Why I Heart David Walker

“Niger” is a word derived from the Latin, which was used by the old Romans, to designate inanimate beings, which were black: such as soot, pot, wood, house, &c. Also, animals which they considered inferior to the human species, as a black horse, cow, hog, bird, dog, &c. The white Americans have applied this term to Africans, by way of reproach for our colour, to aggravate and heighten our miseries, because they have their feet on our throats.

—David Walker, An Appeal, 55

It’s Tuesday, and she’s already said “niggers” twice. And I don’t know why. She’s today’s presenter in my African American literature survey course, and she’s reading Phillis Wheatley’s poem “On Being Brought from Africa to America.” She’s at the part “Remember, Christians, Negroes, black as Cain/can be refin’d and join th’ angelic train.” But where Wheatley writes “Negros,” she says “niggers”—for reasons I can’t quite figure. I pretend instead to smell the not-yet-springtime air because maybe then I won’t hear her say “nigger” again. But there it is anyway, “niggers black as Cain.” I stop her the third time—even though I just want to wonder at the Tuesday sunshine that anticipates the semester’s end—to ask why she’s invited “niggers” into my classroom today.

She looks up but nowhere special. “Oh,” she says, “I didn’t know how it was pronounced. I mean—I thought it was pronounced that way.”

I don’t know what to say. I don’t understand what she means at first; neither do the rest of my students. She’s a native English speaker. The words don’t look alike. They don’t even rhyme. Negro ends in “o”—like hello or banjo—not “r.” Silence, though, makes a way for language.

“The word is Negro,” I stress the first syllable too. “Negro. Negro.” I want her to hear the difference that she can’t seem to see or read. I say it three times in a vain attempt to do over what she’s said even though it’s already done.

“Oh.” She moves on—because she no longer has a use for Wheatley’s verses—to her next slide.

I try to follow the rest of her presentation, but I can’t shake the absurdity of her response. It confuses me. It distracts me until I realize that what I have heard is not an explanation but a confession. It’s what she doesn’t say that confesses to a kind of ignorance that unsettles me. It’s the racist kind of ignorance that does not have to explain itself because it can ignore what it refuses to see. In this case, it’s Negroes. “O’s” are pronounced like “R’s.” “Negroes” turns into “niggers,” and “niggers” flits its way across my classroom where I sit among those whom my student refuses to see, at least for right now. Her eyes dance to avoid me, but her words still find me even if her eyes won’t. I have never liked anger, and I don’t like mine in particular. It’s a competitive kind of anger that just wants to win. So it starts too slow, and lingers too long. I hate most that it reminds me that I am subject to the whims and provocations of living. As luck would have it, I can’t hide from life, or today, from racism’s gaze.

I’m angry now.

I’m mad at her—for what she might call a mistake and what I’d call everyday racism—because she doesn’t have to learn what it feels like to hear “niggers,” for no reason, three times on a Tuesday. She’s never had to learn how the word hangs on bodies, turning them into objects at the mercy of someone else’s gaze. “Niggers” doesn’t mark her ever in jest or in a classroom on a Tuesday. For her, this so-called mistake is a matter of choice and intention. She didn’t mean to misread the...