They called me the "N WORD" and I had no idea how to react!
Fig 1. A brief history of the N Word. |
Soon after I arrived in the United States, I was on a soccer trip in New Jersey playing against some prep school full of huge, machine-like athletes. These guys had obviously done more than the required amount of high school and judging by their beards and wrinkles, I suspect that some of them had already started families and had two to three kids already.
I was playing as a striker. I was really a midfielder by trade but in the US, if you’re a black dude with any kind of speed, you will automatically be put up front and told to keep chasing the ball to your heart’s content (see: Altidore, Jozy). It was a rainy, miserable day and we quickly went 2-0 down after one of their T-1000 killing machines blasted the ball so hard past our keeper that we felt it would have endangered his life to try to stop it. It began raining and we all ran for cover. The game was delayed for about half an hour and our team joked about our predicament figuring that our only chance of winning was to let our powers combine like they did to great effect in Captain Planet.
2-0 down, only one man could save us! |
We leveled the game and soon we become too much for the other team to handle. A diminutive defender was assigned to guard me. He was the smallest of the lot. It seemed like he had been excluded from the rest of the team’s BYOC (Bring Your Own Creatin) parties. I was playing well. I was serving him all day, so much so that I doubt he would be able to pay the bill at the end of the game. It became too much for him and eventually he slid in viciously, sending me to the ground where upon he stood over me and said, “That’s what you get you damn nigger!”
Heck, I even once dressed up as Kunta Kinte for Halloween! |
I kept playing and didn't say anything. The Terminators finally defeated us 5-3 and on the bus ride back, I mentioned to one of my friends that I'd been called a nigger. It led to a massive uproar with black kids jumping up and down ferociously as they demanded that the bus driver turn back immediately, presumably so they could pop the trunk on his bitch ass for saying that. The white kids were more upset than any of the black kids by a factor of at least 6, offering any tactical support in the retaliation, including a trunk to pop.
I was mildly offended but how offended should I really have been?
Nigger didn’t mean exactly the same thing to me. The word hadn’t got the historical power to evoke strong feelings of hurt or hate, maybe perhaps because I was a member of group “B” (See Fig 1); who managed to escape or who the slave trade fad didn't affect quite so profoundly. Although I had heard the word before, I had never heard it spewed with its original hateful and demeaning context before. All this did was confuse me! This happened years ago and I am still confused about how I should have reacted or even how I felt at the time…..