On Being Called “Nigger”: Open Letter to Naje

On Being Called “Nigger”: Open Letter to Naje – 2018

Revised 2023

Najè and Jabari at opening of Black Panther

Dear Najé,

I can’t tell you about the sorrow and deep regret I felt when you told me you had just been called a nigger. It was a hot, humid afternoon in “Hot Atlanta.” We were just about ready to leave to meet you for dinner when you called crying and emotional because a white man in a dark red Toyota Camry with license plates beginning with BLK had just rolled down his window and yelled: “You could have moved up 10 inches so I could have pulled around you–stupid, fucking nigger.”

I am sure you felt violated, shocked, and reminded of where you are today–in the “new” America that is supposed to be in the process of becoming “great” again. At 27, you could not come up with words to say to the racist because you were in a state of shock. And in as much as that was true, you will remember for the rest of your life the contorted face and angry eyes of this sixty-ish in age bigot as he sped pulled around you nearly hitting your car, yelling out for a second time: “You stupid, fucking nigger.”

What happened to you was unsettling and somewhat ironic. In broad daylight you were verbally assaulted on a crowded street in Atlanta, a city that gave birth to the modern civil rights movement. It happened near Little Five Points, one of the more liberal neighborhoods in town, less than a mile from where you attended a prestigious private school. Not in the exurbs or in middle or south Georgia where many whites still proudly fly the Confederate flag. In the ATL.

My youngest of two daughters, we are nearing the year 2023, 160 years after the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 and 9 years after the 1964 Civil Rights Act. If this can happen to you in the heart of Atlanta, then there is no place in this nation where you will be sheltered from this evil, this attack upon what the late actress and human rights advocate Ruby Dee called, your “somebodiness.”

I know for you, my millennial daughter, the shock and pain of it all must be doubly harrowing. You grew up with friends of all races, graduated from Wellesley College, one of the most diverse institutions of higher learning in the world, and work as a clinical researcher at Emory University, my alma mater, considered by many as an enlightened “Harvard of the South.”

You believed your worldview was legitimate. You possessed hope grounded in a faith that if you treated others as you wanted to be treated, good would not only be returned to you but there would be broader benefits for society. Now your heart has been broken. Now you are less sure about America’s ability to cleanse itself or overcome its original sin of racism. We empathize with you.

I remember first experiencing racism more than 50 years ago when I was about seven or eight-years-old. I was getting on a ride at an amusement park in Des Moines, Iowa when the ticket taker called me “Darky.” This was around 1960. It happened again a decade later in Westport, CT, when I was told by my friend’s father that I could not stay at his home for the Christmas holidays because I was Black. Racism chased after me into adulthood as my wife and I, minding our own business, were called “nigger” several times at Stone Mountain Park in DeKalb County and in downtown Atlanta.

It never ends. The micro-aggressions; the victim blaming; and the myth of reverse discrimination that whites like to charge whenever African Americans are in a position of authority. As a college president at a state affiliated higher education intuition, white employees, terminated by white supervisors, approved by white deans always landed me with discrimination complaints by the aggrieved white employees. In their minds, the mere fact that they lost their jobs at a college headed by a Black man was inherently discriminatory.

Each time racism rears its ugly head, overtly or covertly, it stings and chips away at our belief in a society where character wins out over skin color. It is a sad testament that for too many children of color, encountering racial insult is a rite of passage, an initiation into a racialized society where no matter how high you rise, some white person of much lower status can bring you down to size by calling, or treating you like, a nigger.

The tragedy of all of this, my dear, is that your mother and I cannot not prevent such insults from happening to you nor can we adequately prepare you for those insults when they come. All we can do is to pray that somehow when they come–and they will come–within your soul you have the fortitude from what we’ve taught you to get you through. That the guiding presence of the ancestors will protect you and steer you away from all harm.

It would not be a far stretched to link acts of racial hostility and aggression like you experienced to the climate in this country set by the twice-impeached, indicted former U.S. president and those who provide him cover. Unfortunately, too many whites believe they can say out loud today what they always believed but wouldn’t dare utter above their breaths.

They feel innately better than you by the mere fact of their whiteness and their social and economic privileges. Never mind your neuroscience degree from Wellesley and your many other accomplishments–to the bigoted driver, you were just a dumb nigger unworthy of human dignity and respect.

I am sorry my generation has not been able to bring about a better world for you, your sister, and others of your generation. Our country owes you more. If not a world where you are protected from insults and evil of racism, at least a world where you believe tomorrow will be a brighter day.

Love always,

Dad