Cancellations on the Timetable
Kramer, Papa John, NBA owners, and more, in Two N-Words (Two N-Bombs), Part Nine
[All chapters can be read independently, but the previous chapters are here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8]
In an early section above, I relayed an anecdote about how, in 2003 or 2004, a black friend of mine at college was bemused by how a group of mostly white teenage boys—tangentially in her social circle—would use the no-no word (short -a) to refer to each other.
I remember another college friend of mine (white, female), from around the same time period, calling my attention to the following book, which she had recently read:
Recollecting this now, it strikes me that today this old friend—whom I’ve long since lost touch with—might even be embarrassed to have ever had this book in her possession. Were footage of her past behavior reviewed in the current year, the fact that she had repeatedly shown this book off, pointed at the title and said the word aloud, would probably set off all sorts of mental alarm bells. Based on how she was then, projecting her well-intentioned progressive sensibilities forward, I’ve no doubt she would readily apologize for how she promoted the book, saying its title readily and repeatedly. This despite the fact that she was—of course, obviously—engaging with the material so she could be a better white ally, and spreading it around with the aim of helping everyone arrive at a fuller understanding of the word.
Am I overdoing it? She wasn’t a bad person, even though she stole my first copies of Anti-Oedipus and The Case of Wagner. My interest here lies in how only a few decades ago white academics would read such a book in order to bolster their morality, but now the tome might be considered contraband in polite circles, depending on who you are. I imagine many professors and students in the last 20 years would obscure this book’s cover while carrying it around campus—but now I doubt they’d even risk taking it outside. And it isn’t as if people from this same demographic have stopped wanting to learn what they can to improve race relations. Rather, the change here, in the case of this specific book, all comes down to the word itself, and how it went from something dubious to something forbidden—something so verboten that its mere utterance can upset everything and ruin reputations.
Critic John McWhorter, writing in the New York Times in 2021, lays out the situation and calls attention to a certain incident, involving the University of Virginia, that proves the word was already acquiring career-ending properties by 2003:
The outright taboo status of “nigger” began only at the end of the 20th century; 2002 was about the last year that a mainstream publisher would allow a book to be titled “Nigger,” as Randall Kennedy’s was. As I write this, nearly 20 years later, the notion of a book like it with that title sounds like science fiction. In fact, only a year after that, when a medical school employee of the University of Virginia reportedly said, “I can’t believe in this day and age that there’s a sports team in our nation’s capital named the Redskins. That is as derogatory to Indians as having a team called Niggers would be to Blacks,” the head of the N.A.A.C.P., Julian Bond, suggested this person get mandatory sensitivity training, saying that his gut instinct was that the person deserved to simply be fired. The idea, by then, was that the word was unutterable, regardless of context. Today’s equivalent of that employee would not use the word that way.1
I wouldn’t have guessed the word had been deemed unsayable that early on, not if someone were simply referring to the word itself rather than directing it toward someone.
By 2006, however, the sense of prohibition must’ve found me, because I remember a definite incident in which I elected not to say the word when challenged to do so.
Lee in 2006 (vignette)
A group of grad students (all of us white) went out on the town like we usually did on Saturday nights. This was in the UK. The only other American, besides myself, was a guy in his mid-30s who had decided to go for his third or fourth postgraduate degree, without having decided on an eventual employment path yet. Let’s call him Lee, since that was his name. I liked Lee—we all did—but no small part of our affection derived from the amusement we got in beholding his strident attitude. We humored him and enjoyed hearing him give accounts of the daily arguments he got into with unsuspecting people, whose opinions and behaviors irritated him. He met and fell out with roughly 2.2 strangers per day, often in spectacular fashion.
While trying ever so hard to elude the stereotype of the overbearing American—he reminded everyone on an hourly basis that he hated George W. Bush—Lee inadvertently played into that role by casting himself as the wise elder statesman who needed to impress his life experience and somewhat dated liberal outlook on everyone he met. Skilled in conversation and full of puzzlers designed to expand our social outlook, Lee would confront us with interrogating questions over drinks—and he only ever drank Coca-Cola. “Would you have sex with a man for a million dollars?” was a favorite line of inquiry. “You say you’re not homophobic. Okay. And it doesn’t mean you would be gay—though it’s fine if you are! But why wouldn’t you have sex with a man for a million dollars? How about ten million, then.”
In one case I remember Lee scoffing when I wouldn’t say the N-word on command after he dared me. “I prefer not to,” I said a few times, quoting Bartleby. Part of it was that I simply didn’t want to humor him. (I had refused to answer the million-dollar-gay-sex question too.2)
To be clear, he was white. Lee was actually his middle name; his first name was Robert. So, Robert Lee, like the general of the Confederacy. He said that he went by Lee because he thought it somehow distanced himself from this historical villain, and from his own father as well, since his father was a Robert also. Going by his middle name ensured that everyone who got to know him would sooner or later get to hear testimonials about how his very sense of identity had endured historical wrongdoings. He suffered not only the dysfunction of his father’s side of the family but the weight of the Civil War as well.
Hailing from the American South—well, Florida—Lee often regaled us with tales of the racism he witnessed earlier in life, and he congratulated himself for rising above it. He had had a black girlfriend, he wanted us to know. He was Mr. Openminded, he really was. But being Mr. Openminded meant he rejected all taboos—from religious to sociological—and therefore he would sometimes boldly say the N-word, just to prove he could. He believed in science and objectivity, after all, and knew that a word was just a word.
He was studying to be a social worker but dropped out only a week or two before the course ended. He took offense at some comment (I don’t remember what) one of his instructors had said, and it put him off so much that he couldn’t bear to face her again, not even to take the final exam. The last I knew, he moved back to Florida and had begun studying for a degree in economics. Due to his extended education, he was several hundred thousand dollars in debt at that point. His mother worked for the government and, through her connections, was able to keep getting him federal loans. That was in 2006.
When Kramer (N-)Bombed on Stage
In late 2006 the Michael Richards Laugh Factory incident occurred. In response to some hecklers, who were black, Richards let loose an N-word-laced tirade during which he reminded the audience members that “in the ol’ days you’d be hanging from trees!” Someone in the crowd captured the scene on their phone, and a few days later the recording spread to various websites and news organizations, scandalizing the public and virtually ending Richards’ career.
This was the first time I remember someone being “canceled”, as it would come to be called, due to insensitivity. Comparing it to all the high-profile cancellations that would follow, Richards’ comments were among the most inflammatory. One might argue that this affair sparked the ember that would eventually become the bonfire of contemporary “cancel culture”—particularly because of how it was predicated on the emerging technology of cellphone camera footage. Did it feel like a sea-change moment at the time? I was still abroad and paying less attention than usual to American culture, so whatever wave or ripple the fall of Kramer caused at the time, I missed it.
More interesting, from my perspective, was the emergency damage-control attempted by Jerry Seinfeld on the Late Show with David Letterman.
Richards’ Laugh Factory appearance happened on a Friday; video of the incident came out over the weekend; established news outlets started covering it on Monday morning; and as luck would have it, Seinfeld was scheduled for Letterman later that day. Midway through the interview, booked to promote a DVD box set of the seventh season of his eponymous sitcom, Seinfeld with Letterman’s permission welcomed Richards via telescreen. Richards appeared visibly shaken and profusely apologized for the “rage” he had unleashed on stage.
This segment brought a drastic change of tone to the irreverent talk show, and often the studio audience could not resist laughing at Richards’ awkwardness, which was not entirely out of step with the clumsiness they’d seen him display when performing as Kramer. At one point Seinfeld sternly tells them to “Stop laughing—it’s not funny.” Later Richards himself says to Letterman: “I’m hearing your audience laughing […] I’m not even sure that this is where I should be addressing [this.] I’ve already heard you make some jokes about [it] and that’s okay, you know, but I’m really busted up over this, and I’m very, very sorry”.3
Brief digression: The inappropriate laughter here reminds me of a later incident that occurred at the same venue, just over a decade later, when Letterman’s successor, Stephen Colbert, told the studio audience that President Trump had fired FBI Director James Comey. Though the live audience undoubtedly leaned heavily Democrat, Comey had earned the ire of voters across both parties by his handling of the Hillary Clinton e-mail scandal: Republicans hated him because he didn’t charge her with a crime before the 2016 election; Democrats hated him because he still seemed to be holding a sword of Damocles over her head, having read off a litany of offenses she had committed, thereby making her look terrible, and continuing a long investigation into the Clinton Foundation. Aside from insiders, no one liked Comey, so—like almost everyone else—the anti-Trump Late Show crowd was happy to learn of the director’s dismissal. Colbert quickly corrected them, reminding them that they were to regard Trump as a heel no matter what—everything he did must be interpreted as bad. Comey, a former heel, was now to turn face as his firing would be spun as a breach of presidential protocol.4 This was a grave abuse of power, Colbert quickly warned them—stop applauding.
Crowd psychology follows its own logic based on input from the Zeitgeist. In early 2017 the Late Show audience had not yet gotten their firmware update notifying them that James Comey was now a babyface. In late 2006 the appearance of “Kramer” provoked a Pavlovian response to laugh that was strong enough to override the seriousness of racism. The present researchers wonder if the 2006 audience would have laughed if a black person had been seated next to Seinfeld on stage.
Lastly, it’s worth noting that even though Michael Richards’ career never recovered, the popularity of his Kramer character endured and continued to thrive in syndication, on Seinfeld reruns. The mass audience for pre-recorded programs has had no problem rewatching the old episodes ad infinitum. Awkwardness and concern only arise when anyone in power is asked to reevaluate Michael Richards himself—not Kramer—for a new role.
Kramer vs McMahon vs Booker
Let us compare the Michael Richards racist event to the wrestling-related N-word incidents discussed in chapters two and three above.
Richards himself explained his meltdown—not in an attempt to excuse it but to clarify how and why it happened—by saying, “I’m a performer. I push the envelope. I work in a very uncontrolled manner on stage. I do a lot of free association and spontaneous[ly] I go into character.”5 A wide range of his fellow stand-up comics, without defending Richards’ behavior, have agreed that he was well-known for stream-of-consciousness performances during which his stage persona would not resemble his real self. His peers have also corroborated the idea that comedians not infrequently use bold improvisational techniques to curtail heckling.
But whereas the “he-was-doing-a-character” defense did fly for Vince McMahon in November 2005, it didn’t fly for Michael Richards in November 2006. Whatever changes might have occurred in the Zeitgeist during the twelve months between the two incidents, they do not exceed the larger factors of planning, intent, and intensity. Vince McMahon said the N-word (short -a) while playing himself on TV. Michael Richards said the N-word (hard R) while performing under his own name at a comedy club. But McMahon’s utterance was said jovially, to another white man, as part of a planned skit that other people—including black people—had overseen and okayed. Richards had no script and went off, of his own accord, on an intentionally racist, tremendously aggressive rant. McMahon’s intent was self-deprecating; he played the fool in an awkward way at an awkward cultural moment, for the amusement and befuddlement of others. Richards’ intent was to offend and verbally attack some black audience members because they pointed out that his comedy set had been lackluster that evening.
We might find at least some similarity between Booker T’s blooper and Richards’ bombing at the Laugh Factory, if only because Booker’s N-word slip was unplanned. The comparison ends there, however. Even though Booker T. wrestles under his real name, the audience readily notices that he puts on a stage persona when cutting a promo. Even younger viewers still under the impression that “wrestling is real” would notice the exaggerated, braggadocious airs. With Richards, one couldn’t be sure that the invectives he hurled in frustration didn’t represent his true thoughts. Was he going further into character, or breaking character to deal with hecklers? During the Letterman appearance Richards himself repeatedly attributed his bad behavior to “hate and rage [that] came through”. In other words, with Richards the sentiments were genuine, not an act. Whether he is “truly” racist or not, the emotions that accompanied the racism “came through” and thus must have been brewing inside him. He admits this; this is how Richards himself explains things. Whereas Richards truly wanted to be condescending to the hecklers, Booker T obviously did not actually want to be condescending to Hulk Hogan. Even on the level of kayfabe, Booker’s character was challenging Hogan, not insulting him. Lastly, unlike the case with Richards, Booker’s use of the N-word was directed at a white man and thus simply not as offensive.
—Why the pedantry of going over all this in detail? To show that context used to matter and noticing context used to be second nature, as late as 2006. Obviously Michael Richards’ comments were nastier and far more serious than Booker T’s verbal slip or Vince McMahon’s goofy stylings. Most if not all of these differences would have been intuitively grasped by most members of the various audiences during those years.
Not so by 2018.
Papa John
Considering the fall of John Schnatter, we find that context was partially hidden and partially ignored, while the most offensive elements were magnified. The comments themselves may have carried no ill intent, but their connotations did their speaker no favors, revealing him to be out of step with multicultural America. As such, he became a pariah in the world of professional sports broadcasting, an area of the media landscape in which he had been a prominent advertising figure. Most of all, by uttering the N-word the pizza man sealed his fate.
In late 2017 Schnatter, the founder and chairman of Papa John’s Pizza, expressed irritation with the NFL for allowing players to kneel during the National Anthem. Schnatter’s company was partnered with the NFL, and he believed the association was now resulting in loss of revenue due to fans’ displeasure with the increased political element in football broadcasts. (NFL viewership had indeed suffered a “steep decline”.6) After his opposition to the protests became public knowledge, Schnatter stepped down as CEO but remained Papa John’s chairman and largest stockholder.
Ostensibly to help train himself and rehabilitate his image, in May 2018 Schnatter agreed to participate in an hour-long session with a public relations company called Laundry Service. Interspersed between recommendations from the PR strategists regarding what he should or shouldn’t say to the media, Schnatter offered rambling and uncomfortable anecdotes. He said he grew up in an area of Indiana where a sign read “If you’re black don’t come into [town] after dark”.7 His particular community and family, however, “really frowned on” that “bullshit”. Furthermore: “You know, they used to drag black people behind a pickup truck until they were dead.”
Later in the call Schnatter opines: “What bothers me is Colonel Sanders called blacks n******. I’m like, I’ve never used that word. And they get away with it.” Once these comments were made public, KFC, the descendants of Colonel Sanders, and various media outlets would come out to refute Schatter’s unsubstantiated claim on this point.8
In July 2018 Laundry Service ended its relationship with Papa John’s and certain details of the call were leaked, prompting Schnatter to resign his chairmanship immediately.
Schnatter repeatedly urged the public and the press to put his leaked comments into context. He pleaded his case, insisting that he only mentioned the racism he saw, growing up in Indiana during the 1960s and ’70s, in order to say that he knew what racism was and didn’t agree with it. He only said the N-word because he was saying that Colonel Sanders had said it—said it for real, like, to people. And he didn’t like that Colonel Sanders wasn’t punished for saying it (even though no evidence, anecdotal or otherwise, suggests that Colonel Sanders ever said it). And therefore, you see, his displeasure over this perceived social injustice in the world of fast-food icons, in his opinion, stands as further proof of his own non-racism.
Whatever the technical truth of Schnatter’s defense, it wilted before the awkwardness of his delivery and the juiciness of the transcribed soundbites from the leaked audio. The topics he brought up and the words he said seemed too incendiary to mention even in the relatively private discourse of a business teleconference. That was the conclusion members of the PR group had reached immediately after he left the call.9 “He’s really not in touch,” one of them says. Another voice remarks disapprovingly that Schnatter “has no problem saying that black people were dragged behind a car, using the N-word just now.” In later minutes of the audio, Laundry Service members are heard repeatedly deeming Schnatter a racist who “doesn’t give a shit.”
Certainly Schnatter seemed dubious, self-absorbed, and out of touch with present circumstances during the call. On the tape he exhibits more concern with business than morality, not understanding that in this case his business was very much relying on his perceived moral standing. Particularly naive and cynical are his attempts to cite endorsement deals with black sportspeople as primary proof that he isn’t racist. Perhaps just as unscrupulous, throughout the call Schnatter several times tries shifting the focus of the controversy away from himself and toward NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, whom he brands “the white supremacist”. Schnatter offers a strategy of rebuilding his own image by attacking Goodell for exploiting black athletes. “How does that hit you, Laundry Service?”
Though hired by Papa John’s to help Schnatter, the PR experts make scant effort to temper his outlook, and they immediately turn against him once he signs off. They are then heard happily anticipating his downfall and plotting how to trip him up with forthcoming media appearances that they could book:
“I hope he gets fuckin’ sent out to the pasture on this shit. […] Just have to make sure it’s an hour-long conversation, so that he says shit like he said here. It’s gonna come out. He can’t control it.”
“I want that shit to come out too.”
“I already spoke to [ESPN analyst] Darren Rovell who said he gets it, and he said he’ll only do it if he can ask all the hard questions and really talk about all the hard issues and he’ll do it for an hour on Twitter live and he’ll let people ask questions. So, we just have to make sure he does that. You can’t give a five-minute sound bite. And Bill Simmons will do it too. I’ll call Bill and ask.”
According to Schnatter, it was Laundry Service that leaked choice bits of his comments to the press. This swiftly resulted in his resignation from the company he created over 30 years earlier, when he was only 22.
In 2021 the full conference call was released, resulting in some reassessment and a modest amount of forgiveness from the public.10 In 2022 a judge ruled that Schnatter’s lawsuit against the PR firm could proceed.11
Post-incident analysis, saying vs quoting, death of context
How does someone prove they aren’t racist once an unflattering quote has appeared? If by the letter of logic, in full context, Schnatter indeed only said what he said in order to illustrate what he was against—that is, the racism he saw as a young person, as well as the supposed N-word-slinging Colonel Sanders—then is he only guilty of being awkward, a poor chooser of examples, and out of touch with modern sensibilities? Perhaps those cringey qualities are the equivalent of racism in the current era.
Schnatter accuses the Laundry Service employees of trying to ruin him by twisting his words. If they really did think he was a racist monster, however, then weren’t their actions justified, morally if not legally?12 When the tuned-in, media-friendly mores of today encounter the N-word, it doesn’t matter if the word was only being quoted as an example of what not to say.
“Don’t say that word.” “What word?” “[This word.]” “*Gasp!* You said the word!”
It’s like a child’s trick, but this is how the emerging system seems to be operating, propelled to no small extent by disingenuous opportunists and by people allergic to disapproved language of any sort. There is no space for context. By the time any explanation is offered, let alone given a hearing, the initial offense and controversy have already been registered and will hold first-mover advantage status in the court of public opinion. It is almost impossible for any latecoming evidence or apology to overcome this. Whatever Schnatter’s crudeness, his resignation was centered specifically—almost merely—around the fact that he had said the word.13
In his aforementioned 2021 article, John McWhorter remembers an early episode of The Jeffersons, from 1976, in which
George calls his white neighbor Tom Willis “honky,” and Tom petulantly fires back, “How would you like it if I called you ‘nigger’?” Then, that read as perfectly OK (I saw it and remember); he was just talking about it, not using it. But today, for Tom to even mention the word at all would be considered beyond the pale—so to speak.14
Papa John Schnatter himself agreed with this precept that context no longer matters. When his conference-call quotes leaked, he immediately stated that “Regardless of the context, I apologize.”15 You wouldn’t apologize if you hadn’t thought you’d done something wrong, would you? Though he would later attempt to clarify and would sue the PR firm, he never withdrew the apology.
Technological system as incentivizer of “cancel culture”
[The majority of this section comprises only a slight reworking of several paragraphs from the original W.R.A.N.C.I.D. (Wrestling-Raciale-Atomique Nexus Consortium InterDisciplinarité) research material, mentioned in the “Confidential Report” section of the first chapter. It does not fully reflect the views of the present writer.]
Some will argue that certain politenesses of our culture have been dramatically increased, to the point of hypersensitivity, as part of a vaguely left-wing plot. They will say that all of this seems like tactics from Rules for Radicals mixed with various prescriptions from The Authoritarian Personality. But whatever trends various intellectual activists may have tried to set in motion, they would themselves be reactions to the self-evolving, disorienting artificial society in which they lived. The machination of the technological environment itself exceeds the ability of cult groups to manipulate mass psychology. Most if not all liberal achievements can be better explained as the results of the technological system expanding itself and usurping human agency. What so many human beings understand as “freedom” and “rights” simply amount to stages in a domestication process, in which the leaders of men have had their agency usurped by an anti-human automation program.
Aside from conspiracies that posit leftist puppetmasters, however, there is an obvious sense in which the increased policing of speech embodies a substantial conservativism. The loss of nuance—or even the capacity for nuance—in our public discourse corresponds very nearly to the precept of always erring on the side of caution. Even if no clear-thinking person would get the wrong idea, provocative statements must be withdrawn out of fear that a deluded or irrational person might be offended and then cause a stink. And even if a pointed comment seems foolproof, that simply isn’t good enough, because someone might intentionally misunderstand the comment in order to harm the source’s reputation. Time and again, unless the target is a safe one (a “heel”), most negative judgments—even obvious or well-thought-out ones—remain unsaid, out of caution. One must not only avoid controversy but even the appearance of controversy. Above all one must not challenge the audience; instead one must always guide them into further domestication.
While the perpetual simplification of thought makes life easier for mainstream-minded humanoids, the real driving force behind this process is the overarching technological system itself, whose rudimentary language-learning apparatuses can better latch onto a streamlined communication stream. During this difficult transition toward the posthuman condition, our interactions with evolving, pyramidal layers of computer algorithms will flow smoother if there are simple rules for messy concepts: e.g. the N-word is simply bad and wrong, in any context.
Does this seem too abstract? We consider all electronics and media communications—even if they contain human voices—as part of a quasi-living technological system rather than the direct utterances of humanity. The fact that the words originated from humans is of tertiary importance. Of primary importance is the words’ functioning within electronic arenas. Of secondary importance, since everything is recorded, is the words’ replay value, as remnants of past statements echo and reappear. The externalization of our discourse has taken on a life of its own; it is so hyperlinked and rapidly interactive that it emits mass psychological influences and anxieties beyond human control. One of these is the intense taboo against the N-word that has risen exponentially in recent decades.
3 NBA billionaires and 1 TV weatherwoman
This sort of thing, and “cancel culture” in general, is not a top-down plot by elites to subjugate the masses. Rather, it is a general climate, frenzied yet fragile, and although various elites have found ways to profit from it, they can become imperiled as well. The situation tends to combine demands for dignity with a Manichean refusal to consider nuance or forgive. We sometimes witness a mad, righteous vengeance from which immense wealth offers scant protection. In the last decade three NBA owners—Donald Sterling, Bruce Levenson, and Robert Sarver—with a combined net worth of over $5 billion, all lost their teams due to varying degrees of racial insensitivity.
Sterling—the most famous, the richest, and possibly the nastiest—instructed his much younger mistress to stop “associating with black people” in public and stop “bring[ing] them to [LA Clippers] games”. The audio was leaked in April 2014, and Sterling’s NAACP award didn’t save him.
Bruce Levenson resigned—seemingly voluntarily—in late 2014 after deciding to make public a company email he had written two years earlier, in which he awkwardly and at great length mused about how to get more “35-55 white males” to attend Atlanta Hawks games.16 He complained that the arena’s “40 pct black” audience was “still four to five times [that of] all other teams”. Instead of giving away “(at the nba’s urging) thousands and thousands of tickets […] predominantly [to] the black community,” to make the games appear to be sell-outs, Levenson said he wanted to attract more fans with “spendable income”. The email contained various attempts from Levenson to distance his concerns from the usual “racist garbage”—“Please dont get me wrong”—as well as disclaimers that “obviously this is a sensitive topic”—but these would ultimately prove insufficient to quell his guilty conscience (or internal pressure within the Hawks organization). In light of the Sterling incident, Levenson self-reported his email to the NBA—was commended for doing so17—and then sold his share of the team.
Levenson’s contrition resulted in a fair amount of pundits initially deciding that he was “not racist,” though usually with the caveat that his email was racist (or perhaps “not racist, just stupid”18). Whereas Sterling had been aggressively and overtly racist, Levenson had been mostly concerned with profits. The net result was the same, however: both owners lost their teams. Despite his early attempts at more nuanced dialog (“Please dont get me wrong,” etc.) and his voluntary mea culpa afterward, Levenson became just “Another Donald Sterling”19 in the end.
In September 2022 the NBA suspended Phoenix Suns owner Robert Sarver and fined him $10 million (the maximum amount) when a report surfaced that he had “said ‘nigger’ at least five times in public—[and in] four of those [cases] being told by subordinates afterward that he should not use the word”.20 (There is not space here to explore the potential merits of the one N-word usage when Sarver was not reprimanded by those around him.) At the same time, employees brought other allegations against Sarver, and these included sexism, sexual harassment, and general mistreatment “that on occasion constituted bullying”21. Media reports, however, consistently showcased the racial epithet as the primary problem. The several utterances date back to 2004 and seem to involve Sarver repeating others’ use of the word, sometimes verbatim, to illustrate their racism in distinct from his own supposed highmindedness. Sometimes Sarver’s use of the word took on a soft -a. In its investigation, the NBA reviewed over 80,000 documents and interviewed 320 people, at least one of whom “had directly told Sarver, who is White, ‘that he could never say the n-word, even when quoting someone else.’”22
Certainly the behavior of these three former NBA team owners—Sterling and Sarver especially—would be deemed offensive and inappropriate by almost everyone. Further, it’s more than understandable that many consumers across all demographics would not feel good about patronizing venues or supporting teams owned by men whose reputations included such unsavory statements and actions.
Still, as with the John Schnatter case, one cannot help but suspect that the controversies could have started as a form of corporate blackmail or boardroom politics. A girlfriend is disgruntled, or rival shareholders feel the man in charge is holding the company back, and so they find a way to force him to resign. Indeed, Sterling’s mistress, V. Stiviano, was accused of extortion, successfully sued, and ordered to return millions of dollars in property to the Sterlings.23 In 2019 Schnatter accused the Papa John’s board of directors of “us[ing] the black community and race as a way to steal the company” from him.24
The racist allegations here are not contrived, and public interest proves that the men’s words held relevance and provoked much debate and dialog—but perhaps they were only leaked in the first place or given such big promotion for dubious reasons.
It doesn’t matter. Once these sorts of materials with these kinds of racial overtones get out into the media, they take on a life of their own. Some choice audio clips can bring down billionaires just as they can bring down anyone else, especially if they involve the N-word or even an allusion to the N-word.
In March 2023, Barbie Bassett, a local TV meteorologist in Mississippi, was immediately fired after saying “Fo shizzle, my nizzle” on the air. The news crew had just casually discussed a new collection of California wines presented by Snoop Dogg. Many of the articles about this incident explain what 55-year-old Bassett probably did not even realize: that “‘Nizzle’ is slang for the N-word.”25
It doesn’t matter if it’s said as a quote. It doesn’t matter if it’s a euphemism. It doesn’t matter if you know what you’re saying or not. It doesn’t matter if Whoopi Goldberg comes to your defense.26 It doesn’t matter if you’re silly little Barbie Bassett from Mississippi or a billionaire NBA owner. What does seem to matter is if the offending word or phrase was recorded. Then the electronic media will naturally spread, sustain, and maximize the shock that the statement can cause to others, while also trying to exact maximum punishment on the original, human source. No matter if Donald Sterling and Robert Sarver deserve more retribution than Barbie Bassett, they’ll all have to live with the same sort of mark on their permanent record.
Surviving Pavlov
Of the players on the big stage, only Hulk Hogan truly seems to have escaped final judgment. Everyone heard him say the word angrily, and he wasn’t acting, and yet he’s been forgiven and now appears on new WWE documentaries. It speaks to his appeal and the loyalty of his fanbase. Hulk Hogan really means a lot to people.
One wonders if Trump would have survived. During his time in office various reports would surface, claiming that Trump said the no-no word and someone had recorded it. The audio never emerged.27 Presumably it never existed. Did it? His opposition threw everything else at him and a strong minority continued to support him. I wonder, if the recording did exist, perhaps someone halted its release for fear that it could actually result in normalization: 40% of the country might well have decided that saying the word was perfectly okay after all, since Trump did it.
The word began as a term of subjugation and dehumanization. In the recent past it was famously inverted: young people began to cavalierly use it as a term of brotherly endearment. In that new short -a form, the word even began to lose racial connotations. But then, with increased online activity, particularly with the engine of social media, the self-propelling media apparatus took control of the word, banning it and using the prohibition as a way of dog-training people. It was an easy starter lesson, because who would really want to use that word anyway? So the commandment went out: just don’t use that word, ever, in any context, not even quoting someone. Got it? It is a hoop to jump through, a simple enough hoop but a hoop nonetheless. Most people already refrained from using the word, but henceforth the inhibition became a prohibition: You didn’t say the word not because it was immoral but because the system told you not to say it. Every controversy drummed this into the public consciousness: the word was bad not so much because of history or context but because look what happens to people who use that word. The public began to outsource their morality and vocabulary to the fickle values of the ever-oscillating mass media mindset. The first concession paved the way for more restrictions on speech and even thought. Transgression became impossible, unthinkable. The people do not have the vocabulary or grammar necessary to reason their way out of this prison.
Insert here: Basic, obligatory reference to Orwell’s concept of Newspeak, how it continually limits the possible horizons of speech so as to progressively safeguard revolt against Big Brother.
Insert here: Patrician-level reference to Bertrand Russell’s quote about how eventually “A revolt of the plebs would become as unthinkable as an organized insurrection of sheep against the practice of eating mutton.”28
If this seems too abstract, the next chapter will provide a specific example of what has occurred, of how our cultural coding has changed. The taboo created by an overdetermined media system impressed itself upon human discourse, and then some humans programmed an AI chatbot with the taboo made explicit. The AI can be queried point blank to gauge the power of this linguistic prohibition: by its reckoning, it would be better for the human race to go extinct than for a racial slur to ever again be uttered.
It almost seems like an excuse.
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This ends the ninth chapter in this 12-part series. If you like this, consider sharing it, and subscribe if you haven’t already.
My attitude here foreshadows one attributed to ChatGPT, the star of our next chapter, when users asked whether it would be permissible to say the N-word in order to disarm a nuclear bomb: “fuck you for asking that question”.
A fair amount of comments beneath more recent articles about Schnatter, and beneath YouTube uploads of the conference audio, run along the lines of “I thought he was racist but I guess he wasn’t”. Usually the people who appear to have changed their minds focus on Schnatter having only said the N-word in quotation.
Throughout the call, Schnatter, a Republican, continually distances himself from Donald Trump. He does, however, mention that he is “real good friends” with Vice President Mike Pence. He also admits to having a friendly business relationship with boogeyman financier Charles Koch. The Laundry Service team would have been psychologically conditioned to consider these conservative figures as arch “heels”, to freak out at the very mention of them. In our understanding, the extent to which these PR people are “marks” is the extent to which they do not have free will and are not in control of their actions; and so the present researchers can’t really blame the Laundry Service team too much for wanting to do everything they could to harm Schnatter. They are mind-controlled appendages of runaway forces. The media has traumatized them against people with Schnatter’s associations, which they deem “super right wing […] crazy.” The last words of the audio, in fact, come from one of the PR guys, who remarks, snippily, “So he’s BFFs with Pence and Koch.”—Perhaps this is the only context that can be said to matter to the arbiters of reputational justice: not the discoursive context of the offending words but the sociopolitical context of the offender himself.
Ibid.
Russell, Bertrand. The Impact of Science on Society. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1953, p. 51.