But when used by a white person it references a history of slavery and lynchings while enacting the violent enforcement of white privilege.Ī psychological take on how this episode shows the coiled snake of unconscious racism lashing out is important along with the logical and the linguistic. It can refer to empowerment when used by a black person. The very meaning changes depending on the racial identity of the speaker. The n-word can be thought of as exhibiting a kind of racial deixis.

Same for words referring to time (“now” and “then”) and place (“here” and “there”). For example, when I say “I” I am referring to “me” but when you say “I” you are referring to “you.” Who the speaker is changes the meaning. More fundamentally, linguistics has the term “deixis” for words whose very definition depends on who is speaking. In contrast, when Rachel Maddow uses the term it means someone who denies science, someone who values power over compassion and reason. While the word “conservative” can have a static dictionary definition, when Rush Limbaugh says “conservative” it means a right-thinking honorable American. The meaning of a word often depends on who says it. The fact is that words, including the n-word, don’t have static meaning, no matter what is written in a dictionary. By using the word he references his own version of white supremacy. In fact, in a möbius strip of logic, if he uses the word then he does not hold the egalitarian values that in some tellings would license his use.

And no matter how deep and inclusive are his consciously held progressive values, those values do not grant him license to use the word. He asserted a privilege to use a word that is not his to use.

Instead, his word choice enacted the very supremacy he was apparently making fun of. But he could have done that by saying “Whoa Senator, I’m a privileged white guy” which would have been funny without letting his racial hostilities leak out. Instead Maher really does seem to be poking fun at himself, maybe even trying to indict the excesses of racism and white supremacy. So, let’s give Maher, Sasse and the audience the benefit of the doubt. That would require guilt-free conscious racist attitudes to a degree not yet widely present even in Trump’s America. First, let’s ask what was even potentially funny in this joke: Was he joking how slaves who worked inside had comparatively better lives than those who worked in the fields? Is it a white-guy wink-and-nod that the trauma of slavery is not really our concern, that slavery, wherever one worked, was not a traumatic assault on human dignity?

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