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No South Asians, you cannot say the N-word.
“The N-word is unique in the English language. It is the ultimate insult; a word that has tormented generations of African-Americans. In 2008, Neal A. Lester, dean of humanities at Arizona State University, taught the first-ever college-level class designed to explore the N-word. According to Lester, as early as the 17th century, the N-word has been used to address African-Americans in a derogatory way (Price, 2011, p. 3). It has always been a sign of disrespect. The word is inseparably connected with viciousness and severity on African-American minds and deprecatory slanders cast on Black bodies.” — From this article.
When my article on the accusations of a toxic workplace environment from the women of colour who worked on Hasan Minhaj’s Patriot Act went viral, Black people sharing it in tweets added comments about him using the n-word in a show.
Full disclosure: I do not watch Hasan Minhaj. I had no idea about this until I saw those tweets. I thought at first it must have been some lesser-known or much earlier piece of work by him in which it happened.
Nope. It was on Homecoming King.
Which is from 2017.
And is still on Netflix.
At which point I had to ask: why did the woke Desis need my article before “cancelling” him? From what I could tell, Minhaj was everybody’s favourite woke, Brown boy—which means the vast majority of them would have watched this show. These people love to talk about anti-Blackness as a way to gain social justice points, social clout and signal their general wokeness and yet, it seems Desis had not taken him to task for it. In fact, they seemed to go on loving him and elevating him as an amazing representative of South Asians in America.
In this clip on The Breakfast Club, Minhaj addresses his use of the word and seems to imply that he has learnt and would not be using the word in the future. His defence is that he chose to use the word on the show “so that people could hear what people have called me.”
Which brings us to the point of this article: Can South Asians use the n-word if it has been used against them?
