ABSTRACT
At a staff meeting with then new Washington, D.C., mayor Anthony Williams, David Howard, the director of the public advocate’s office, discussed the meager amount of money available for the constituent services office. Howard was quoted in the meeting as saying that he would have 132to be “niggardly” with the office’s budget. Howard’s use of the word niggardly, which is defined in the Second College Edition of the American Heritage Dictionary as “stingy,” instigated a controversy, offending other members of the mayor’s staff, who perceived the word as too closely related to the racial epitaph nigger. Williams eventually forced Howard, who is white, to resign, largely in response to overwhelming public support for his removal and the mayor’s own desires to challenge perceptions among some black residents in Washington, D.C., that he was not “black enough.” 1 In the preface to his book Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America, John McWhorter presents black reaction to the controversy as evidence of the “Cult of Victimology, under which it has become a keystone of cultural blackness to treat victimhood not as a problem to be solved but as an identity to be nurtured.” 2 According to the linguist, “Victimology determined the niggardly episode: the basic sentiment that racism still lurks in every corner led naturally to a sense that the use of a word that even sounds like nigger was a grievous insult.” 3 While I concur with McWhorter’s assessment that Howard should not have been forced to resign, I am interested in his critique of the incident and black public response to it for another reason. I contend that many blacks were in fact uncomfortable with the word not simply because it was perceived as a marker of racial difference but arguably, and more profoundly at this moment, as a marker of difference within the black community. No matter what the word niggardly actually means, I would submit that most black residents in the city and elsewhere heard the word niggerish, “acting like a nigger.”
