Why Have We Given This One Word So Much Power?

There are plenty of ways in which the American culture of my youth has little resemblance to the realities of American life today.  One that really jumped out at me after comparing it to recent headlines is the cultural presence of the "N-word".  In February 1991, the youth-coded TGIF comedy "Family Matters" did a Black History Month-themed "very special episode" where the N-word was spray-painted across one of the major characters' lockers is large, bold letters.  We're talking about "Family Matters" here, the show that brought us the iconic live-action cartoon sitcom nerd Steve Urkel.....and it was hardly alone.  It wouldn't take too deep of a dive into movies or TV shows from the 80s and 90s where a character said the N-word.  It only started causing some tangible controversy by the time Andy Sipowicz said it in a late 90s episode of "NYPD Blue".

Fast forward to 2026 and a Minnesota woman was just prosecuted--and convicted--for disorderly conduct for saying the N-word to a child in a park.  There wasn't even an attempt to layer on additional context to frame the defendant's language as being tangibly threatening.  The foundation of the legal case was that vocalizing the N-word to an autistic eight-year-old child by itself constituted a crime.  Back in 2020, it would have seemed hard to top refusing to say that COVID started in a lab in Wuhan as a jump-the-shark moment in indulging racial sensitivity, but criminally prosecuting somebody for verbalizing the same word Dave Chappelle has deployed in his comedy show for the last 20 years takes the trend to an even more intoxicating level.

I don't use the N-word and I don't believe there was ever an instance that I did unless I was directly quoting somebody, even in an era where its casual usage was more widespread.  I strongly suggest you don't use the N-word either, and not just in terms of self-preservation.  The word represents a chapter in American history that deserves to die, and the denormalization of its usage by cultural gatekeepers has served a moderately valuable purpose.  But the gatekeeping has become a very unfunny parody when the word has assumed a level of power that no other word in our nation's 250-year history has been given.

The Constitution of the United States is our guidepost here, especially the First Amendment that guarantees free speech.  Even those who defend the cancel culture that's arisen to enforce usage of this word in polite society should concede that criminal prosecution is a bridge too far, and by no small amount.  There was never a constitutional carve-out for the free speech qualification of unfashionable words in the past and we shouldn't be allowed to invent one now, shoehorning its utterance into a false flag example of disorderly conduct.  On July 24, 2026, we did invent such a carve-out in Rochester, Minnesota, and I really hope it gets overturned on appeal.

And it should come as no surprise that this news story went national and brought out the worst of all parties, highlighting the extremes of our national discourse and the cold civil war we've been dancing on the periphery of for the better part of a decade.  The mother who hurled the racial epithet to a child went viral for her racist outburst and, when the predictable backlash ensued, she took to social media and turned it into a fund-raising opportunity.  A few months later, she'd collected more than $800,000 from fellow bigots and left Rochester, Minnesota, for a rural sanctuary with "excellent demographics".

We'll show her, responded those who still wanted to make an example of her, reimagining the recorded incident as disorderly conduct and then subjecting her to a manipulative form of lawfare. And now we've endured the indignity of this episode living on in the news cycle for additional weeks this summer with the wrongheaded verdict finding the defendant guilty of disorderly conduct.

It all feeds in to the kind of misguided and ultimately counterproductive backlash to Trumpism that we encountered during his first term, back when #MeToo was claiming every scalp in sight no matter thin the case and when the rise of identitarian wokeness began to be unmistakable.  The ruthless beatdown that Trump's critics were treated to in November 2024 has led to some soul-searching by the left since then, but not enough.

Last night, the marquee swing state of Wisconsin narrowly avoided nominating a candidate who called publicly called for canceling Thanksgiving and lamented her own biracial son's "proximity to whiteness".  The fact that this woman got within 20 points, let alone 3,000 votes, from being the Democratic nominee for Governor in Wisconsin is a reminder that the left's bad instincts for gauging the public temperature have not been resolved.

Meanwhile, next door in Minnesota, I suspect the new Minnesota state flag could be a sleeper issue that the Republicans are able to hang around the neck of Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan, who won the nomination for the open U.S. Senate race in Minnesota by a shockingly robust 20 points last night.  I discussed a few months ago how the new state flag has become a mindless culture war flashpoint in the Gopher State, and people seem to be voting with their feet with a preference for the old state flag.  This puts Flanagan in a vulnerable spot having argued against the old state flag as an example of Manifest Destiny.  If the GOP highlights this, and honestly they'd be crazy not to, the roughly half of Minnesotans who favor the old state flag are gonna be a little less likely to vote for her, knowing that she considers them racists for favoring it.

Even if one thinks these dots shouldn't be connected, the legacy of the late 2010s and early 2020s looms large and we're probably not done suffering the downstream consequences of them yet.  There are millions of voters out there who know in their gut that there's something tangibly and irreversibly wrong with the stewardship of the country under Trump and his ideological brethren, but they remain a hard sell for their political opponents to win over.  Prosecuting and criminalizing someone for a racial slur surely isn't helping that cause.  Nor is referring to a popular state flag as racist.  Nor is calling for the cancellation of Thanksgiving.

Given what's at stake with an omnipotent strongman determined to run roughshod over every constitutional and institutional guardrail imposed to prevent autocracy, the persistence of racial and ethnic score-settling is a luxury we can't afford.  And yet, it seems as though those who claim to be most committed to taking down the omnipotent strongman can't control themselves from continuing to touch that stove and expecting a different result.