Nigger: The Strange Career Of A Troublesome Word by Randall Kennedy

players, by name, as either niggers or half-niggers. The niggers were the players who were doing their jobs well. The half-niggers or non-niggers were the ones who needed to work harder. Coach Dambrot later explained that he had used the term
nigger
“for instructional purposes with the permission of my African American players, and I used the term in the sense in which it is used by my African American players … to connote a person who is fearless, mentally strong, and tough.” 51
    Despite the halftime pep talk, Central Michigan lost thegame. But that was merely the beginning of Coach Dambrot's problems.
    Word soon spread on campus about Coach Dambrot's locker-room speech. He must have become aware of this, and realized that some observers might take offense, because he asked the university's athletic director to speak to the members of the team about the incident. None of them voiced any objection to what the coach had said. Nonetheless, the athletic director told Dambrot that regardless of his intentions, his use of
nigger
had been “extremely inappropriate.” 52 The director then warned the coach that if he used the term again, he would be fired.
    Soon thereafter, a student who had previously quit the basketball team complained about the coach's language to the university's affirmative-action officer. This administrator, a white woman, demanded that the coach be punished. She insisted that a formal reprimand be placed in his personnel file, that he be suspended without pay for five days, and that during his suspension he arrange for a sensitivity trainer to meet with the team to explain why the use of
nigger
was always inappropriate. She further specified that attendance at this sensitivity-training session should be made mandatory, that Coach Dambrot should “help assure that the team is not hostile to the training,” and that he should “convey his support of this training session to the players and the staff.” 53
    The coach did not resist, hoping that the incident would blow over quietly. His hopes, however, were shortly to be dashed. Publicity triggered two demonstrations at whicheighty to a hundred protesters expressed their disapproval of the coach's purported “racism.” The president of the university responded by announcing that the coach had been disciplined, declaring that “the term
[nigger]
is inappropriate under any circumstances,” and avowing that he was “deeply sorry about the hurt, anger, [and] embarrassment its use ha[d] caused individuals as well as the entire university community.” 54 By that time, though, critics of the university, including state legislators, were calling for harsher punishment, which was soon forthcoming
    On April 12, 1993 , the university administration fired Coach Dambrot on the grounds that “public reaction to the incident [had] created an environment that makes it impossible for the university to conduct a viable basketball program under [his] leadership.” 55
    Dambrot then sued the university, claiming that his discharge constituted a violation of his First Amendment rights. In a gesture of solidarity, members of the basketball team also sued the university, claiming that its speech code violated
their
First Amendment rights. The students prevailed—judges invalidated CMU's speech code—but not so their coach: judges ruled that the First Amendment did not bar the university from firing him. As interpreted by the Supreme Court, the First Amendment protects (to some extent) speech that touches upon matters of public concern. Therefore, if the coach had been talking to his team at halftime about, say, the racist history of the term
nigger
, his comments probably would have been protected. But in the view of the judges, Dambrot'sspeech did not touch upon a matter of public concern and was therefore fully vulnerable to the university's censure.
    Here, however, I am interested not so much in the courts’ conclusion that the university had the authority to