Marion Tango read this powerful original poem at the 2023 Coming to the Table National Gathering.
Watch and listen here to Marion
Why I Don’t Use the n-word
It’s the only word I ban from my Pasadena house
Unless it rolls in on a song I like,
Like in my first favorite musical: Hair,
Or, well I don’t much listen to Kanye these days.
I was That white woman
Who let her entitled 7-year-old son say any word he knew how to say:
Fuck. Shit. Hairy butt-hole.
Not the n-word.
I don’t know who told me first, it was bad.
But it seems I could always sense its vitriolic intentionality,
Its programmed putrid hatred,
Its callous, casual cruelty, and
Its posing puffery of rancid, stagnant superiority
Like the slimy resin build-up on the bottom of an over-used spittoon.
I didn’t hear it often, or maybe even ever
In my first 6 years at our New Jersey home.
My liberal parents and their mostly Jewish friends
Were pompously
North of the Mason-Dixon Line,
New Yorkers and Quakers and Brits,
Too comfortably removed from the sordid business of colonialism
Or the Southern stench of chattel slavery
To have any qualms or
Reason to disparage
People of a darker hue.
They didn’t see color,
As was the fashion in those years,
From the Civil Rights era on,
In Manhattan and the boroughs beyond,
But they were happy to see it,
If that were preferred.
I believed the Yankee lie,
Of racism and slavery being a Southern stain,
A Confederate calamity,
A Dixie-land disease,
And we were from the North,
Land of unions and newspapers and people with a conscience.
The first time I remember someone saying it in front of me,
I was 12 or 13,
In Pennsylvania,
At a Denny’s (of course),
With a group of kids I didn’t know well.
This white boy said it,
I think in a joke.
I froze.
Shocked
Horrified
Incensed
Almost, at a loss for words
“Don’t say that in front of me”
“Lighten up, it’s just a joke”
“It’s not funny, and if you say it again, I’m leaving”
Now he looked shocked,
Confused
Ashamed?
“No one’s ever said that before.
I didn’t know”.
Huh.
That was easy.
We’ll get this racism licked in no time.
Imagine my surprise,
to be a junior in a Bohemian boarding school
in Western Massachusetts,
Almost as far North as Canada,
The year a KKK cross was burned
under the window of the
First
Elected
Black
Student
President
of Williams College.
1980
Well, that was just the beginning
Of the surprises in store for me.
Like,
My great-great-great grandmother came from the South,
And all her kin.
Like,
My family’s held hundreds of men, women, and children,
Against their will,
In bondage and servitude,
With no rights or liberty,
No choice or agency,
No promise of safety,
And they used That word
To clarify their position
They used That word
To instill fear and humiliation
They used That word
To say nobody’s coming to save you today
Some white people say, “it’s just a word.”
Some white people say, “it’s a free country, I can say what I want”
Some white people say, “censorship is as bad as slavery”
Some white people say, “my Black friend said its ok”
Some white people say, “but Kanye says it”
My family may have said it
A long time ago
My Grandma may have said it in my lifetime, doh!
But my evolution has brought me to this time and place
Where I don’t want to threaten the Black human race
With leftover misguided superiority
Of the pale-skinned people,
With no humanity
Author: Marion Tango is on the steering committee of the Southern California Coming to the Table local group, and is committed to a lifelong path of healing the legacy of slavery through education, deep conversation, and mindfulness practice, with a focus on individual, collective and ancestral trauma. Marion is a certified Thomas Hübl practice group facilitator. She descends from enslavers and colonizers who stole this land now known as the United States.
©2023, Marion Tango. All rights reserved.
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My father’s family was mostly stone cutting and loggiing Northerners. My mother’s family was Southern and her paternal family were slave owners. The maternal branch was looked down on because they were poor mountain people. Surprise. Her paternal grandparents, he from slave owning English and she from a Jones family that seemed to spring up in 1837 in Missouri (along the Mississippi River) on a marriage record. Lucy’s father was John Jones and his father was Elijah Jones who was born about 1813 in Kentucky. The Joneses were easy to find after the 1850 census and one various marriage and baptismal records. Lucy married her Sutton with no hint of where Elijah came from. Someone has linked Elijah to a Goins family who were FPC in the earliest Indiana and Kentucky censuses. The Goins were small landowners in Southern Virginia where FPC were “encouraged” to move West after the opening of the Western territories after the Revolutionary War. Many Goins remained in the Ohio River Valley between Kentucky and Indiana. If my Elijah Jones was born Elijah Goins, when he turned 18 or so, he moved down the Ohio River to the MIssissippi and reinvented himself in Missouri as a white man. The Goins remained FPC through the 1840 census and appear as white after 1850…so I assume they were pretty pale complexed at an early date. One researcher has connected the Goins to the original shipment of slave to Virginia in 1619 who were only enslaved for a specific term. Only more research will tell. The thing is the Suttons and Jones are not receptive to what may be an African origin to the Jones family.
Just yesterday I was told that DC white cops assigned to Jan. 6 protests at the DC jail are using that word freely as they buddy with white nationalist protesters.