I read the news today, oh boy, and it made me very angry. Rather than stewing about it, I wrote this blog post to sublimate my anger.

A production of the Stephen Sondheim/John Weidman musical Assassins at Northwestern was cancelled when Black students protested its use of the N-word in one of its songs. They didn’t seem to object to the fact that in the show another character refers to Leonard Bernstein as a “faggot”.

Sophomore (in more ways than one) Noel Matthews complained, “Whether you are complicit with it in solely a theatre sense or a non-theatrical sense, using the N-word is violent. It’s linguistic violence, and that should not be condoned by anybody.”

While I think I understand her anger, I believe it was misplaced in denying the performers, who had spent weeks preparing their parts, the opportunity to display their talents and the ticket holders the chance to decide for themselves, simply because of a niggling use of one little word.

I’ve been planning to do a series on my latter days at Penn State and State College, and now I’m going to bump up one of the stories because it seems to be appropriate.

In 1971 I attended several HoPS meetings, the Homophiles of Penn State, an organization that was devoted to changing attitudes on homosexuality through legal reform and education, and at one of those meetings the subject of the F-word and the N-word came up.

Of course, we didn’t have those neat little linguistic circumlocutions back in those days, so the talk was initially about gay people calling each other “faggot” when it was considered a slur when hurled at a gay person by anyone else.

Then Jim Murray spoke up. This was the first time that I had ever seen Jim, although we later became friends and tried to write songs together although our every attempt ended up sounding like “Octopus’s Garden” but that’s another story.

Jim was one of only two Black fellows at the meeting that was otherwise entirely composed of lily-white persons.

He tried to make the case that gay people calling each other “faggot” was the same as Black people calling each other by the N-word, though, of course, he didn’t use the N-word construction as it hadn’t been invented yet. According to Jim, Black people could call each other the N-word because they knew how to use it.

I very much wanted to ask Jim if he could teach me how to use the N-word. Would he be able to teach me how to use it so that I could call him out with it right there in front of everyone?

Naturally I did not do that. I did not want to embarrass either Jim or myself.

Because I did not truly think he could teach me how to use the N-word. In the current society it was (and is) acceptable for one Black person to call another Black person by that word, but a white person, except under very exceptional circumstances, simply can not.

And as I said, he and I became friends shortly after that meeting.

But the imbalance persists to this day.

Black folks understandably consider the N-word to be a terrible slur, so awful that we have now invented the “N-word” to refer to it. And yet Black people, or at least a certain subset of Black people (I don’t want to make the mistake of lumping them all into one homogeneous pot), persist in using it themselves. And some of them continue to use it in their music. One of the reasons that I absolutely loathe rap music is that I associate it with cars driving by while blasting it out with lyrics spewing out the N-word among other things that I’d rather not repeat.

And some Black folks use the N-word when writing their books and plays and movies and TV shows. In fact a few months ago I tried watching a show written by a Black woman and featuring lots of Black actors, but I had to stop, because every time there were two or more Black actors in the same scene, the N-words just seemed to be flying non-stop.

I was probably being overly sensitive, but I still find there is something wrong when there is a magic word that I can’t use because it’s offensive, but those who find it most offensive, or at least a subset of them, seem to use it indiscriminately.

Which brings me back to Ms. High and Mighty Noel Matthews, the sophomore (love the irony) who complained (or one of the ones who complained). I wonder if, having achieved a goal, she will now be setting her sites on Black artists who use the “violent” N-word.

I suspect not. I’m not a psychologist and have no training in the art, but I suspect her anger was never really directed at the Sondheim work; it just made a convenient target. The real subject of her anger lies perhaps 716 miles away (I checked a map), but she probably feels there’s little she can do about it (him, it, them—pick your pronoun). So she chose a target nearer home.

Meanwhile, just how does the N-word figure into Assassins?

It’s during the number “The Ballad of Booth” which is a duet between the Balladeer and John Wilkes Booth. 

At one point Booth asks the Balladeer to tell the real story and he becomes quiet, and the way Sondheim develops the song the audience might be feeling a certain sympathy for Booth. Then he builds to a passionate climax and destroys that sympathy.

“Tell ’em, boy!
Tell them how it happened,

How the end doesn’t mean that it’s over,
How surrender is not the end!
Tell them:

(Quiet and plaintive)
How the country is not what it was,
Where there’s blood on the clover,
How the nation can never again
Be the hope that it was.

How the bruises may never be healed,
How the wounds are forever,
How we gave up the field
But we still wouldn’t yield,
How the union can never recover
From that vulgar,
High and mighty
Niggerlover”

Here are Patrick Cassidy as the Balladeer and Victor Garber as John Wilkes Booth from the Original Off-Broadway Cast recording.