Using Hurtful Words for a Noble Purpose

What is in a word?

In a coming episode of Fox’s highly original new comedy “Andy Richter Controls the Universe,” our genial protagonist is having regular euphoric sex with the kind of great-looking blond who normally doesn’t give him a tumble, only to learn that she is a bigot.

When she tells him she took a phone call for him while he was in the bathroom, he asks her who it was. “I don’t know,” she replies. “Some Jew.”

Sweet, likable Andy is crushed. But what to do? Does he heed his raging libido and keep seeing her or obey his inner outrage and break it off? Wanting to give her the benefit of the doubt for self-serving reasons, he devises an ingenious ethnic food test that he hopes she’ll pass. But no. “Those Jews are so cheap,” she says, “they don’t even give you the middle of the bagel.”

The laugh comes not from the line but from what it produces: Andy’s obvious dilemma, one stemming from the inner struggle between his moral sense and his anatomy.

Jew!

“You say it a million times, it’s the only word that never loses its meaning,” says Danny Balint, the self-loathing Jewish skinhead in “The Believer,” which just aired on Showtime.

Actually, Jewboy is the operative affront. Only anti-Semites like Balint would argue that “Jew” alone is an epithet, in contrast to “nigger,” a two-syllable insult so volcanic that this and other newspapers are skittish about printing it even as part of a discussion, preferring the code “N-word” instead.

The broadcast networks are becoming less and less reticent when it comes to language in prime time, mostly for the purpose of gratuitously matching cable’s raunch, but also occasionally opening important doors to dialogue and understanding that earlier were padlocked shut.

The N-word, for example, is addressed in a high-minded episode of “Boston Public” that Fox says it is repeating Monday because its Feb. 25 premiere yielded such a large, positive response from viewers.

What is in a word? In this case, hundreds of years of aching history.

Slavery ... segregation ... flaming crosses ... firebombs ... bodies swinging from trees.

Those grotesque images are painful shards that fly from the N-word, even when it’s famously used for effect by respected U.S. literati, from Mark Twain to Carl Sandburg. It’s a word more jarring and wounding, arguably, than slurs aimed at Jews, Asians, Latinos, Italians, gays, women, you name it.

At least when the source is nonblack.

Which is the essence of Monday’s “Boston Public,” written by whites (the series has no black writers) John J. Sakmar, Sean Whitesell, Kerry Lenhart and series creator David E. Kelley. It comes a year after the recently departed “Any Day Now” stripped down the N-word in a notable double-length episode on Lifetime, stating it 61 times but never to shock, while affirming that TV’s reputation for timidity in taking on hot-button issues is not always deserved.

“What other word has as much power?” asked the attorney on “Any Day Now” when defending a black teen on trial for fatally striking a white youth who had taunted him with the N-word after a basketball game.

“Boston Public” asks about the same question, but instead of putting the word itself under a microscope, it looks mostly at the debate over who, if anyone, has the moral right to use it. And in what context?

It opens with a hallway fight erupting when black Andrae (Aldlo Hodge) objects to a white classmate, Jordan (Stuart Stone), using the word in a friendly way to address his black pal, J.T. (DeJuan Guy), as he would use “dude” in casual conversation. Their white teacher, Danny Hanson (Michael Rapaport), breaks up the fight, then urges his class to “talk ... about what just happened” in order to hack away the word’s terrible “power.”

Yet just as a Jew can say “Jewboy” facetiously without offending, and those with physical disabilities will jokingly label themselves “gimps,” as sometimes happens, it’s not uncommon for some blacks to call one another the N-word.

“But whites can’t?” asks an incredulous Jordan in class.

“If a white man uses the word, it puts us down,” responds Hodge as Andrae, swiping every scene he’s in with his seething presence.

There are the usual parallel plots here, one involving a homeless girl and another focusing on that aging irritant, teacher Harvey Lipschultz (Fyvush Finkel), who puts the kibosh on a student’s application to Amherst and later asks, “Is it time for me to quit?” Yes, YES!!!!!! It has nothing to do with chronological age, only with his growing confusion and urge to pass on his biases to students.

But the N-word is this episode’s emotional centerpiece.

When black teacher Marla Hendricks (Loretta Devine) learns that Hanson has deployed the word repeatedly in a class discussion, she is infuriated and won’t be assuaged. “No teacher should use that word anywhere, anyplace, especially a white teacher,” she protests to sympathetic principal Steven Harper (Chi McBride), who is also black. “White people haven’t earned the right to say that word,” she argues.

All of this sets up a confrontation between Harper and Hanson that endangers the teacher’s job, even though his talk-about-it strategy seems quite sane and admirable in Monday’s volatile milieu, whose frames of reference range from black comic Chris Rock’s incendiary but funny N-word monologue to Harvard scholar Randall Kennedy’s book, “Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word.”

The episode has its own troubles, ending very badly by appearing to reinforce the batty notion that whites are, indeed, disqualified from hashing over the N-word even in an academic setting. But it’s a noble effort that declines the protection of euphemisms and easy answers, while pounding another nail into the coffin of a former TV taboo.

“Boston Public” airs Monday nights at 8 on Fox. The network has rated next week’s episode TV-PG-L (may be unsuitable for young children, with an advisory for coarse language).

Howard Rosenberg’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He can be contacted at howard.rosenberg @latimes.com.