The Nigger Word.

Posted by Pointman on June 29, 2012 · 27 Comments 

There’s been a bit of a furore recently about a supposedly prestigious science journal running a paper that was peppered with the word nigger. The editor, of what can only be referred to as a rag now, even came up with a fatuous reply to the resultant criticism, which when stripped of the oily sophistry, was quite frankly embarrassing. The journal now joins the ranks of those once respected but now debased heralds of new ideas in science. It’s sad, very sad. Whatever happened to Nature, Scientific American or The New Scientist? I long ago cancelled my subscriptions to them all, but the saving grace is the internet. I get to read those new, deliciously interesting ideas so much sooner.

The extent of my involvement, was a comment in a tangential debate at Jo Nova’s blog. “There was a time when people could write a letter to a newspaper and refer to black people as niggers, and the letters were published too. If objected to, the disingenuous argument was the that the word merely referred to their skin colour. Of course, all the adults knew exactly the emotional payload of that word. Eventually, the penny dropped with the newspapers and letters using that word no longer appeared on the letters page.”

I understand all about prejudice and bigotry because I’ve been on the receiving end of it. That’s the end, where because you refuse to accept the demeaning stereotypes and are determined to live your own life unconstrained by such stupidity, you get the shit kicked out of you. It hurts. I suppose at this point you’re supposed to say it somehow makes you a better person but it’s not true. When you’re nursing a few good bruises, owning the higher moral ground isn’t much of a comfort. Mostly, it makes people good haters. Converting you into hating other people is the ultimate victory of all bigots. You should never give them that victory, because if you do, you become a bigot yourself and it’s welcome to the internal wars that tear societies apart. That war will last to the end of your life.

That’s their nasty petty little world and they’re welcome to live their nasty petty little lives in it. It doesn’t actually matter that you didn’t somehow manage to pull a Bruce Lee but that you went down flailing against a gang of them. It don’t matter a damn. It really doesn’t. What actually matters is you didn’t bend the knee and the people watching it saw that. When it happens enough times, the silence of the watchers gets to the thugs. After a while, they leave you alone because they realise you’re prepared to take the whole thing all the way down to demolition. With every fight, the watchers learn they don’t have to accept the mould and the thugs learn there are some things you simply can’t smash into the ground.

Brutal though it can be, that’s how change actually starts to happen.

There is an essential decency in people and you see it in those extreme situations. They know they should have done something but they were afraid, so they didn’t and they feel bad about it. Look at the faces of some of the onlookers in the picture above. You understand that and it’s sort of okay. It’s being part of that network of humans, who work together to keep us all going, irrespective of our race, religion or nationality. The thugs have excluded themselves from it forever and they know it in the back of their heads, which makes them even more vicious. It’s the one bit of us they can never crush. They’re forever outsiders.

Bigotry is essentially being lazy. It’s right up there with all the other isms, simple solutions to complex problems that people simply don’t want to do the difficult thing of thinking through. They’ve been looking down the psychological microscope at us, in an effort to understand the “nigger” mentality, so why don’t we actually have a look back up the thing and try to understand them?

I won’t be using statistics, I won’t be taking a poll, I won’t be doing any psychometrics, I’ll just try to understand them as I see them. Patently, calling a whole set of people niggers is an extreme act, especially as from any rational viewpoint, we’re having a difference of opinion about a matter of scientific fact. Why on earth would anyone do that?

It’s really about hate and fear.

Hate is basic. It’s comfortable and it’s easy. Behind any education and civilisation, it sits there smugly and constructs facades of rationalisation and sophistication over what is the basic beast we’re dealing with. They find us inexplicable, so there’s a desperation on their part to find a pigeon-hole for us. By calling us niggers, they’ve finally settled on one they’re comfortable with, so they can start the construction of a whole mythos on top of it. We niggers are all right-wing reactionary middle-aged men, in the pay of Big Oil and with some sort of fractured misunderstanding of science.

They have a real need to package us up into a neat bundle they can get a grip on. Just like those thugs, trying to get me to conform to their idea of what I should be, they want us to conform. They want us to march in their simple straight lines, because that’s all they know how to do or perhaps they simply don’t have the strength of character to do any different. Given that we will not conform, the stereotypes they create of us are now the ones they desperately need us to conform to. We frighten them because we feel no particular compulsion to march in step with anyone. Not even with each other.

Don’t misunderstand me about hate, there are a number of things I really hate and will always fight against, but they’re things, rather than people. That is a subtle difference but it’s a vital one. Hating a whole group of people simply because they’re Spanish, or Muslim, or have a different colour to their skin is irrational. It makes no sense on any level except when you get inside the head of the person doing the hating. Then it all makes a sad sort of sense.

So often, they have a need to hate someone, anyone, because it makes them feel better about themselves. It’s about establishing an artificial social order in their world, which finally puts them above someone else. They may be considered to be people of no account by everyone else in the society they live in, but they’ve now established themselves as being at least better than some other group of people. Those are the types who will come at you hard, because every time you don’t conform to the expected stereotype, you’re demonstrating for all to see, that their world view is wrong, which puts them right back at the bottom of the esteem pile again.

Fear, grown and fertilised from ignorance, is the other part of the motivation they have. They don’t know what’s happening inside that synagogue, so they fear it. They don’t know the customs of another culture, so they fear it. They don’t know that foreigner’s language, so they fear them. They don’t understand that beneath it all, when you strip off the cultural markers, people are pretty much the same the world over, so they fear them.

If they only spent a little time addressing that ignorance, then the nagging fear would disappear. Learning about some social group you don’t know much about, involves listening to them. Above all, it involves taking that first brave step of simply saying hello, even at the risk of rejection. A bigot will never attempt that step.

The truly stunning thing about hate is that it’s blind. Once the stereotype has been constructed, it ignores all the facts, it ignores the patently obvious. If we’re all supposed to be men, how come so many of the significant and articulate realist bloggers are women? If we’re all being financed by Big Oil, then just where the hell is the money being spent? If we’re all supposed to be right-wingers, then why are so much of my politics left of centre? If we don’t know anything about science, why did the skeptic blogs make a complete clean sweep of all the science blogs in the Bloggie Awards this year? We actually have done the hard bit of learning about climate science. It seems at times that we know more about it than the supposed experts, as evidenced of late by the hurried withdrawal of several alarmist peer-reviewed papers, which didn’t survive a skeptic blogosphere review for long.

Bigots come from all strata of society. You’ve got your common or garden variety of trailer trash, who at least will call you a nigger to your face. You know where you are with them from the word go. You do get the more subtle ones from higher up the social pecking order though. They’ve always worked out some reason for precisely why they dislike niggers but it’s just the same ole same ole dressed up in slightly more respectable clothes. Hatred and fear. They’re the variety of bigots I truly despise, because they’re not even honest bigots.

I recall as a young man an entrance interview at a very prestigious university. It was me and a panel of five or so mathematics bods. I had, to say the least, a good collection of academic scalps by that stage, with the added unique selling point that I came from a shite school. That actually helped, since there was also a bit of a political push on at the time to get more working-class lads into university, so the prospects looked pretty reasonable. Things were trucking along quite nicely until the head honcho started grilling me about my politics. My politics have never been extreme and I fielded the questions without much trouble but he kept on going and going.

It slowly dawned on me that there it was again; the bigot and the silent watchers, and all of it occurring in a sandstone edifice of the venerable dreaming spires. So much for the sheltered islands of academic reason. What he was really after, was getting me to disown my own people. The message was pretty clear; your grades are good enough, just do a bit of Uncle Tomming for me and you’re in.

That was a hard moment in my life. I thought it over for a while and made my decision. I knew my parents would have dearly loved me going to a university like that, but the price being asked was simply too high. They’d worked so hard for all of us and deserved some bragging rights but chasing some sort of acceptance there, would have been at the price of an ultimate betrayal of them. If that was the culture there, I’d have nothing to do with it. A fish rots from the head downwards. He kept on probing but I simply stared at him without offering any reply at all and he eventually spluttered to a halt. The rest of them, in some embarrassment, tried to rescue the situation, but I just stared at them too.

The rest of the interview was probably the longest ten minutes of complete silence in their entire lives. I’d been worked over by experts and learnt exactly how to give it back, and I didn’t need my fists to do it either. At the end, one of them even came around the table in an attempt to shake my hand but I wouldn’t give them that easy conscience pacifier. Perhaps the next kid like me coming through the door would have an easier time. It’s not one of life’s nicer memories.

The lesson of that encounter, which I knew already, was that if someone is a highly educated bigot, they’re still just a bigot, but one who can come up with a cleverer rationale for it.

The people who wrote that paper, and the people who decided to publish it, fall into that exact category.

Looking over this article, I realise I’ve used the word nigger rather than denier. I should go back and reedit the whole thing but there’s not really any point. Hating any group of people, like all bigotry, has the same essential tune, with nothing varying except the lyrics. Denier, jew, paki, catholic, kike, yank, women, protestant, men, blackie, wog, muzzi, brit, paddy, spic, greaser – substitute any one of those nouns for nigger and you wouldn’t need to change a single sentence of the piece.

The interesting question is – who were the silent watchers in this case?

©Pointman

Related articles by Pointman:

Why Multiculturalism failed.

Lies, damn lies and polls.

The real bastards.

Click for a list of other articles.

Filed under Article · Tagged with Bigotry, Denier, Education, Nigger, Profiling, Racism