Professor Ken Taylor on the N-Word.
Less than a year after his untimely passing, I find myself in desperate need of Ken Taylor’s advice. I, we, always need the wisdom and kindness of Professor Taylor. But right now, I especially require his expertise on language: the material he used to teach and write about at Stanford: ESF8, Recognizing the Self and its Possibilities and PHIL 181C: Slurs and derogatory language, and his commentary on Forbidden Words like his 2013 episode of Philosophy Talk. Most urgently, I wish I could seek his guidance on the use of the N-word in campus lectures.
“The N-word,” he lowered his voice as we spoke after first our class together in 2015. “Has been commercialized by rap. It’s one thing that our Black students sing along and use it as term of endearment among each other. It’s quite another to hear people who aren’t Black feel there’s an invitation to say it now because it’s in lyrics.”
Professor Taylor never said the N-Word in class. But I think I remember hearing him ambling down the Quad humming some rap lyrics once, and I know a couple times he read The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s mention of the word aloud. This variability was Taylor’s prerogative as an African American; his history with the word, his decision when and how to use it.
When we taught together, he extended the same linguistic courtesy to me, his Jewish colleague. In seminar discussing W.E.B Dubois’ antisemitic statements in The Souls of Black Folks, he offered:
“I’m not sure what’s motivating Dubois here. It’s hard to believe Dubois would condemn anyone because of their religion. I can’t imagine him ever saying the….” Taylor threw a significant glance at me and dropped to a near-whisper, which was uncharacteristic of this man with a notoriously booming, theatrical voice:
“The… K-Word.”
The students stole puzzled glimpses at me. One next to me scribbled on a note.
“The what?”
I explained he meant “kike,” a derogatory word for Jews.
After class I pursued the topic with him, did he really think the K-Word and N-Word were equivalent slurs?
“Are they?” He asked, withholding his opinion in favor of hearing mine.
I demurred. There’s no moment Jews have appropriated the K-word as an act of self-affirmation, no complex self-usage among Jews, and it’s not a very commonly used word these days anyways. I’m more upset if a non-Jew uses the word “Jewy,” which I sometimes say with family, and feel most uncomfortable when I hear AP English high school juniors innocently giggling at depictions of Meyer Wolfsheim in The Great Gatsby, which they fail to understand as antisemitic.
Ken was interested in these more subtle types of slurs too, but he especially wanted students to understand the problem of hateful language on their own. A great admirer off 19th century liberal philosopher John Stuart Mill, Taylor invited students to think deeply about Mill’s position that all words, ideas, and opinions must be heard for the sake of the long-term progress of humanity: “If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.”
Debating Mill’s On Liberty at the same time that anti-Muslim activist Robert Spencer spoke at Stanford in 2017, students had no inkling of Taylor’s position on whether having Spencer speak was an act of free speech and inclusion, or the affirmation of a racist, or something else. He let students debate this one, saying merely that the modern university is not completely Millian. The university invites free speech, but in more measured ways than Mill originally imagined. Mill’s model, he considered, resists any simple application.
In my own college experience in the 1970s and 1980s, I recall some remarkable attempts to forbid censorship under the aegis of Mill and liberal ideas about language and art:
An elderly, very proper Austrian literature professor, who deeply believed in the sanctity of the written word, would gamely read aloud the most sex, profanity, slur-filled page, because one MUST NOT shrink from “difficult art.” Rather, one must read, say, write to uphold the autonomy of the work.
A Cold War ethos that ostentatiously rejected censorship of any kind as totalitarian.
A simultaneously hippie and conservative insistence that all students read every slur aloud to prove themselves truly free and enlightened. It was our MORAL obligation to be ADULTS and say, read, write exactly as it stood in writing!
Taylor had absorbed some of this ethos too, but deployed his own methods. Most importantly, he enjoyed debate and fundamentally abhorred shaming of any kind. I believe he’d be greatly interested in student discussions about Stanford Professor Rose Salseda’s voicing of the N-word in a Spring 2020 CSRE course. A week later a posting of hers appeared in which Salseda had written out the full name of N****z Wit Attitudes, aka NWA. Was this an old post? Or had it been posted after the students widely expressed their dismay at non-African American using the word in class? Timing and context matter here. If the post is old, it raises a single question: who can read the N-Word aloud. If new, it raises two: usage of the N-Word and whether its writer continued to assert herself despite the injury registered by students.
Taylor often chose his words based on context, speaker, intent. In many ways traditional, and by 2019, a grand elder statesman of philosophy, Ken Taylor nevertheless proved himself unlike the professors both he and I knew in the 1970s and 1980s. He worshiped the autonomy of some texts—“See Dubois describing Black people as ‘shiftless?’ See those antisemitic sentences? See, see, never look away, let’s discuss.” But other times, he explained: “I read MLKJR aloud in ways one can if one is Black.”
I believe I learned from Ken Taylor, that in 2020 we no longer insist the written word retains an absolute autonomy. The limit to that autonomy holds especially for slurs, including the N-Word, which carry the weight of a history of oppression with them. Taylor also helped me understand that only professors of African descent are free to decide how to use the N-Word in their classrooms, and even then they engage in, as he did, a complex conversation with their own Black students about when and how to use the word in class.