Here we are again in the grip of this debate that should never have been. I’m obviously talking about the one surrounding the n-word. As if we hadn’t debated it enough a year ago, the CRTC recently fanned the embers of this great farce by severely blaming Radio-Canada for a column in which the word terrible was uttered. Following a decision that is convoluted to say the least, our tax radio will have to publicly apologize to the very tenacious complainant who, since the fateful segment of August 17, 2020, has continued to assert his right not to be offended. Let us recognize at least a certain tenacity in him.
Tenacity perhaps, but lucidity? That would be a bit overkill. Since beyond our valiant defenses of a freedom of expression that will never be absolute, this whole controversy rests on a profound misunderstanding as to the functioning of the most ordinary language. An expression, in fact, always fits within a particular linguistic context. By itself, it doesn’t mean much. To give an example of which our southern neighbors have the secret, inciting a mob to “march to the Capitol” when it is known that they are armed and enraged is not the same thing as doing so when it is peaceful and peaceful. In the first case, incitement to insurrection. In the second, we talk nonsense because that’s all we know how to do. The expression is identical, its ranges are profoundly different.
So it is with the word in n, in the two contexts which have fueled this controversy. Whether in a course with an explicitly anti-racist vocation, or in a chronicle with an explanatory vocation, the scope of the word changes. Far from being an insult, it becomes a symbolic and emotional way of recalling the full importance of a social phenomenon. The title of Pierre Vallières’ work was thus a real stroke of genius. By bringing the experience of black Americans closer to that of French Canadians, he gave the experience of the latter a symbolic weight bearing witness to the extent of the injustice that struck them. It takes very little memory to affirm without embarrassment that this comparison was completely illegitimate.
This is why the work of Vallières must be quoted as such. Replace the n-word with something else, and you lose its deep rhetorical charge. A political work is a whole that holds together; the metaphor of the title is integral here. In other cases, however, the n-word may be largely useless, as in They were ten by Agatha Christie. By removing the hated title, which took up a racist nursery rhyme of the time, we change neither the plot, nor the work, nor the real meaning.
impoverish the world
Nevertheless, some will want to claim that a word — this is the only argument they have left now — can be inherently hurtful and bad. No latitude as to context should be allowed: the word should be removed from usage, period. Just as it is difficult to rationally convert the religious fundamentalist to the idea that a woman should be able to do what she wants with her body, it is not easy to see what we can answer to someone who affirms such an idea. Tell him that there is no “legal” right not to be offended in Canada? Very well, but he will tell you that this right is moral and that the Supreme Court erred in its recent judgment.
We could nevertheless point out to him that by choosing as his battle horse events whose innocuous nature is granted by many, he weakens a noble and crucial cause that we nevertheless share. On the one hand, he should know that the factors on which he must play to free us from racism are largely material: real discriminations are always first experienced by bodies. By focusing on the tree of word usage, he loses part of the credibility he would need if he really wanted to attack the forest of social injustices. (Perhaps this obsession with language expresses the difficulty of this struggle today.)
On the other hand, one could make him regret the impoverishment of the world to which his crusade, literally and figuratively, contributes. The world is born in the words we use to describe it. By deleting certain words, we delete part of reality. A part of the real that we cannot afford to lose if we want to at least keep alive the memory of the worst that men have been capable of, as well as the worst that they have suffered. Fighting injustice also means giving yourself the means to remember it. The chloroform comfort of an entirely ideal censorship risks destroying this memory.
Dictate the sayable and the unspeakable
Finally, if the pitfalls of this false debate are now clear, we cannot allow ourselves to remain indifferent to the dangerousness of the precedent created by the very federal CRTC. Let’s not forget that freedom of expression has never been justified by the precise ideas it allows to express, but by the simple capacity to express ideas, no matter which ones. Only this ability is truly vital.
It is she who allows us to redress, when necessary, an injustice that the powers that be like to see continue. And it is still freedom of expression, more fundamentally, which is the cement of our liberal and modern world which knows that any state certainty imposed by force is the prelude to its internal decadence.
Those who rejoice in the CRTC’s decision today should consider the door it has just opened. He did not just bring about the triumph of a “woke” ideology or whatever, as those who like to criticize all progressivism will proclaim loud and clear. It allowed an ideology to come and dictate, through the voice of the state, the sayable and the unspeakable.
And is it completely unreasonable to fear that, past the heyday of the ceremonial progressivism of the Trudeau son, under the effect of a conservative government wishing to radically surpass American “middle ageism”, it will henceforth be the words fetus or abortion banned from the airwaves? Is this a game worth this candle ?