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

college-level course. By contrast, Coach Dambrot had acted imprudently in gratuitously using the word
nigger
in a context readily available to misinterpretation. Common to both cases, however, was the overeagerness of academic administrators to fire a subordinate for a
single
perceived misstep, even in circumstances in which the alleged wrongdoer had quite obviously been innocent of any intention to insult or otherwise harm those whom he addressed.
    A much more sensible and humane response was modeled by high school students in Gould, Arkansas, in 1988 . 58 A white teacher got into trouble because of a remark she made to an all-black class of students who were, according to her, becoming rambunctious. Exasperated, she said something designed to get their attention: “I think you're trying to make me thinkyou're a bunch of poor, dumb niggers, and I don't think that.” Upon hearing about her comment, ninety-one parents signed a petition demanding her removal. The school board requested the teacher's resignation after she acknowledged that she had committed “a dumb, stupid mistake.” She was reportedly about to leave the town for good when students circulated petitions asking the board to reconsider its decision. The petitions were signed by 124 out of the town's 147 high school students, only two of whom were white. In light of this development, the school board, chaired by a black man, reversed itself. Asked to explain the students’ intervention, a student leader replied, “We were ready to forgive and go on.… Anybody ought to get a second chance.”
    The student's statement, generous as it is, needs a bit of qualification. The offer of a second chance ought not to be automatic but should instead hinge on such variables as the nature of the offender's position and the purpose behind his or her remark. In contrast to District Attorney Spivey, the teacher held a position that, while important, did not entail her exercising powers like those wielded by a prosecutor. Moreover, again in contrast to District Attorney Spivey, the teacher was not attempting to humiliate anyone. She was simply trying to instruct her students for their own benefit, albeit in a regrettable manner. In such circumstances she, like Coach Dambrot, deserved a second chance.
    Advocates of broader prohibitions against “hate speech” maintain that the current legal regime is all too tolerant of
nigger-
as-insult and other forms of racial abuse. Several of the mostprominent of these advocates—notably Charles Lawrence, Mari Matsuda, and Richard Delgado—have, in their positions as professors in law schools, provided intellectual underpinnings for campaigns aimed at banishing hate speech. 59 They and their allies have succeeded in persuading authorities at some colleges and universities to enact new speech codes. They have succeeded, too, in shaking up and enlivening civil libertarians, a group that had become intellectually complacent in the absence of a strong challenge. They have been unable, however, to sway the judiciary and have thus been forced to witness the invalidation of speech codes tested in litigation. 60 They have also largely failed to capture opinion. In the American culture wars of the 1980 s and 1990 s, the left-liberal multiculturalists who sought increased regulation of hate speech were soundly trounced by a coalition of opponents who effectively derided them as censorious ideologues—otherwise known as the P.C. (Political Correctness) Police.
    The point, however, is not simply that the champions of speech codes lost on a variety of important fronts; it is that they
rightly
lost. For one thing, proponents of enhanced hate-speech regulation have typically failed to establish persuasively the asserted predicate for their campaign—that is, that verbal abuse on college campuses and elsewhere is a “rising,” “burgeoning,” “growing,” “resurgent” development demanding countermeasures. 61 Regulationists do cite racist