What the F
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It’s counterintuitive that the very people most injured by a defamatory word would adopt it as their own. But this same reappropriation of slurs has happened over and over again across the world and across denigrated groups. Instead of using offense at certain derogatory group labels as an impetus to try to decrease use of those terms, some people co-opt and recast them as badges of proud group membership. Some African Americans use nigga, just as some homosexuals use queer or faggot, and some women use bitch or slut. These reappropriators often feel they can mitigate a word’s power to offend or hurt by taking ownership of it.
There is a little evidence that this works. A 2013 research paper reported on ten studies designed to understand the ecology of slur reappropriation—who does it, when, and what effects it has.23 The most revealing experiments explored participants’ responses when someone else used a slur to describe him- or herself. Researchers randomly assigned people to read a newspaper article in which someone belonging to a stigmatized group was described with a slur, like queer in one experiment and bitch in another. In each experiment there were two conditions, which differed only in terms of who used the derogatory term. For half of the participants, an outsider was quoted as saying, “You’re queer” or “Your name is bitch,” to another individual. For the other half, the homosexual or female person in question was quoted as saying, respectively, “I’m queer” or “My name is bitch.” After reading their assigned version of the article, participants rated how negative the given word was, on a scale from 1 to 7. For queer, the difference was massive. Participants who read, “You’re queer,” rated queer as extremely offensive, with an average score of nearly 7 out of 7. But those who read, “I’m queer,” rated it about 4.5 in offensiveness. The bitch experiment produced the same type of effect, in the same direction, but wasn’t quite as pronounced. Ratings swung from 5.9 following other-labeling of bitch to 4.7 after self-labeling—still a significant difference.
The upshot is that when you observe people using a slur to describe their own group, that word seems less offensive to you, at least in the short term. But we don’t have any experimental evidence about potential longer-term effects of self-labeling on feelings about the slur—either among the people who self-label with it or outsiders.
We do know that once reappropriated, a slur expands and morphs into something nearly unrecognizable, at least linguistically. Nigger has changed a lot since it became nigga. Some really revealing data comes from a paper presented at the Linguistic Society of America conference in 2015. The researchers, who speak AAE, documented the use of nigga in contemporary English by analyzing 20,000 tweets containing the word.24 They found that nigga retains very little similarity to nigger.
For one thing—and I think many people will be familiar with this use—nigga serves as a generic noun that neutrally refers to usually male, usually African American people. I say “usually” because each of these generalizations has rampant counterexamples.25 For instance, it can occasionally refer to nonhumans. An attested example from the study is this tweet: “I adopted a cat and I love that nigga like a person.” It can also refer to people who are not African American, as in this tweet: “This white nigga just slapped his mom x_X.” So the word has migrated substantially. This generic, mostly human, mostly male use of nigga is roughly equivalent for many speakers of AAE to other generic terms, like guy or dude.
But here’s something you probably didn’t know. Nigga can actually behave like a pronoun too. As a refresher, pronouns include words like I, you, we, she, and they that can stand in for specific nouns. To a linguist, this is a huge deal. Languages don’t just add new pronouns willy-nilly. Just ask people militating for gender-neutral pronouns in English. Never heard of ze and zir? I’m not surprised. Pronouns are part of the grammatical core of a language and are appropriately resistant to change. But according to how it’s used on Twitter, nigga has crashed the pronoun party. Or more accurately, a nigga has. Consider examples like this one, again from a real tweet: “Spring got a nigga feelin myself.” We have to put on our grammarian hats to know that this is a special use of a nigga. Who does a nigga refer to? The hint comes from myself, which you’ll remember from Chapter 6 is a reflexive -self pronoun that tells us that a nigga absolutely has to be referring to me. So in this use a nigga appears to be acting like the first-person pronoun me. It can also act like I, as in the tweet “A nigga proud of myself.” Or it can be like my, as in “You read all a nigga’s tweets but you still don’t know me.” In all these cases, a nigga appears to be acting like a first person pronoun. It refers to the speaker.
To reiterate, these ways of using the word—as a generic noun or a pronoun—really only appear in certain varieties of English. And African Americans or people who culturally identify with African Americans happen to mostly speak those varieties. That fact will become important in a moment, so hang on to it. For now, let me just reiterate that nigger, having been appropriated by the very people it’s meant to denigrate, has assembled new uses that may be totally unknown to people who speak other varieties of English,26 like most national legislators or the owners of most professional American sports teams. The same process of reappropriation followed by changes in meaning and grammar has happened in the histories of faggot, slut, and other co-opted slurs. That’s point number one in the argument that banning slurs can be counterproductive.
The second point is that context matters. In certain contexts it’s socially acceptable to use slurs even if you don’t belong to the group they denigrate. One such context is in tightly knit groups of young people. It’s been most studied in groups of males but is also apparently present among females.27 As I was once a young person myself, I can personally attest that it’s not uncommon for the one Jew in the group (for instance) to be razzed as a kike, hebe, big-nose, Jesus-killer, snip-dick, and so on. A homosexual in the group might be addressed as fag, butt-dart, ass-spelunker, pillow-biter, or shit-pusher. Although in other contexts these words might elicit offense, among groups of close peers, a different dynamic is at play. On the insulter’s side, using a derogatory term highlights how close he is to the person he’s insulting. If he can get away with using a slur, even though he’s not a member of the group insulted by it, that shows that he must be very close in another way. At the same time, on the insultee’s side, allowing others status as an “honorary” Jew, homosexual, or whatever and permitting them to use slurs that would usually offend demonstrates how secure he is in the friendship.
When we’re talking about groups of young people, posturing is often also involved, and allowing others to insult you gives you two ways to exert your dominance. First, by allowing insults, you show your own self-confidence—you demonstrate that mere words don’t bother you. And second, you have the opportunity to engage in one-upmanship via verbal sparring. This can take place in an impromptu manner. Or it can be part of a ritual insult game, like “the dozens”—there are other names for it, like “snaps” or “signifying”—that’s performed mostly, but not exclusively, by young adult males, often in working-class or poor neighborhoods. Basically, participants spar verbally, insulting each other and the people and things the opponent values, like his relatives, especially close female relatives. The point is to do so in as creative, insulting, and specific a way as possible. For instance, a person playing the dozens might say Yo mama’s so fat, when she was diagnosed with a flesh-eating disease, the doctor gave her five years to live.b Verbal sparring is often filled with slurs—but again, these are licensed by the social environment. The goal is to simultaneously display verbal agility and a superior ability to stay cool under fire.c
There appears to be room at the bottom of this page for more yo mama jokes. You know, for the sake of science:
Yo mama’s so fat, she went to the zoo and the elephants started throwing her peanuts.
Yo mama’s so fat, her ass has its own congressman.
Yo mama’s so fat, she’s got smaller fat women orbiting around her.
Yo mama’s so fat, on Halloween she says, “Trick or meatloaf!”
Rap battles often have this same format, though in a more structured environment, and the practice has an early antecedent in the ancient practice of flyting—as in Conlee, J. (2004).
Within these particular communities of practice, slurs operate not as insults but as part of a socially licensed interaction. It’s similar to how actions taken on the battlefield (like shooting people) or, for that matter, the football field (tackling people) are socially permissible in those contexts but not elsewhere. And as a result, in some contexts slurs aren’t intended to offend and are not received as offensive. They can be poetic, creative, and even important to creating and reinforcing social relations.
So the upshot is this: Some slurs are used as much, if not more, by members of the groups they originally denigrated. These in-group members use the terms in ways largely divorced from their original negative connotation. In some contexts the use of slurs even reveals and reinforces group coherence and personal allegiances.
This brings us back to the issue of banning slurs and the consequences of doing so.
# $ % !
Many organizations representing the rights of specific groups advocate against anyone ever using terms perceived as pejorative. They reason, broadly, that using derogatory group labels can not only cause social tension but also disempower members of less powerful groups. This sentiment, translated into sports league policy, justifies punishments for using slurs—$100,000 for faggot, fifteen yards for nigger.
But even if well-meaning, a policy that legislates words, without taking into account how they’re used or by whom, runs the risk of causing disproportionate and unfair injury to the very people it aims to protect in the first place. This is most obvious with nigger because it’s used so much more frequently by African Americans and because it manifests in so many ways other than as a slur. As former NBA star and current analyst Charles Barkley put it, “I’m a black man. . . . I use the N-word. I will continue to use the N-word among my black friends and my white friends.”28 Many US athletes are African American (76 percent of NBA players and 66 percent of NFL players),29 which means that many of them are also native speakers of AAE, the language variety in which nigga, as we’ve seen, acts as a common, inoffensive noun as well as a pronoun.
The consequence is clear. To ban nigger is to disproportionately silence and punish the very people the regulation ostensibly strives to protect. We’re going to protect you, the league office is saying, by cutting out part of your language. And if you use this particular first person pronoun, you’re going to be playing for free on Sunday, if we allow you to play at all.
I’m not the first person to observe that this policy is the linguistic equivalent of a frontal lobotomy. When asked about a possible ban on nigger, Stanford-educated Seattle Seahawks cornerback Richard Sherman said, “It’s an atrocious idea. . . . It’s almost racist to me.”30 He pointed out, “It’s in the locker room and on the field at all times.” And “I hear it almost every series out there on the field.” Sherman speaks AAE. But if you were a league executive or a team owner who wasn’t a native speaker of that variety of English, this might not occur to you.
Now, to be clear, this is not a First Amendment issue. Sports leagues are private companies and can ban whatever they like. So the fact that the law views slurs in general as protected speech doesn’t matter—an employer can set its own policies. But I’m not making a legal argument here. I’m saying that if someone thinks banning words is a silver bullet that will eradicate racism, sexism, heterosexism, or any other offensive ism, with no downside, he or she is mistaken.
Nor am I arguing that the right policy approach is to legislate intent. No one wants to have to infer what someone really meant by a particular word—not referees in the moment or league executives after the fact. Was that nigger or nigga? Was it a slur or a pronoun? Do these two players like each other enough to legitimately use the term in a socially licensed way? Intent is essential in the courtroom, where it has to be established to determine whether a defendant has committed a crime. But intent is really hard to infer even in the legal setting and even with the full power of subpoenas, sworn testimony, and lengthy reflection. There’s no reason to think it would be feasible to impose a courtroom standard on the basketball court or that doing so would lead to fair or reasonable outcomes.
So what’s the most productive response? To do nothing? Let’s zoom out. I’ve reviewed some evidence that slurs are offensive and—unlike other kinds of profanity—can even plausibly do harm in certain contexts. But those same words have very different uses in other contexts, some of them positive, and sometimes among members of the very groups ostensibly harmed by those words in the first place. As a consequence, blanket bans or attempts to infer intent are probably more harmful than doing nothing at all to regulate language. I’ve made this argument with respect to sports leagues, but the same logic applies wherever similar conditions are met: in businesses, schools, or public spaces. The power that slurs have over our brains and bodies compels us to act. But reactive regulation isn’t the answer. The next chapter explores some alternatives.
11
The Paradox of Profanity
Profanity is powerful. Its repercussions can be measured in your body. A single fuck or nigger hastens your heart rate and opens the pores of your palms. Its impact can also be gleaned from your behavior. Fag makes you scoot your chair away from someone you think is homosexual and makes you think of him as less human. A raised middle finger leads you to interpret people’s actions as more aggressive.
And many of us treat profanity as not just powerful but bad. It’s not uncommon to encounter the belief that it betokens an uncreative or lazy mind or a weak vocabulary.1 The fact that these bad things remain unproven provides little shelter to the offending words.2
These negative beliefs that people have about taboo words and their power often lead to attempts at suppression, not just of slurs, as discussed in the last chapter, but of profanity in general. Self-censorship occurs inside your own head when you self-monitor—internally tracking what’s likely to come out of your mouth next and stepping on the verbal brakes when something taboo is in the works. You also censor interpersonally when you suppress the use of profanity by other people, especially children. For example, you might react to a child’s utterance of a particular word by explaining that it’s not acceptable or appropriate—that it’s a “bad word.” You might go farther and chide or even punish him or her. There’s a long history of punishing children for profanity both verbally and physically, washing out their mouths with soap being one of the most creative and most memorable to its victims.3
And we also display a suppressive reaction to profanity as a society through social and legal institutions. The sports leagues from the last chapter provide a glimpse into how this works on a small scale. In the United States, the three biggest players are the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and the Entertainment Software Ratings Board (ESRB), which regulate the content of films and video games, respectively, as well as the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), a state organ that regulates broadcasts over the public airwaves. As I briefly mentioned in Chapter 1, one of these institutions’ most visible functions is to suppress profanity.
And yet, all the evidence suggests that existing efforts to squelch profanity are ineffectual. Below, I’ll present the case—not just for slurs but for “bad words” in general—that there are better ways to deal with profanity than to suppress it.
# $ % !
Let’s begin with censorship at the societal level and look at how it works and why it doesn’t.
The MPAA is an industry organization, founded by the motion picture industry. Among other things, it’s responsible for the film ratings that limit children’s access to movies.4 In addition to violence, drug use, and sex, the MPAA identifies “strong language” in films as inappropriate for children of certain ages. Despite its regulatory rol
e, the MPAA has no published standards for what language leads to what rating—no list of offending words or accounting of how many times each word is permitted to merit what rating. The association’s method is largely opaque. Production companies submit their films to the board before distribution, and the MPAA ratings board, whose members are an anonymous “independent group of parents,” issues a provisional rating. The net result is effectively a sort of censorship. Filmmakers and production companies often self-censor their films in order to reach the largest audience possible, and the ratings board acts as a gatekeeper that can issue seemingly arbitrary requirements and restrict access to the film.
The ESRB acts effectively like the MPAA, but its purview is video games.5 Like the MPAA, it uses unpublished criteria for determining profanity, but by observing the ratings it assigns, we can infer that they depend on the frequency and intensity of strong language. One study that tried to reverse engineer the ESRB’s criteria found that profanity is almost always absent from games rated E (for everyone) or E10+ but is present in 34 percent of games rated T (teen) and 74 percent of those rated M (mature).6
The FCC works quite differently. As a federal commission, it’s legally empowered to oversee all transmissions over public airwaves, which includes broadcast television and radio. The FCC has charged itself with, among other things, enforcing laws that prohibit profanity during daytime and evening hours. Like the MPAA and the ESRB, the FCC has no published list of banned words, but it describes profanity as “language so grossly offensive to members of the public who actually hear it as to amount to a nuisance.”7 Punishments it can dole out range from issuing a warning to imposing fines and even revoking a station’s broadcast license. This has a colossal impact on the language used in music and television. Television production companies and music labels self-censor, avoiding language they think will incur a rebuke from the FCC or from television and radio stations. They or the stations excise profane words that do make it into the artistic product. This happens in a variety of ways, including bleeping offending terms, making alternate versions that replace taboo terms with others, and silencing profanities out entirely, among a number of others.a