I suppose I am shocked that collegians, including Yalies, were shocked and maddened to hear a speaker at Yale’s Political Union on the topic of free speech use the word “n****r.” No matter that the noxious word was used in reference to an actual incident on another campus or that the speaker himself — Harvey Silverglate — is a free-speech advocate. Silverglate clearly did not use the “N-word” in a derogatory fashion towards or about any person, living or dead. Some who heard Silverglate’s talk nevertheless took umbrage at the use of the N-word not because it was used as an epithet or had a target in mind — but because liberal pabulum being what it is nowadays, especially on college campuses, certain words are to be per se banned.

Those who took offense at Silverglate’s inglorious example of free speech — not used as calumny towards anyone, seemed to delight in taking offense at the co-founder of a free speech organization — FIRE — were mainly Blacks who felt insulted, not assaulted, by the mere invocation of the “N-word” and Whites who either did not hear Silverglate say it or took offense that an invited guest to a campus event would dare to speak freely on the very subject at hand. Reflexively, perhaps paternalistically, the Yale Daily News ran scathing opinion pieces from two African Americans who were at the event, chastising Silverglate for his “raw” and “sickening” use of the N-word. One Yalie, Richie George, blasted Silverglate’s use of the N-word as speech unworthy of being heard at a “public audience.” Another, Miles Kirkpatrick, suggested that had the presiding officers of the event actually heard him utter the N-word he would have been “gavelled down for using unparliamentary language.” Where might we find such an offense to parliamentary procedure? Surely not in Robert’s Rules of Order; Silverglate did not call anyone in the room or the speaker who disagreed with his views “the N-word.” He merely made a historical reference — a recollection, in defense of free speech, at that.

Did the critics of Silverglate’s alleged slur object because Silverglate is Caucasian and not a Black activist? Would they have been so offended, in the sixties and seventies, when Black militants and White allies used the “N-word” in their addresses to college audiences? Speakers like Stokely Carmichael, H. Rapp Brown and Dick Gregory? Indeed, Dick Gregory, a Black civil rights pioneer — long before Harvard’s Randall Kennedy — used the N-word in the title of his book on the racial freedom movement. The Black community, in effect, over time, adopted the old epithet to defuse and make fun of the N-word as wretched silliness. Today, I can’t enumerate the times I hear young people of all colors refer to themselves as “n****r”, as they start their rebukes of something a pal says with the inartful phrase: “N****r, please…!”

If on campus people are going to be brought up before tribunals for using the N-word, how many times will African-American students be summoned to answer to such fake charges before fake hearing bodies? Or is the rule against ever using the N-word applicable only to White, Asian and non-Black students? Show us that inane rule book.

Talk about idiocy. 

Banning words on a college campus is especially heinous, absurd and offensive. If the worrywarts at Yale are so offended by mere references to the N-word in history, in books, in literature, in media and in everyday discourse, Yale will bastardize itself as a decidedly unserious academic institution. No, Richie George, “free speech is not hate speech”; but “hate speech” is, in our American lexicon, free speech.

MICHAEL MEYERS is the president of the New York Civil Rights Coalition. He is the former assistant National Director of the NAACP and a former national Vice President of the ACLU. Meyers is African American (Black). He can be reached at NYCRC@AOL.COM.