It’s Not Just About The Word

But more to the point, the sign in question was about claiming identities. Slut isn’t an identity I would claim – I have no personal experience with it. But the application of the idea that woman is the nigger of the world to people who nigger has never applied is puzzling, to say the least. First, it would assume that all women are in the same boat. And as the statistics show when you start breaking down issues of wealth, representation, health, maternal wellness, and just about any other measure, that would be a lie. It’s also trying to pull the experiences and pain of a term on to one’s body without ever shouldering the burden that goes with that term. To me, that’s as asinine as me trying to adopt an anti-Asian slur or an anti-gay slur. Those kind of words would never be leveled at me. I never have to labor underneath their weight. I am not a part of intra-community discussions around those terms. No one has ever tried to make me fear them with those words. I don’t face that set of issues. I don’t carry those burdens. Therefore, it makes no sense to keep ham-fistedly applying terms that don’t fit.

For a woman to reclaim slut, it would imply that they are not apologizing for living up to the idea of the slur. It would imply that people will not apologize for their bodies, clothing, or actions even if some read those things as slutty. It would call into question the validity of the slur in the first place, if the enhanced focus on “sluts” allowed those who rape/sexually assault others to walk because they can not, and will never be, deemed sluts under our current system.

So, for people who have bodies policed by the term slut, or see enough kinship in their own struggle with this one, it would make sense to reclaim the term, to strip it of shame, to wear it with power and pride. (Word to Kenyon Farrow.)

For those outside the racial binary, they have a more complicated reality with racially charged terms. Nigger may be placed on their bodies, but in a way that is modified or different. One of my friends who is Desi remembers being held down and called a nigger by the girls at her all-white primary school. She remembered being confused – after all, she was brown, but not black. But no one said racism was logical. People from the Middle East/Central Asian region have a variety of epithets, but sand nigger is also in the mix. What is the relationship with the term nigger in these groups? An interesting dialogue rolls in the rap world, particularly about non-black emcees using the term, even in a hip-hop space which uses the term freely. But, as most people who have been the subject of a slur know, the politics are complicated. And that complication, once lived, probably speaks to why the vast majority of the pushback has been from white people.

Most white women have no relationship with the term nigger. It is not a term used on white bodies. Speaking historically (because words change and migrate over time) the term has ever been applied to white women, except in one clear way. Anna Holmes, in her post Jezebel life, has sent me reams of info on women in the civil rights movement. One of the women she fixated on what a young white woman who was murdered for her participation. The term they applied to her was not nigger. It was nigger lover. The idea that white women would willingly associate themselves with Black people was an offense where these women could not be allowed to live. Complicating this is the relationship that white women (and white people, more broadly) have instituting the term as a mark of difference. We could start with debates about suffrage, with some white women being aghast that black men were given the right to vote before white women, or we could go back even further to how white people used the term nigger to keep black people aware of their place in society. So, already, we are speaking about very different relationships with a term.

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