The epithet has the upper hand. While the highest stage of celebrity may
be recognition by first name, the epithet has achieved a new standard:
recognition by first letter. Pity nefarious, nephritic, nihilist,
nepotistic, nascent, and neophyte, all useful N-words, but none
freighted enough to be the N-word. Not niggardly, either—it’s in the
vicinity but unrelated. The N-word is so potent, so evocative, and so
enduring that even without five-sixths of its letters we still know what
and whom it’s about. The conventions of polite conversation seek to
delete not simply those vowels and consonants but the entire obscene
history that the word conjures—and the complex, contradictory ways in
which the subjects of that history have sought to come to terms with it.

This was the contradiction highlighted two weeks ago, on “Real Time with
Bill Maher,” when, as part of a failed punch line, the host referred to
himself as a “house nigger.” Maher issued an apology, after which Ice
Cube made an appearance on the show to demand a kind of
epithet-protectionism policy, insuring that the word fall only from the
mouths of black people. That incident was one of a series. Two days before Maher’s remark, someone had spray-painted the word on the front gate of LeBron
James’s home in Los Angeles. Several days before that, Walmart banned a
white customer who was caught on video hurling the term at another
shopper. There is a superficial sense of progress associated with the
fact that a term constructed for the sole purpose of human degradation
has been so widely disparaged. Yet the problem is not, and never has
been, the word but, rather, the world that the word helped create. There
are many ways to grapple with ugliness bequeathed to us by the past; as
it happens, excising five letters is not a particularly effective one.

We’ve had occasion of late to think a good deal about excising history.
Last month, Mitch Landrieu, the mayor of New Orleans, delivered a
speech at Gallier Hall,
which served as City Hall for more than a century, on the city’s removal
of four Confederate-themed monuments. The decision had generated
protests—some of them armed—and counter-protests, and for a moment the
city became a symbol of the broadest tensions between the left and the
right that have been roiling the nation. Landrieu’s speech, a finely
crafted examination of New Orleans’ history and culture and their impact
on the present, went viral, and the Times and the Washington Post published the text of the speech on their Web sites. Landrieu’s comments
were not confined to the immediate controversy but, rather, challenged
the flawed morality that had initially led people to memorialize three
Confederate leaders—Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, and P. G. T.
Beauregard—and the Battle of Liberty Place, an act of racist mob
violence that occurred in 1874. The cult of the Lost Cause, Landrieu
pointed out, was designed to obscure the fact that the Confederacy was
“on the wrong side of history and humanity.” He
said:

That this cause, the one that the word “nigger” is meant to serve, might
ever have found a place of honor is a more apt barometer of the
country’s relationship to its own history than the facile concerns over
the usage of the word. Landrieu’s assessment is not, or at least should
not be, considered controversial, but his office was inundated with
phone calls from people buoyed by a rush of denialism about the fact
that those Confederate leaders had fought,
unrepentantly,
for the cause of slavery and white supremacy. That denial was central to
the thinking of the Alabama state lawmakers who, on the same day that
New Orleans removed the last of the four statues, passed the Alabama
Memorial Preservation Act, making it illegal to remove any memorial that
has stood on state ground for more than forty years. As tortured as this
perspective may be, it contains a veiled concession: a feeble but
detectable recognition that racism per se is sufficiently indefensible
that it must be cloaked in euphemism. The Trump era, it appears, has its
own brand of political correctness.

Three days after Landrieu delivered his speech, Richard Collins III, a
senior at Bowie State University, was stabbed to death on campus in an
incident that is being investigated as a hate crime. A University of
Maryland student who has been charged in Collins’s death was a member of
a white-supremacist Facebook group called Alt-Reich: Nation. Four days
after that, in Portland, Oregon, a white supremacist stabbed to death
Rick Best, a fifty-three-year-old military veteran, and Taliesin Myrddin
Namkai-Meche, a recent graduate of Reed College, and also wounded a
third man, after they had come to the aid of two Muslim women on a
train. Those crimes reflect what the Southern Poverty Law Center and theCouncil on American-Islamic Relations have noted as increasing
numbers of bias attacks and threats in the past year.

The geographic spread of these episodes is telling. Landrieu’s speech
missed a crucial point: the resurgent celebration of the Confederate
cause is not just a matter of Southern history. Last week, two local
N.A.A.C.P. chapters petitioned Doug Ducey, the governor of Arizona, to
take down six Confederate monuments in his state, which did not join the
union until a half century after Appomattox. The South did not rise
again, but it didn’t have to. We have assiduously monitored the
deployment of the word “nigger,” but the idea that it is meant to convey
has become, in the past few years, increasingly prominent, visible, and
dangerous.