Power of a Single Word Haunts Us Still

“Mind your tongue,” parents scold their children. It’s good advice, though the truth is also that language has a strange power to control us.

Last Friday, California Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante was addressing a largely African American audience at the Emeryville Holiday Inn. He was praising black labor organizations.

And then, in a litany that repeated the word “Negro,” many in the audience heard or thought they heard that other word. There was a commotion. People left the room. It took several minutes for Bustamante to apologize.

His career now might be at an end. And we are left to wonder about the power of a single word to undo a long public life.

Sigmund Freud talked about “slips,” those verbal mistakes that may reveal an unconscious belief or emotion. Besides Freudian slips, there are times when public people are overheard in their privacy. (The politician or businessman mumbles to a crony, unaware that a microphone is overhearing.) This happened to Jesse Jackson in 1984, when he offhandedly referred to New York City as “Hymietown,” and it happened to executives of Texaco who were caught on tape recordings denigrating black employees.

I do not know Bustamante. I cannot psychoanalyze him and I know nothing of his private conversation. I know only his public life.

His slip, if that’s what we should call it, reminds me of a different sort of verbal mistake--those moments when my mouth says something that I don’t intend. In saying goodbye to a blind friend recently, I was horrified to hear myself say, “See you later.”

What one realizes at such a moment is that the tongue plays tricks on us. Sometimes concentrating hard on not saying a particular word is the quickest way to have that word enter one’s mouth.

Curiously, we live at a time when profanities, especially sexual, are freely uttered in public, by women and men alike. At the same time, and not coincidentally, political correctness dictates whole lists of nouns we can or must not give one another.

Is the female teenager a “girl,” or is he “Hispanic” or “Latino”?, These are questions that preoccupy us at a time when the near-naked woman on a reality television program needs to have every sentence partially bleeped.

But at a time of both great verbal freedom and political correctness, there remains the “N-word.” On the one hand, there are few words left in America that retain so fierce a taboo. On the other, one hears the word all the time now, in thumping lyrics of rap music, for example.

In the 1960s, Dick Gregory, the black comic, encouraged the wide use of the word as a way of deflating its power. Today, African American teenagers toss the noun among themselves. Precisely as Gregory wanted, they take possession of the word used against their ancestors.

Many other Americans are more reticent. I am more reticent.

While I loathe the prissy euphemism--”the N-word”--I cannot bring myself to sound the two terrible syllables. I understand too well why some in Bustamante’s audience got up and left at what they heard.

“Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me,” runs the childish chant. The deeper truth is that language does have a power over us.

Ancient people knew, when they swore or cursed, a word spoken enters the air. And it is not always easy to take the word back.

For generations, Americans spoke the N-word, referring to slaves, to human beings they regarded as chattel. They used the word casually. They meant their cruelty to be mundane.

Thus the word entered the air. It haunts Americans centuries after.

A liberal politician--Latino/Hispanic--gets up to speak in a hotel ballroom to honor African American achievement. He celebrates generations of black men and women. He remembers those years when people who were told to walk bent, walked straight.

And then the word springs from the mouths of the dead. It invades the Holiday Inn. It rides piggyback on the word “Negro.” People think they hear it. A career may be in shambles.

And all of us--both we who are verbally free and we who are politically correct in our speech--must be taken aback by the possibility the voices of the dead may linger in our mouths.