OPINION: Good teachers use the N-word
But it's how they use it that makes all the difference
Omarosa Manigault Newman, the senior White House staffer turned author, said recently during her book tour that she had heard a tape of President Donald Trump using the N-word during his time on the reality show The Apprentice. Trump denied the existence of any such tape, tweeting, “I don’t have that word in my vocabulary and never have. She made it up.”
Whether such a tape exists or not, would such a recording tell us anything we don’t already know? We already have plenty of evidence of the president’s bigotry and racism. From his taking out a one-page ad in The New York Times to call for the death penalty for the Central Park Five in 1989 before they were eventually exonerated, to his equating of torch-toting neo-Nazis and Confederate sympathizers with anti-racist protesters in Charlottesville last year, and instituting a travel ban for those from certain Muslim-majority nations, and proposing a border wall with Mexico, and his gross labeling of Mexican immigrants as rapists and murderers (I could go on), his actions have betrayed his words. It’s a safe assumption that he has used the word before.
The day after Manigault Newman’s revelation, on the comedy news program The Daily Show, correspondent Roy Wood Jr. eloquently and hilariously explained the situation using muscular movie star Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, saying, “I don’t need footage of the Rock in the gym to know if he works out!”
Likewise, we don’t need tapes to know Trump — or other past presidents for that matter — used the word; we have public policy to show it. Government-backed slavery, redlining that kept black people from getting low-interest loans and a three-strikes policing policy that led to the mass incarceration of black people speak volumes about what federal leaders believed, and said, behind closed doors. Nevertheless, if a tape surfaces of Trump using the N-word, how should teachers respond to the media storm that would surely follow?
To be clear, educators hear and use the N-word everyday. They say it as a slur, or a term of endearment, or they teach it within the text of assigned readings. Students spew it in the hallways, on the way to and from school, on buses and in sports practice. It proliferates in pop culture: in music, in movies and in slang. It’s so ubiquitous that Continue reading: OPINION: Good teachers use the N-word
