The NFL is making efforts to police to use of the N-word this football season, and on the surface this appears to be a very worthy attempt at cleaning up the game. Few would argue that the N-word is offensive and degrading, but banning the word — any word for that matter — opens the door for a number of issues, including the right to free speech.
While I understand why the N-word has been given the title of the worst word in the world, if we are to look seriously at the many other words that are used exclusively to hurt others I think the discussion quickly widens. For example, it is terribly offensive to call someone with below-average intelligence the R-word, and there are countless gay slurs used with the intention of embarrassing and shaming homosexuals. My goal here is not to compare the words in an attempt to develop a weighted hierarchy, but to instead point out that there are countless words used today with the sole goal of hurting others.
Painful words
As a mental health clinician, I learned early in my career that it was not my place to determine the “level” of pain a person should experience, and whether I felt they should or shouldn’t feel the way they do. In other words, if a client of mine was deeply hurt at being called a gay slur, it was not for me to laugh off the word and suggest to my client that he was over-reacting. Instead, the more professional and respectful thing to do was to understand, empathize, validate, and try to help.
Using that line of thought, I feel the same way about the NFL attempting to clean up the N-word. Sure, it’s a great idea, but it also opens a very slippery slope when it comes to the many words that people are offended by — and if the final goal is to protect players from feeling offended, I really don’t think ranking them and then only choosing what is perceived as the worst word to be banned is fair. It is for this reason that I believe eventually more level-headed minds will prevail when they begin to understand that policing language may not only run interference with the Constitution, it might also be an ongoing battle with no real end point in sight. Additionally, enforcing language within a fast-paced game might be impossible to do – especially if the language parameters eventually widen to include gay slurs and derogatory remarks toward individuals with below-average cognitive abilities.
The future
I don’t think it’s fair or right to try and suggest that one person is hurt or offended more than another when looking at individuals who have been verbally assaulted. Pain is pain, and if a person is deeply hurt it’s more important in my opinion to validate their pain rather than try and rank the level in which one should be hurt. It is for this reason that I believe the NFL, while having noble intentions, will eventually pull back on the policing of the N-word and look at other ways in which the game on the field can be continually improved for the future.
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