Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language

84 Forbidden Words
whites; and in Australia, boong and gin are not invariably dysphemistic, no
more so in fact than are lebo ‘Lebanese’, wog ‘Caucasian Australian who is
not Anglo-Celtic’ and skip(py) ‘Anglo-Celtic Australian’. Practically all these
‘racist’ terms can be used without irony in orthophemistic illocutionary acts.
Consider the term nigger. African American law professor Randall Kennedy’s
book Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word provoked a storm of
protest from blacks and whites when it first appeared.
Patricia Williams, an African-American professor at Columbia Law School, objected
to the title: ‘That word is a bit like fire – you can warm your hands with the kind of
upside-down camaraderie that it gives, or you can burn a cross with it. But in any case
it depends on the context and the users’ intention, and seeing it floating abstractly on a
book shelf in a world that is still as polarized as ours makes me cringe.’ (New York
Times, 1 December 2001)
Used among African Americans, nigger is often a badge of identity and
solidarity (when it is often spelled nigga):
nigger Form of address and identification among blacks (can connote affection,
playful derision, genuine anger, or mere identification of another black person; often
used emphatically in conversation). (Folb 1980: 248)
Something comparable holds true for almost all racist terms – indeed, all -IST
terms. Nonetheless, the lexicon entries for the racist terms exemplified above
will need to mark the degree to which they are dysphemistic: e.g. black should
probably be marked as orthophemistic, whereas nigger should probably be
marked as typically dysphemistic, with exceptional contexts identified. Privileged
use of terms like nigger (and other -IST dysphemisms) may be extended
to outsiders under certain circumstances. The problem is that side-participants
and overhearers may not recognize this special dispensation. Randall
Kennedy 64 cites the case of a white university basketball coach whose mostly
black team gave him dispensation to use nigger as they did; both administrators
and students at his university protested, and he lost his job for violating
their taboos.
As the result of an automobile accident, John Callahan is a wheelchairbound
quadriplegic; this gives him licence to create the rambunctious, scatological,
irreligious and very non-PC cartoon Quads. The main character,
Reilly O’Reilly, who is also a wheelchair-bound quadriplegic, lives in
Maimed Manor (bought with the settlement from his accident) along with
the rest of the Magnificent Severed, who include Blazer (a head on a trolley),
Lefty who has scythes in place of hands, and Fontaine the blind African
American. Quads would be severely censured, and possibly censored from