. . . but Intent Can Really Hurt Me

If ever I get around to writing that book, “Names I’ve Been Called During My Life as a Black Person in America,” the following story will rank among the Top 10:

It was the early 1980s and I was assigned to cover a public hearing in Depew, a suburb of Buffalo, N.Y.

Having written more than my share of stories on these particular events, I knew the Hold the Presses Factor was low.

So imagine my surprise when I arrived and found the tiny meeting room was standing room only. What was the single item on the agenda that had attracted scores of townsfolk? A federal proposal to build public housing.

For the next eternity, residents offered all sorts of objections to the plan, some feeble, some not. I was floored when someone said that more cops would have to be hired because, well, the new residents--referred to throughout the hearing as those people or they --would invade Depew with their criminal ways.

You didn’t need a brain to figure out who they were, but if there was any doubt, one resident finally stood up and, looking at me, announced: “I see we have a colored in the room.”

All eyes turned and ears perked up as he proceeded to tell me that it was nothing personal. Then he explained to his all-white audience that I was probably a nice one but some of them aren’t and, well, if they live in projects in Depew, well, Depew will suffer. As if things can get worse when you live in a place named Depew.

This tale will probably appear in the chapter titled, “The C-Word Gets the Point Across Just as Effectively as the N-Word.”

But because sometimes only the real thing will do, I’ll probably devote some space in my book to, “My 15 Months Among the Arizonans.”

Cut to April, 1985. I’d just blown in to Phoenix to work as a reporter, and I was waiting to cross a downtown street when a pickup drove by and the white man in the truck bed shouted, “Hey, nigger!”

Was I offended? You bet. Did I wish him and his mother (although I seriously questioned if he even had one) lots of misery? Sure, I did.

Reactions were no less ugly when my elderly aunt and my mother were greeted at their niece’s wedding reception by her black husband, who asked of them, as the party died down, “You niggers still here?” (I suspect Ma and Aunt E put a teeny hex on his hide; he is now their ex-nephew-in-law.)

Which brings us to last week’s Battle of the Black Lawyers Over The Word.

Of course, The Word is offensive. It’s a bad, terrible, horrible word. It’s definitely one of those words--among them, the “S-word,” the “P-word,” the “B-word” and the “F-word”--that would cause the sisters at St. Joseph’s to get out that big bar of Ivory soap.

On my list of words that I’d rather not have used interchangeably with black or African American , the “N-word” definitely is at the top. It offends me to my deepest core. But using or not using it in the Simpson case or anywhere else for that matter is not the great issue of our time. Nor is the ensuing debate over The Word by my people--that would be my people, the media. (I just about laughed myself silly last week when I saw the creative way a TV station found to get around actually saying The Word: They aimed a camera at The Word in a dictionary.)

Frankly, this debate over the “N-word” is the “B-word.” (That would be the “B-word” that doesn’t rhyme with witch .)

We don’t want to have to deal with the real problems of race in America, so we glom on to a word rather than a community’s fears and assumptions that lead to rejection of a public housing complex because the coloreds will move in and rape and pillage.

We don’t want to deal with some jerk in Arizona who opts not to greet a newcomer with, “Hey, welcome to Arizona, ma’am.”

We don’t want to hear about the time my sister and I were on vacation in the Adirondacks and a small-town shopkeeper innocently asked if we were on our way up to Dannemora, a state prison that makes Attica look like nursery school.

Or the time I was coming back from vacation in Spain and the woman seated next to me asked what Army base I was stationed at. After all, there was no way I could have been there for any other reason, right?

Similarly, there is little interest out there in a black friend who worked as a reporter in Green Bay and the assumption among white strangers that she was married to a Packer. Why else would she live in Green Bay?

I assure you, black folks don’t wilt over being called The Word. What we don’t take kindly to is being treated like one.