"N***** is just a word."
Those five words were my piercing introduction to being an African American female teacher and graduate student in the field of composition pedagogy. Even now, more than two decades later, those five words remain a dominant memory of my experience earning my graduate degree in English.
It was a composition pedagogy and curriculum course for first-year graduate students, and I was a proud and excited member of the cohort. We had received teaching assistantships as part of our graduate school funding package, and we were being trained to teach college-level writing. The class was being team-taught by two instructors, one constructed as White female and the other constructed as White male.
At the time, the terminal degree offered by the university was in rhetoric and professional communication (RPC), and the RPC faculty theoretically managed the composition program, including training the new graduate teaching instructors. The class was pedagogically structured around the theoretical belief that all writing is an argument and around Aristotle's methods of persuasion.
Readings about the art of constructing arguments, studying famous persuasive arguments, and class discussions were the primary content of the course. Toward the end of the course, students were tasked with developing writing course syllabi, writing assignments, assessment tools, and a theoretical and methodological rational narrative as support for our pedagogical delivery of the freshman composition curriculum.
"What did you say?" I responded back to the professor. I was sure that I had misheard her. I was never allowed to use that word. I didn't use that word, and I couldn't understand why she was using this word in our classroom. I tried to look into the faces of my fellow students and future professional colleagues for help and support while the professor looked at mine, but my fellow students
looked away.
The class was working in small groups, and the professor pivoted and turned in the middle of the room to ensure that she made eye contact with everyone. I looked at the members of my small group, which just happened to be all the constructed people of color and other marginalized folks in the room: two African Americans (including me), one Afro-Latinx, one White LGBTQ+ female, and one Muslim student. The remaining and dominant number of students in the classroom were constructed as White American.
"N***** is just a word," the White female professor said for the second time. She was short, and I swore that she bounced slightly up on the balls of her feet in beat, two times, with the consonant sounds in the word, n**-***.
We had read many essays and books, including Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire and the classic "Just Walk On By: Black Men in Public Space" by Brent Staples. Freire's text links the struggle of oppression to understanding one's position to the world and power central to the educational process and, in my view, to writing (literacy) acquisition.
Staples writes about how his education did not prevent him from being viewed through gendered and racial stereotypes. There was discussion of words and their constructed meanings, and the professors emphasized how all words only have power when people who use and hear those words are complicit in the construction of the power: blah, blah, blah, and super-blah.
So I asked a person in the classroom, who is a descendant of African slaves in the United States, if he was only offended by the use of the word n***** because he was complicit in creating its derogatory meaning at the moment the professor let the word n***** slip from her lips.
It seemed that I just had to merely concede that in the professor's use of the word n*****, she wasn't really acknowledging the racist, violent, and hegemonic social historical, political, and exclusionary affect and effect of the word on me as an African American and others as non–African Americans in the classroom.
It was just a word. Right? Wow! It was like magic!
Where had this theory been all my life, especially when I had been subjected to equally derogatory argumentative identity words of bitch, hoe, slut, darkie, dumb, lazy, stupid, fat, and pussy, to name a few?
I was trying really hard to understand how our class lecture arrived at this vast breach in the classroom knowledge and experience. I was also trying really hard to ignore her, but I am not really good at that, so I went back into the conversation.
"Excuse me. I am sorry, but I didn't understand what you said." I thought that was a good place to start.
I looked the professor directly in her eyes, and she showed no signs of retreating. I was new to graduate school and the ways scholars boldly manipulate and use theory to obscure and perpetuate the silence and invisibility of the Other and their experiences.
The other groups stopped working, and the class fell silent. The male professor made his way over to our group and positioned himself closer to the female professor. The male professor didn't repeat what his colleague said, but his physical proximity to the professor's body was a show of support, and his colleague went back in for the kill.
"N***** is just a word. Rhetoric is a form of communication, and words only carry the meanings that we give to them," she explained like she was explaining how to solve a variable equation on the board for the third time. In that moment the professor created a paradigm where our identities and experiences of meaning could not exist simultaneously. My identity and experiences had to die in order for hers to dominate the classroom discourse, her lesson plans, and meanings that she was so well-meaningly creating for the classroom.
Cue lovely jazz elevator background music.
***
Like some first-generation Black folks one to two generations geographically removed from the U.S. South, I grew up in a segregated northern inner city in the seventies and eighties. It was a place and time where if you could string a well enunciated sentence together and all your verbs conjugated correctly with the help of Schoolhouse Rock's "Verb: That's What's Happening" on Saturday mornings, everybody said that you were "articulate or well-spoken" and that you should go to school to become a lawyer.
So growing up and throughout the majority of my undergraduate career, attending law school after graduation was my plan. No shade to lawyers, but if believing in the study and practice of law as my career path (along with believing that it would allow me to one day buy a blue Mercedes for my momma because we never had a car and blue was my momma's favorite color) got me out of the South Side of Chicago to become the first person in my family to complete a college degree, then Patricia J. Williams and Johnnie Cochran was where it was at.
I couldn't really tell anyone that I wanted to be a writer. After undergraduate years of studying English Literature and student activism, I was sincerely convinced that I didn't want to work in a professional field where I could so compassionately empathize why, in some social situations, citizens were set up to break laws and subsequently be subject to inequitable outcomes.
I could have never imagined that a year later I would be in a graduate composition pedagogy class with a White professor using racial epithets with Montresor's impunity as a methodology for teaching me—a first-generation African American female student—a lesson on argument.
And I thought teaching writing would be a safe space for me as a woman of color. In that moment, the teacher called me a n***** and did it legitimately because it was within her academic freedom and purview. Because rhetorically n***** is just a word. Right? Poverty, homelessness, oppression, learning differences, class differences, and incarceration are just things. Right? Sexual assault, homophobia, bullying, and disabilities are just things. Right? Students are just bodies that we, as teachers, have the power to mold and to control how we want without really seeing who and what they are and the myriad of ways that they may show up.
Maybe this is what happens when we teach in spaces, and we don't acknowledge and humble our pedagogy and curriculum to the world in which we and our students inhabit. Those worlds can be the same, simultaneous, overlapping, intersecting, or completely isolated.
The sad part is that I think that the professor, like many of us who teach, sincerely believed that what she said and did caused absolutely no harm, so I don't write this essay to shame or blame. I write this essay to release myself and others from the trauma experienced in the writing classroom, and maybe through compassion and empathy my experience can heal and inform our field and us (practitioners, teachers) as we work to transform in the changing dynamics of higher education with a focus on social justice, diversity, equity, inclusion, and antiracism to better teach and serve our students and intersecting community members.
This is excerpted from Traveling without Moving: Essays from a Black Woman Trying to Survive in America by Taiyon J. Coleman. Published by the University of Minnesota Press. Copyright 2024 by Taiyon J. Coleman. All rights reserved. Used by permission. Certain words and phrases in this extract have been edited for reader sensitivity.
Taiyon J. Coleman is a poet, writer, and educator whose work has been anthologized widely. A Cave Canem and VONA fellow, she is a 2017 recipient of a McKnight Foundation Artist Fellowship in Creative Prose and is one of twelve emerging children's writers of color selected as a recipient of the 2018–19 Mirrors and Windows Fellowship funded by the Loft Literary Center and the Jerome Foundation in Minnesota. She is associate professor of English and women's studies at St. Catherine University in St. Paul, Minnesota.
All views expressed are the author's own.
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About the writer
Taiyon J. Coleman is a poet, writer, and educator whose work has been anthologized widely. A Cave Canem and VONA ... Read more
