When Is It Ever Acceptable for a White Person to Use the N-Word?

There are certain words whose meanings cannot reasonably be separated from the histories that produced them. The N-word is one of them. Its significance does not reside merely in the intentions of the individual who utters it, nor can its historical weight simply be suspended by friendship, humour or the subsequent explanation that no offence was intended. It belongs to a much longer history through which Black people were racialised, degraded and constituted as inferior. This history raises an important question about contemporary arguments concerning its supposedly non-racist use: when, precisely, does a word historically used to dehumanise Black people cease to carry that history, and who possesses the authority to make that determination?

These questions have acquired renewed significance for me following an intervention by Nigel Biggar concerning the use of the N-word. Biggar argues against automatically treating every utterance of the word as racist and suggests that there may be circumstances in which punishment for its use is unjust because racist intent is absent. More strikingly, his argument extends beyond quotation, historical discussion or reference to another person’s speech. He proposes the possibility of a white person using the word jokingly with a close Black friend without racist contempt either being expressed or perceived.

It is this hypothetical that I find particularly troubling. Of the thousands of words through which friendship, intimacy, humour and affection can be expressed, why should the ability of a white person to use this particular word require intellectual defence? What is lost to interracial friendship if the N-word remains outside the vocabulary available to white participants? And, perhaps most importantly, if its use is to be declared harmless in certain circumstances, harmless according to whom?

These questions concern much more than etiquette. They concern history, power, authority, interpretation and what I describe here as the unequal distribution of presumed innocence.

The N-word does not enter an interaction as an historically neutral collection of sounds whose moral character is subsequently determined by the intention of whoever speaks it. It arrives already carrying a history.

It belongs to the vocabulary of racial hierarchy through which Black people were represented as inferior, uncivilised, intellectually deficient and less fully human. It became embedded within social worlds shaped by enslavement, colonialism, racial science, segregation and racial violence. Its derogatory power therefore precedes the contemporary speaker.

This distinction matters because arguments based primarily upon intention risk treating racial language as though meaning originates afresh with every utterance. If the speaker intends affection, the word becomes affectionate. If the speaker intends humour, it becomes humorous. If the speaker claims not to have intended racial contempt, its racial significance supposedly becomes uncertain.

But language does not operate in this way.

Words acquire meanings socially and historically. Individual speakers can manipulate, contest and sometimes transform those meanings, but they do not possess unilateral authority over them. The history of a racial slur does not disappear simply because the person uttering it announces that they meant something else.

There is, of course, an important distinction between using a racial slur and mentioning it. A historian analysing a primary source, a court considering evidence, or a scholar discussing the genealogy of racist language is doing something different from directing the word at another person. Context matters.

There is also the complicated phenomenon of linguistic reclamation. Members of marginalised communities sometimes appropriate language historically deployed against them, altering its meaning within particular social and cultural contexts.

Yet reclamation does not automatically produce universal availability.

The fact that some Black people may use variants of the N-word among themselves does not logically confer equivalent authority upon white people. Reclamation by members of a historically subordinated group and use by members of the group historically positioned as dominant are not socially identical acts because the histories accompanying the speakers are not identical.

This brings us to the question that should precede any declaration that such usage is acceptable:

Acceptable according to whom?

There is something deeply uncomfortable about a member of the historically dominant racial group determining the circumstances under which language historically used to degrade another group should cease to be regarded as degrading.

If some Black people decide that they are comfortable with particular forms of linguistic reclamation, that is one conversation. A white intellectual constructing circumstances under which white people should be permitted to participate in that usage is another.

The distinction concerns authority. Who gets to decide that the historical meaning of the word has temporarily been suspended?

The white speaker?

The Black recipient?

An observer?

A philosopher?

Society?

And how would any of these parties establish that the encounter was genuinely harmless?

Consider Biggar’s hypothetical. A white person uses the N-word jokingly with a close Black friend. Perhaps the Black friend laughs.

What exactly has the laughter established?

Very little.

Human behaviour does not provide transparent access to interior experience. People laugh when uncomfortable. They smile when embarrassed. They participate in humour they dislike because challenging it would create social tension. They accommodate friends, colleagues, employers and relatives. They sometimes laugh during an encounter and recognise only afterwards that something disturbed or humiliated them.

There can be pain behind laughter. There can be discomfort behind accommodation.

There can be anger behind politeness. The apparent success of a joke therefore cannot establish the absence of racial harm.

Perhaps the Black friend genuinely finds the joke amusing. That possibility should not be denied either. Black people do not constitute a psychologically homogeneous population, and there is no single Black response to racial language.

But precisely because responses differ, the tolerance of one Black person cannot become a transferable racial licence. One person’s consent belongs to that person.

It cannot determine what another Black person should tolerate, nor can it establish a general principle according to which white use of the N-word becomes benign.

At the centre of this debate lies a concept that requires much greater scrutiny: intent.

Intent is routinely invoked in discussions of racism.

“I didn’t mean it that way.”

“She isn’t racist.”

“He was joking.”

“I know her; she would never intentionally hurt anyone.”

“There was no racist intention.”

Such statements appear reassuring because they seem to distinguish deliberate hatred from misunderstanding, error or clumsiness. Yet they can also perform another function: they can move attention away from the conduct experienced by the recipient and towards the presumed moral character of the person responsible for it.

This is particularly evident in responses to complaints of racism.

Imagine that someone reports experiencing racialised treatment from a colleague named Mary. Another colleague responds:

“But I know Mary. Mary isn’t like that.”

What has actually been established?

Perhaps Mary is kind to that colleague. Perhaps she is generous, progressive and well regarded. Perhaps she has never displayed racial hostility in their presence.

None of this establishes what occurred in another interaction. Yet Mary’s perceived goodness has quietly become evidence against the account of the person reporting racism.

The inquiry has shifted.

The question is no longer simply:

What happened?

It has become:

Is Mary the kind of person who would intend to behave racistly?

That is an entirely different question.

It also relies upon an impoverished understanding of racism. Racism does not require an individual consciously to identify themselves as racist or deliberately to formulate an intention to cause racial harm. People who sincerely oppose racism can reproduce racial stereotypes. People with Black friends can participate in racialised practices. People who understand themselves as liberal, tolerant and egalitarian can nevertheless behave in ways experienced by others as discriminatory or degrading.

Moral respectability does not confer immunity from racialised conduct.

There is another epistemological difficulty. How do we know what another person intended? We infer it.

Human beings do not possess direct access to one another’s internal states. Intention is reconstructed from conduct, language, context, patterns of behaviour and surrounding evidence.

This becomes particularly important when presumed intention determines how apparently comparable conduct is morally classified.

One person commits an act and receives the explanation:

“It was inadvertent.” Another engages in similar conduct and receives: “They knew exactly what they were doing.”

One receives error.

The other receives deception.

One receives complexity.

The other receives culpability.

The obvious question is: what evidence permits us to reconstruct those two internal states so differently?

This question has particular resonance in recent debates surrounding plagiarism and academic misconduct. Where one academic’s unattributed use of another person’s material is interpreted through inadvertence, poor practice or absence of deliberate intention, while another person’s textual appropriation is treated as evidence of intentional deception, intention cannot simply be asserted as though it were an observable fact.

There may be legitimate evidential differences between cases. Scale may differ. Patterns may differ. Institutional findings may differ. Available documentation may differ. But those differences must be demonstrated. Otherwise “intent” risks becoming the place into which existing assumptions about character, credibility and belonging are inserted.

This is where the problem becomes considerably larger than either plagiarism or racial language. It concerns the unequal distribution of presumed innocence. Presumed innocence operates socially as well as legally.

We extend interpretive generosity towards people we trust, recognise, admire or understand as belonging to our social world. When they do something troubling, we search for context.

Perhaps they misunderstood.

Perhaps they were joking.

Perhaps they were tired.

Perhaps their words were taken out of context.

Perhaps they made an innocent mistake.

Perhaps they did not intend the consequence.

Such generosity is an important part of human relationships. The problem arises when it is distributed unevenly.

Who receives complexity?

Who receives context?

Who receives the benefit of ambiguity?

Who receives the presumption of good intention?

And who, by contrast, has intention reconstructed against them?

Race can matter profoundly within these processes, not necessarily because every individual consciously decides to protect members of their own racial group, but because assumptions about credibility, competence, threat, innocence, respectability and belonging are themselves socially produced.

This is one reason that statements such as “I know him; he isn’t racist” deserve scrutiny.

Knowing somebody’s kindness towards oneself cannot establish how that person behaves in every context. Nor can shared ethnicity, friendship, political affiliation, professional admiration or familiarity provide privileged access to another person’s interior world. Indeed, identification may sometimes make charitable interpretation more likely.

The point is not that generosity should disappear. The point is that we should ask who receives it and who does not. There is also a fundamental distinction between the intention of an actor and the experience of the person affected by an act.

If I make an Islamophobic statement and subsequently explain that I did not intend to hurt Muslims, my explanation does not determine whether a Muslim listener experienced that statement as degrading.

If I make a homophobic statement and insist that no harm was intended, that declaration cannot determine the emotional experience of an LGBT person who heard it.

The same applies to racism.

Two people belonging to the same racialised group may respond differently to identical language. One may dismiss it. Another may experience profound hurt. A third may become angry. A fourth may laugh.

These different responses do not establish that one person has correctly understood the event while another has misunderstood it.

Human beings possess different histories, vulnerabilities, experiences and thresholds.

Consequently, the proposition “I did not intend to hurt you” cannot logically produce the conclusion “therefore you were not hurt.”

Intent belongs to the actor. Impact is experienced by the recipient. The two can coexist without corresponding. This is precisely why “I didn’t mean it that way” cannot function as a complete answer to racial harm.

My concern with Biggar’s argument is intensified by my previous engagement with his scholarship on slavery, empire and Britain’s historical responsibilities.

I have previously challenged forms of historical reasoning in which recognition of violence becomes repeatedly accompanied by moral qualification: Britain participated in slavery, but Africans also participated in slave trading; empire produced violence and exploitation, but its purported benefits must also be considered; Britain benefited from slavery, but Britain subsequently became instrumental in abolition.

The historical propositions themselves require careful analysis. African participation in slave trading is not something serious scholarship should conceal. Neither should Britain’s abolitionist history be erased.

My concern is different.

It concerns what moral work particular historical facts are asked to perform.

African participation in slave trading cannot dissolve European responsibility for European participation in Atlantic slavery. British abolition cannot retrospectively cancel British participation in, and enrichment through, systems of enslavement. Historical complexity should deepen our understanding of responsibility rather than continually becoming a mechanism through which responsibility is diluted.

It is therefore striking to encounter another argument structured around qualification.

The N-word is acknowledged as abhorrent when used racistly, but perhaps there are circumstances in which a white person can use it jokingly with a close Black friend.

Once again, my attention is drawn to the but.

The issue is not that moral qualification is inherently illegitimate. Serious scholarship requires complexity.

The question is what the qualification accomplishes.

Why, when confronted with language carrying an extraordinarily well-established history of anti-Black degradation, does the intellectual inquiry turn towards identifying circumstances in which the white speaker might nevertheless remain innocent?

Why is the exceptional innocent usage something that needs to be recovered?

The word “but” can perform remarkable moral labour. It can acknowledge harm while simultaneously redirecting attention towards mitigation. Yes, this happened, but consider the context. Yes, this language is degrading, but consider the intention.

Yes, this group experienced violence, but others participated too.

Yes, this conduct caused harm, but the person responsible is fundamentally decent.

None of these qualifications is automatically false.

Yet when qualification repeatedly travels in the direction of recovering the innocence of those associated with historically dominant groups, we should examine the pattern.

This is particularly important in discussions of anti-Black racism because Black experiences are frequently subjected to demands for extraordinary evidential certainty.

Was it definitely racism?

How do you know?

Could there have been another explanation?

Did they actually intend it?

Perhaps they treat everyone that way.

Perhaps it was a joke.

Perhaps you misunderstood.

Perhaps they simply made a mistake.

Any individual question may be reasonable.

Collectively, however, they can create an almost impossible threshold: racial harm becomes recognisable only after every alternative explanation has been exhausted and the internal racist intention of another human being has somehow been established.

That standard is epistemologically impossible. We cannot open another person’s mind. This returns me to Biggar’s hypothetical. What exactly would be lost if white people simply did not use the N-word? Would interracial friendship become poorer? Would humour become impossible? Would intellectual freedom collapse? Would meaningful human intimacy become inaccessible?

There are innumerable ways in which friends tease one another. There are countless words through which affection, irreverence, humour and intimacy can be expressed.

Why, then, does this particular liberty require recovery?

Why must we construct a hypothetical scenario in which a white person’s use of one of the most notorious anti-Black slurs in the English language becomes morally innocent?

The question becomes even more significant when considered historically.

Black people did not create the conditions under which the word became degrading. They did not invent the racial hierarchy from which its historical power emerged. They did not collectively request that the word become attached to assumptions of Black inferiority.

Why, then, should members of the historically dominant group possess the authority to determine when that history ceases to matter?

There is a profound difference between analysing a word, quoting it where genuinely necessary, studying its historical development and claiming a social entitlement to use it against another human being as humour.

The latter requires justification. And “I didn’t intend racism” is insufficient. Perhaps we need to move beyond the obsessive search for racist intention altogether.

The more useful questions may be:

What was said?

What was done?

What histories does the conduct activate?

What power relations surround the encounter?

How was it experienced?

What consequences followed?

Was there a pattern?

How did the institution respond?

Whose account received credibility?

Whose behaviour received charitable interpretation?

Who was required to prove their pain? And who was permitted simply to declare their innocence? These questions do not require us to abandon complexity. They require us to locate complexity somewhere other than exclusively inside the presumed intentions of the person accused of causing harm.

They also allow us to examine racism without reducing it to the psychology of individually malicious people.

Racism is not only something contained within a hateful heart.

It exists within language, institutions, histories, assumptions, patterns of credibility, distributions of power and structures through which some people’s humanity is more readily recognised than others’.

A society concerned with racial dignity therefore cannot make the recognition of racism dependent upon proving hatred inside another person’s mind.

Acceptable According to Whom? I return finally to the question with which I began.

When is it acceptable for a white person to use the N-word? Perhaps the question itself is wrongly framed. Perhaps instead we should ask: Why does a white person need to use it?

Why should a word created within histories of Black degradation become an object around which the liberty of the white speaker must be defended?

Why should the intellectual problem be how to establish the exceptional circumstances in which its use becomes innocent rather than understanding why Black people might reasonably expect others not to use it?

And if somebody nevertheless declares that its use can sometimes be acceptable, another question must immediately follow: Acceptable according to whom?

One Black friend cannot speak for Black people collectively. Laughter cannot provide transparent evidence of an absence of pain. Friendship cannot erase history. Good character cannot establish innocent conduct. And claimed intention cannot dictate another person’s experience.

There is something profoundly revealing about the amount of intellectual labour sometimes devoted to finding innocence within conduct whose historical meaning is already well understood.

Perhaps that is the larger question raised by this debate.

Not simply whether a hypothetical white person can utter the N-word without consciously intending racial contempt, but why the recovery of that person’s innocence should command greater intellectual attention than the history that made the word degrading in the first place.

The N-word already has a history. Black people did not create that history. And Black people should not be required continually to negotiate with other people’s declarations of good intention before the dignity denied by that history is taken seriously.

Read Biggar's “Who decides if a word is racist?” https://spectator.com/article/who-decides-if-a-word-is-racist/