A few years ago it became obvious that Maw Maw, as we knew her, was developing Alzheimer's. Anyone who has watched a loved one suffer with the condition knows how difficult it is to witness the deterioration that takes place: the forgotten memories, the forgotten names, the unfamiliar faces, the anger of feeling abandoned; and finally, a regression back to a virtual infant stage of development. It is a fascinating disease, in that it renders otherwise healthy persons helpless, eventually causing not only a complete mental meltdown, but a physiological one as well. It renders its victims incapable of reason or comprehensible thought. It saps the conscious mind of its energy, and therein lies the point of my story.
You see, resisting socialization requires the ability to choose. But near the end of my grandmother's life, as her body and mind began to shut down, this consciousness — the soundness of mind which had led her to fight the pressures to accept racism — began to vanish. Her awareness of who she truly was disappeared. And as this process unfolded, culminating in the dementia ward of a local nursing home, an amazing and disturbing thing happened: She began to refer to her mostly black nurses by the all-too-common term that forms the linguistic cornerstone of white America's racial thinking. The one Malcolm X said was the first word newcomers learned when they came to this country. Nigger.
It was a word she would never have uttered from conscious thought, but one that remained locked away in her subconscious despite her best intentions and lifelong commitment to standing strong against racism. A word that would have made her ill even to think it. A word that would make her violent if she heard it said. A word that, for her to utter it herself, would make her another person altogether. But there it was, as ugly, bitter, and no doubt fluently expressed as it ever had been by her father.
Now think carefully about what I'm saying, and why it matters. Here was a woman who no longer could recognize her own children; a woman who had no idea who her husband had been; no clue where she was, what her name was, what year it was; and yet, knew what she had been taught at a very early age to call black people. Once she was no longer capable of resisting this demon, tucked away like a ticking time bomb in the far corners of her mind, it would reassert itself and explode with a vengeance. She could not remember how to feed herself. She could not go to the bathroom by herself. She could not recognize a glass of water for what it was. But she could recognize a nigger. America had seen to that, and no disease would strip her of that memory. Indeed, it would be one of the last words I would hear her say, before finally she stopped talking at all.
Please understand: Given this woman's entire life and the circumstances surrounding her slow demise, her utterance of a word even as hateful as this one says little about her. But it speaks volumes about her country; about the seeds of evil planted in every one of us by our culture; seeds that, so long as we are of sound mind and commitment, we can choose not to water; but also seeds that left untended sprout of their own accord. It speaks volumes about the work whites must do, individually and collectively to overcome that which is always beneath the surface; to overcome the tendency to cash in the chips that represent the perquisites of whiteness; to traffic in privileges and feel superior to others, not because of what they are, but rather because of what you're not: in this case, not a nigger.
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