Thoughts on a Racial Slur
During my time as a student at UCPH, I have become increasingly alert to the ways the Danish n-word, often used and discussed as a racial slur, circulates in both classroom situations and conversations among students in their free time. By “racial slur” I mean a derogatory designation for a racialised minority group where the disrespectful nature of the term is determined less by intentionality than by the effects of the word on the target group. It is my experience that criticism of the so to speak conventional use of this word is explained away through, on the one hand, a refusal to acknowledge the lasting effects of its deployment in the creation of a racial hierarchy, and on the other, the trivialisation of the Danish participation in global imperial politics, including the transatlantic slave trade. In other words, claiming that racial discrimination existed in the past, not today, or was/is carried out by someone else, not us. Etymologically, the many variations of the n-word derive from the Latin word for black (niger). They have historically been utilised by white Europeans as pejorative racialising terms to characterise people of African descent as savage, child-like and less developed than themselves as a rationale for enslavement, colonisation and racial segregation. Because the Danish n-word is permeated by these histories, it can hardly be understood as a natural or neutral designation when used today. Things become tricky when the n-word crops up in statements of solidarity made by non-black people. On several occasions I have heard non-black students emphatically reiterate it in assertions of their own antiracist politics. These typically take the form of confessions of perceived past ignorance or expressions of incredulity at the anti-black racism exhibited by other non-black people. In respect to these situations, I take issue with what I perceive to be a simplification of or a kind of speaking over the complex and heterogeneous relationships that people of African descent (myself included) have to this word by people who, for instance, are racialised as white. I am not suggesting that anti-blackness cannot be discussed by non-black individuals, nor that the censorship of slurs would solve the problem of anti-black racism, but rather that more critical engagement with these topics that avoids normalising the overexposure of racial slurs would be productive. After all, what may seem like a purely intellectual discussion to some can have a very different resonance for people who are targeted by racial slurs in real life, including university contexts.
