THE WASHINGTON POST MAGAZINE 53 Sign up to get email alerts every time Damon Young publishes a column at wapo.st/damonyoung Damon Young
One of the boys accidentally tripped and fell. Another one of the
boys laughed and called him a clumsy d-word. (Rhymes with
“Lego.”) Everyone laughed. He shot back, “Shut up, you stupid m-
word.” (Rhymes with “hick.”) Everyone laughed again. By the end
of the week, I also heard a w-word (rhymes with “pop”), a p-word
(rhymes with “mole lock”) and ... lamb chop (which just made me
hungry).
At first, I thought I’d misheard them. But after getting to know
everyone better — particularly, getting to know everyone’s last
names — I learned that my ears were fine. I already knew, of course,
of general slurs for White people. I didn’t know that White people
had ethnically specific slurs for one another too. The Italian kids,
the Irish kids, the Polish kids and the Greek kids communicated to
each other on this secret-to-me low frequency, and it was
fascinating. I was already a veteran user of the n-word. My first
memories of it said in an easy and loving manner were from
eavesdropping on Dad and his brothers and cousins telling lies on
my great aunt’s porch in New Castle. And although it ain’t a perfect
analogy — the differences, culturally and historically, between the
n-word and those White slurs are vast — I saw some of that same
familiarity with how my new classmates used their language, too.
And that’s what it was: their language. I was at St. Barts for
three years, and some of them White boys became my boys, too. We
spent nights at each other’s houses. Changed in the same locker
rooms. Crushed on the same cheerleaders. Cheated on the same
Spanish tests. And not once did I believe that our closeness, or their
frequent and casual use of those words, gave me permission to say
them, too. I never wanted it either. Why would I desire to wield
something so complex, so thorny, so contextually specific — a
weight I’d developed no muscle to carry — when I had my own
special words?
That question is rhetorical. Just remember that I understood
this. And that despite hearing the n-word in movies and in rap
songs and on basketball courts and from me, they understood not
to use, or ask to use, my special word either.
And we were 11 years old.T
he first thing I learned about my new White classmates at
St. Bartholomew Catholic School in 1990 was less a “new
thing learned” and more a rejection of an old thing thought.
Months earlier, my parents decided to pull me out of Pittsburgh
public schools and enroll me there to start sixth grade. If you’d
asked Dad why they made that decision, he’d probably offer some
market-tested answers about “school rankings” or “pre-AP courses”
or “the benefits of didactic parochial instruction” — exactly what
Black parents who ship their kids to predominantly White
suburban schools are supposed to say. But if you knew my dad, and
you asked that same question, he might tell you the truth: I was a
talented basketball player, and their ball program was the best in
western Pennsylvania. Getting me there was one step toward his
(later successful) master plan of getting me a full ride to college.
Anyway, I assumed the White boys there would be soft. And it’s
not like I was hard. But I was hood. And I thought that meant I was
inherently tougher than anyone not from a place like where I was
from. Especially suburban Catholic White boys. But my new
classmates and teammates were the sons of plumbers and deli
owners, school nurses and construction workers. They ripped and
roasted and fought just as quickly — and just as well — as anyone
from my neighborhood did. Months later, when we outfought the
rest of the diocese to cap an undefeated hoop season, I never felt so
good to be so wrong.
The second thing I learned about my new White classmates
happened my third day there. It was recess, which meant each of
the 50 sixth-graders took part in a football-like substance where
the football was a Koosh ball and we played “stop-grab” instead of
two-hand touch.
If you’ve ever witnessed a group of 11-year-old boys doing, well,
anything, you know that discovering what they think are the
newest ways to conjugate and weaponize the English language’s
oldest four-letter words is their favorite pastime. Koosh ball was
basically just an efficient delivery system for chaotic swearing. We
sounded like the first 16 minutes of “Reservoir Dogs.” It was fun.
Familiar. But then something unfamiliar happened.
A story about
some words
I can’t say
ILLUSTRATION: MONIQUE WRAY