Q: How does your philosophy of editing apply to the N word?

A: That has changed, over time.

Q: What changed it?

A: Being confronted about it. Thinking about what someone else had to say to me. About my use of the N word. How it affected them.

Q: What did you used to think?

A: I was born white in the segregated south. Black people had their own neighborhood, colored town. A black bourgeoisie of entrepreneurs and professionals. Poor blacks. Not any wealthy blacks, I don't think, although some black men were doing better than some white men. Blacks had separate-but-equal schools that weren't equal. They couldn't eat in white restaurants, use white public restrooms, or drink from white drinking fountains.

This seemed wrong to me.

I asked my parents why it was and they said it had always been that way.

They said change took time.

White people needed to be educated.

Q: Did your parents work to make that happen? To educate white people?

A: My father was either mayor or on the city council when Delray Beach was integrated. He worked with black community leaders to make the transition peaceful. Black community leaders respected him because he treated them respectfully.

If he gave his word, you could take it to the bank.

Q: Did you hear the word nigger at home? Or at school?

A: Nigger was an ugly word. A hateful word. It was intended to hurt.

I never heard my parents use the word except to tell us not to use it.

It was rude, it was déclassé. Only a peckerwood used the word. Or niggers themselves.

I never heard a teacher use it. If you used it in front of a teacher you got in trouble at school, and then they told your parents. You got in trouble at home, too.

You might as well say motherfucker.

They could. You couldn't. It was a case of "Smile when you say that, stranger." A white person couldn't smile enough. The history was different, for them. People had been enslaved. Lynched. White people hadn't been lynched. Enslaved.

Calling a white person a cracker wasn't the same.

If a white person was a cracker, you'd better not call him one, either.

Q: Did you use the word at school among your age-mates? Like you all cussed?

A: Yes. That's just how we thought of a black person.

Not as a colored person, a Negro, a black person, an African-American, or a person of color.

Until you knew a black person's name, knew who he or she was, he or she was a nigger.

"You see that nigger in left field? He looks bad."

Bad was good.

Q: So you spoke that way in informal speech?

A: Yes, and I thought that way.

I would think, What's that nigger want?

I didn't use the word in polite speech but I thought it. I would bowdlerize myself, if I spoke.

There may be some white people who don't think that way, but I don't believe them when they say so.

I think black people think that way about white people.

Until they know who I am, I am not a person, I am an ofay cat, or dem, or Captain Charlie. Not-us. Other. The man. "Where'd a boy like you get $20?"

What I thought didn't hurt anyone, if I didn't say it. I thought.

I thought if I kept what I thought to myself, what I thought was nobody's business. It was what I did. What I said.

Speech was action. Action was discrimination.

Thought was private. If you thought something, but didn't act on it, it wasn't discrimination.

Q: What do you think now?

A: It's not enough not to call a stranger a nigger, to yourself. You have to stop thinking of them as a nigger.

Q: How do you do that?

A: I don't know. Practice?

Q: Why do you think that?

A: In a diversity class I took, we were asked to be open about our thoughts and feelings.

I admitted I used the word nigger to myself. That when I saw a black person I didn't know I thought of them as a nigger, instead of as a member of the black race. An African-American.

Later, in class, a man accused me of calling him a nigger.

I hadn't, and wouldn't. But to him I would, and had. He didn't distinguish between thought and speech.

So whereas before, I tried to write the way I thought, and spoke, among friends, now I saw the word nigger as inflammatory, and stopped using it, in my writing.

I watched what I was saying.

Out of prudence. And practicality. The discussion ends when someone thinks you're disrespecting them.

No matter what you argue, they always come back to, "Yes, but you called me nigger."

Q: What do you care?

A: I want to have a dialogue, not name-calling and bad feelings.

I want to express how I feel. Tell my side of the story.

Q: Uh oh.

A: In my diversity class, there was a litany of complaints about what white people had done to blacks.

I didn't do it. I wasn't embarrassed.

This was turned into, "You see, he isn't even ashamed of himself."

I was not just a bigot, I was complacent about it. I was proud to be a bigot.

For the rest of the class I was the class example of a self-satisfied white supremacist.

Q: Why?

A: I told what blacks did that annoyed me.

Q: Uh oh.

A: I said that most of the problems I had were caused by black people. From crime, drug abuse, and illegitimate children to poor schools, shitty music, and bad television, blacks, and their sorry ways, were responsible. If they'd live more like people of Northern European descent we wouldn't have so much family dysfunction, social pathology, and cultural crisis.

Q: You blamed the victim.

A: I was ethnocentric. I imposed my worldview on people who didn't share it.

I was bigoted, or class-ridden, or culture-bound.

I couldn't see their view. Or wouldn't.

Q: But you weren't apologetic.

A: I was. I just didn't think it was deliberate, a personal choice. We all are influenced by the way we're raised, and educated. But that's not an excuse. I don't want to excuse myself. I want to overcome it. To rise above it.

I think honesty helps.

Honesty is necessary.

It's a first step.

But in that class I gave my enemy a sword.

If they ask you to be honest, and you are, and they aren't, they use your honesty against you. They're going to win. They're more interested in winning than in being honest, or playing fair. They're the oppressor. They're just as bad as a white racist.
They are black racists.

Q: How did that go over?

A: Like a turd in a punchbowl.