species (human beings) was negligible. Human beings across the spectrum of the pseudo-scientific divisions of race are actually 99.98% genetically identical. This effort put to rest the centuries-long pseudoscientific belief that there is a sub-species category within homo sapiens that we call race. There is no such biological or scientific reality.
However, our society continues to be plagued by social systems set up under a racial paradigm. We’ve inherited and continue to build an entire social dynamic based on dominion, supremacy, subjugation, and exploitation. Afterall, that was the purpose behind the creation of race in the first place. This is evident in the ongoing usage of race in our daily lives.
We must all racially categorize for census data, bank loans, demographic analysis, or student enrollment. It is perpetuated in our media, science fiction providing an excellent example. In almost every instance, fictionalized species living in these sci-fi universes are classified as races within the written dialogue. Star Trek, Star Wars, Ender’s Game, Galaxy Quest, Guardians of the Galaxy, Avatar, and even Contact all use the word race to describe other sentient, bipedal species in their universes.
So, why do we continue perpetuating a fraudulent paradigm designed specifically for division and dominion? We do it because it is within each of us. This is #TheColonizedMind at work.
America is a birthplace of exploitative systems that were designed to advance the few on the backs of many. We, as Americans, chaif at such accusations. We far more enjoy the revised histories of discovery, hardship, sacrifice and opportunity. Unfortunately, the history that is written in colonial and American law, journals of conquest, and analogues of exploration tell a story of calculated and deliberate human actions to take what wasn’t theirs and ensure that they would keep it. All you have to do is read them for yourself.
Our European ancestors were fully invested in the opportunity the new world afforded because the old world had failed them. All they had to do was give up the ethnic identites from lands which they came in exchange for the racialized identity that would ensure their prosperity; White. A racialized identity that has no connection to ethnicity, history, genetics, tradition, indigeneity, community, or land: A whiteboard, a blank slate, a construct in which colonized indoctrination, values of superiority, and manipulated mythos are can be laid over. This is America. This is #TheColonizedMind.
Whiteness has a difinititive beginning in history. It starts with the bondservant society that formed the 17th-century colonies of Virginia and Maryland. Throughout the 1600’s, English poor, homeless and prison populations where forcibly sent to the colony to work a bond-servant contract under the rule of English noble govenorship. They were joined in 1619 by the first Africans in America that came off a Dutch ship called the White Lion. The White Lion had taken the human “cargo” by force from a Portugese enslaver ship on route to the Caribbean colonies.
Many bond-servants didn’t survive long enough to see freedom in the early years. As the decades passed and conditions improved, laws were enacted to ensure those in bondage stayed in bondage; an ongoing act of power over the population that had devastating consequences.
This social hierarchy would eventually descending into the creation of a new legal class of people identified as “White” and “Black” in 1681. This legal evolution on the pseudo-science of race was inspired by the bond-labor revolt of Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676. English and African indentured-servants revolted and demanded better conditions and the guarentee of land once their contracts were fullfilled. They were defeated in 1677.
To ensure such a labor disruption would never occur again, the Virginia Governor and English Noble colonial elites wrote laws to separate the labor & land owner classes by the color of their skin. To be clear, they wrote laws to seperate those below them by phenyol type; an act of divide and conquer. Thus, for the first time in history, White and Black were legally born: One destined to participate in the creation of society, the writing of law, the ownership of property. The other to a legacy of enslavement passed down generationally in perpetuity until emancipation in 1863.
These two acts ripple through history and deeply impact our present day. The word White and the upholding of White supremacy was wrtitten into American laws hundreds of times and upheld by the US Supreme Court on two seperate occasions. Whiteness was a legal construct at the birth of our nation that has never been definitively defined but was regularly utilized to ensure White citizens had more rights and opportunity than any other race in America. Over 300 laws were passed from 1774–1964 to ensure this paradigm stayed in place. Conversely, the creation of chattel enslavement was a completely unique form of enslavement in the world. It was based on the idea that anyone that was Black was less-than human. There had never been a form of enslavement based on phenotypical features of human beings.
Although we have removed the legal construct of race from our society with the enactment of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the social, economic, political, educational, scientific, and religious structures of race are very much alive in our culture. How could it not be? These are the very seeds that gave way to the tree of our union.
The colonized systems of dominion and supremacy are embedded throughout our social structure: How we extract resources for the earth, our insatiable consumption of goods, our unsustainable food cultivation methods, and the perpetual-growth paradigm are all driven by the foundational idea that humans have dominion over all we survey. #TheColonizedMind
They are, in fact, unsustainable colonized systems. Unfortunately for us, we have thousands of years of the rise and fall of human civilizations to demonstrate that unsustainable societies inevitably crash. We desperately need to understand these concepts in a new way; with fresh eyes and open hearts. At it’s core, racial equity work is about dismantling destructive paradigms for us all and creating new ones that encourage individual transformation toward a new way of being: That is what systemic transformation looks like.
The evidence that these racialized paradigms reside in our children’s perspectives is found by how they’re taught and conditioned to behave. When a white boy uses the n-word in a way that is meant to segregate his peers along racially divisive lines, he is enforcing dominion over another. When this is performed within a group dynamic, as it often is, it’s an act of supremacy. When teachers, parents, and law enforcement, all embedded within systems that have perpetuated and upheld this supremacy of whiteness, do nothing to curtail this behavior or change the narrative, they are systemically furthering the indoctrinating paradigm of racial superiority. That is what being comfortable with the status quo looks like and why doing something about it is deeply uncomfortable.
No one said the issue of race was simple or binary. No one should believe for a second that one side is innocent while another is guilty. Colonized paradigms and racialized identities run deep in the roots of America and within each of us. We are all of #TheColonizedMind. It will take more than just ignoring race to make it go away. It will take a reckoning that must be perpetuated by every individual who lives, works, and breathes within this system. Certainly, the use of the n-word in popular culture needs to be addressed by the cultural group that continues to broadcast it in an effort to possess their own culture. That flawed strategy in only perpetuating an already destructive system.
That is not where white responsibility lies. White America must take responsibility for dismantling racialized paradigms; for its design was to uphold whiteness and accumulate power. Americans of European descent need to take accountability for their children and peers’ continued desire to subjugate through language, and their own attitude and comfort within the status quo. Americans of European descent must not only let go of whiteness, but boldly dismantle its cultural and individual existence as the fraudulent identity that it is.
Our European ancestors were duped into believing that all was to be gained through a racialized paradigm. It is about to cost us everything.
#DividedWeStand #UnitedWeFall #WokenessIsWhiteness #DismantlingWhiteness #HealingTheColonizedMind #SelfAwareness #SelfReflection #SelfRegualtion #TheGuidingPriciplesOfAlohā #EvolutionOfAlohā
Jeremy Tunnell is an author, facilitator and consultant with Co3 Consulting. Jeremy writes and presents on dismantling whiteness, personal and organizational resilience and our reality in the Unified Field. Together with his partner, Dr. Gerry Ebalaroza-Tunnell, they lead teams and organizations in equity and inclusion through Healing the Colonized Mind and Whole Systems Leadership. Gerry is the principle consultant for Co3 Consulting and author of the upcoming book Evolution of Aloha. Together, they host The Plowline Podcast.
For More Information https://linktr.ee/co3consulting
