by Eric Rauchway

True confession, following Dan's post: I, myself, a white guy, have used the N-word in front of dozens of students--when quoting white racists, in my U.S. history lectures. Which I regard as legitimate, but I didn't reach that conclusion lightly: It still gives me pause, and I could be argued out of it. As I've pointed out elsewhere, one of the few pleasures of studying the history of American racism before the Civil Rights Movement is the ease of finding evidence: American racists used to be unashamed and frank about their racism. They didn't eupheme; they told you they didn't like black people and intended to keep them from voting and that was that. Why should we quote these sentences, which are a dime a dozen? Not primarily to shock and certainly not to titillate, but to illustrate to students the silliness of relying on "states' rights" or similar explanations that attribute the parlous state of African Americans between the Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement to some complicated cause that isn't racism. Because, sure, you can start from a principled defense of limited government and find your way via circuitous logic to a regretful denial of civil rights to black southerners--but Occam's Razor asks that we notice the much shorter route, by which you get to denial of civil rights much more quickly if you start from abundantly evident racism. Even so, we could quote white racists saying fairly horrible things in sentences where they don't actually use the N-word. Plenty of white racists, in genteel moments, spoke of their intent to keep "Negroes" out of politics. Should we, in the interest of modern propriety, quote those pronouncements and stop short of more shocking language? No, I think we should actively if (again) carefully find the appropriate time to point up the historical use of now-unacceptable language. It's precisely our sense that that word is beyond the pale, that it's on the edge of violence, that requires us to quote it. We need to see, vividly, the easy dehumanization of black citizens in the minds of white racists. We cannot hope to grasp the moral power of the nonviolent Civil Rights Movement without it.