CNN’s Smerconish Hosts Professor Who Uses Uncensored N-Word 7 Times On Air to Argue It Should Be Used in Academia
CNN viewers got to spend 11 minutes of their Saturday morning listening to the uncensored n-word, hard “r” and all, courtesy of Michael Smerconish and Harvard Professor Randall Kennedy, who argued the word should not be censored in certain contexts.
Smerconish opened the segment with a brief rundown of recent controversies involving professors who took heat for using the word — as well as the ill-fated attempt to equate “Karen” with the n-word — then introduced Professor Kennedy.
Smerconish asked Prof. Kennedy to summarize his answer to the question “Is it acceptable to enunciate, for pedagogical reasons, a racial epithet that some find deeply upsetting?”
“Sure you should be able to enunciate the term n***** for pedagogical reasons,” Kennedy said. “In the instances that you mentioned in your introduction, you had teachers who were seeking to drive home as vividly as possible the depth and the centrality and the influence of racism in American life. And one of the ways in which these teachers sought to do that was to quote from important figures in American history.”
Kennedy went on to illustrate his point by using the term over and over again during the segment, which Smerconish repeatedly said he found jarring.
Smerconish went on to ask “Is it narrowly confined to the classroom setting?”
“No, not necessarily,” the professor said. “A lot of learning takes place in classrooms, but suppose you’re at dinner and education takes place in lots of domains of American life. It seems to me the important point here is the use of the word to demean people, and solve people, terrorize people. That’s terrible, that should be condemned. On the other hand if you are in a discussion and you are talking about the way in which until relatively recently there were politicians who routinely used the infamous n word to refer to black people. And if you were sort of talking about this and saying until relatively recently there are politicians that in the United States Congress who would use n*****. And if you were to say that over dinner would it be right for somebody to condemn you for having made a statement the purpose of which was to underline the problem of American racism?”
Smerconish concluded by asking “Is the race of the speaker in the context you’ve identified irrelevant?”
“I think so. If you’re making a good point, you’re making a good point whether you’re white black red, doesn’t matter, brown. A good point is a good point. And it would be a terrible thing in American culture if we erected a race line with respect to who can say what,” Kennedy replied, as millions of white people looking for an n-word pass rushed to practice saying “pedagogical” with a mouthful of Buffalo wings.
Smerconish appeared to find the argument persuasive, but declined to use the word himself.
Watch the clip above via CNN.
