How Not to Teach Your Child About the N Word

For months, our family couldn't get enough of Kanye West's "Gold Digga.'' Whenever it came on Z100, we'd dance in the car and sing along, blithely overlooking the subject matter (see "My Lumps.")
Then Regis downloaded the song so we could listen to it at home. And, unfortunately, he didn't get the radio edit. Instead of the line, "But she ain't messin' with no broke...broke....uuhh'' our children could now hear, "But she ain't messin' with no broke nigga.''
Lulu and Zeb didn't seem to notice. But Regis and I looked at each other, stricken. What if they DID notice?
What if they started using the word? What if they started using it around black people?!!!
Regis rushed to explain, at least to Lulu. Zeb was watching TV.
"Nigga is a word that black people sometimes call each other, and when THEY do it, it's okay. But it's not okay for a white person to use it. Then it's a really bad curse word and it hurts people's feelings.''
"Can you call a white person that?'' she asked.
No.
"Why?''
Because it's a very bad word, we told her.
"Why is it worse to call black people that?''
We felt compelled to trot out the whole issue of racial injustice, which we also confront during drives through Newark, where we work, when Lulu wonders why there are so many black people there. When we tell her that one reason is because many of them are poor, she asks why, and it gets long and complicated.
On Martin Luther King Day, we supplement the snippets of black history Lulu learns in school so she doesn't believe the Time Magazine for Kids explanation she got in kindergarten about Martin Luther King wanting to change the world because as a child he wanted to play with white kids.
We wanted her to know that a lot of black people fought for their rights--even died for them--that it didn't just happen because of one man, or because Rosa Parks sat in the front of the bus.
Now, we had to explicate "nigger'' for her.
We told her that this it was a horrible curse word white people invented for black people back when they made them slaves. But black people had turned it into a different kind of word that wasn't so bad and they sometimes used with each other, especially rappers.
Lulu nodded as if she understood. But she didn't.
That night at bed time, she was still wrestling with the complexity of the word.
"So black people can see each other and be like, "Hi, nigger!'' she said brightly.
"No, they don't really use it like that,'' I tried to explain.
"How do they use it?''
"Maybe more like when we call you "stinker'' but we mean it affectionately,'' I replied.
"Oh, you little nigger!'' she said in an amused, maternal voice.
She was enjoying the word, and every time she said it I winced.
"Listen,'' I said. "You can't use that word. It's really the most awful word you can ever use. And it's especially awful if you use it around black people. They could get really mad at you, or you could hurt their feelings very very badly. So DON'T EVER USE IT.''
Of course, by describing "nigger'' as the ultimate verbal taboo, I had invested it with an allure even more powerful than "fuck'' or "shit,'' so now she was irresistibly tempted to try it out.
It slipped from her mouth a few days later, when she was angry at Zeb, sputtering, "You butthead! You...you...nigger!'' (She lost TV for the day over that).
When she watched the "Cat in the Hat'' movie and the evil Alec Baldwin character came onscreen, she looked at me wickedly and said, "He's a ni---'' waiting for me to stifle her before she finished the word.
I told her to cut it out, but tried not to respond with shock and outrage, since that only heightened the word's potency for her. We tried to treat it like any other profanity, telling her if she had to say it she can go in her room with the door shut and say it when no one's around.
Meanwhile, we wait in suspense, wondering if she'll utter the word in school, or in front of an actual black person, just to see what happens.