Book Review: Jabari Asim’s The N Word

What is so pernicious about the “n—–ization” of America is the way it self-perpetuates, creating false history, false “experts” and false “eyewitnesses”, thus creating an inauthentic basis for the black experience. Asim deals with this explicitly in a chapter about the painful legacy of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The book (which I have never read), is, in fact, a Christ allegory, written by an ardent, Christian abolitionist. How, then, did it come to be synonymous, in the contemporary lexicon, with “sellout”? Asim explains that Harriet Beecher Stowe, having little first-hand experience with black people, used many of the racist conventions of (white-authored) “plantation literature”, in their portrayal of black speech and attitudes. With a foundation of inauthentic “research”, even the sympathetic portrayal of blacks in the novel served to perpetuate negative and harmful stereotypes.

Adding insult to injury, the rights to dramatize the book fell away from Stowe’s control, allowing the masses to see play versions of the book, in which the character of Tom was altered from a robust young man to a dodering, simpering old man, sometimes nominally in keeping with Stowe’s rhetorical point, but often, perverted to serve explicitly racist motives.

The racist stereotypes are even internalized by blacks. After generations of blacks being forcibly corralled into a small sphere of possibility, after generations being told that they are base and less than human, or, certainly, less than whites, many blacks begin to live out the very grotesque “fables” of black life, as concocted by whites. From this, stems the smiling, dancing, “coon”, a role still required of many African Americans on sitcoms and lame comedies, and the “bad N—–”, the provocative, raping, stealing, killing machine that eventually became the “thug” or “gangsta”, celebrated in film, in rap music and on the streets of America.

The most horrendous problem is the circle of unbroken white power, modern white politicians and authority figures using the self-comforting lies of their ancestors about the nature of the black race to justify the curtailment of blacks’ rights. By using this “folklore” to decide that “urban blight” is a foregone conclusion, based on the nature of the black community, contemporary politicians are able to perpetuate their ancestors’ racist policies, all while avoiding admitting that racist hiring practices, racist college admission policies, failing public schools and difficulty accessing financial services are NOT the result of failures within the black community, but the result of centuries-old racist, self-serving beliefs. Believing in these “truths” also allows contemporary whites to view any attempt to correct historical injustices to be “reverse” racism.

In the concluding chapters, Asim describes a black community caught between a desire to “own” the “n” word and those who wish to bury the “n” word, along with all of attendant white lies about the limits of black genius. Asim points out how, by perpetuating the use of the word, blacks may be reinforcing this “folklore” of black inferiority… to young blacks and, worse, to a new generation of whites, such as Quentin Tarantino, all of whom feel the liberty to play in the “n—–” sandbox”. Using examples such as “Archie Bunker” and Dave Chappelle, he points out the limit of even intentional satire — that those most in need of understanding the joke may be those most likely to dangerously misinterpret it. (In fact, on THE ACTOR’S STUDIO, Chappelle, himself, admitted that seeing too many white kids use his show as permission to use the “n” word was part of the reason he so publicly pulled the plug on production. This isn’t mentioned in the book, but lends tremendous credibility to Asim’s point.)

Asim feels that artists and historians should have permission to work within the poisonous world the “n” word created, but that for all others, the use and its legacy should be ended, in favor of a more uplifting vision for black (and white) America, saying:

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