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This literary analysis seeks to evaluate Gloria Naylors short story The Meanings of a Word from the perspective of a sociological paradigm. The subject of this story is the autobiographical study of a young author who describes her experiences and feelings about the use of the term Nigger in her direction. Naylor draws a parallel between the use of the word by the black and the white community, pointing out the plurality of its meanings. The essence of the short story can be boiled down to the authors conclusion that the words themselves may not be offensive, but the consensual context gives them certain connotations. Nigger, said by members of the extended black Naylor family, rarely had an offensive context and, in some cases, was even associated with praise. Nigger said by a white boy classmate of the young author, was meant to hurt her feelings and offend her. This is why Naylor succinctly postulates at the outset of her work that language is the subject, pointing to the need to consider the context of the words spoken (1). In this analysis, the sociological literary paradigm is used to evaluate this story more deeply and place it within the historical-political framework of writing.
The Meanings of a Word was first published in the authoritative The New York Times in 1986. By that time, the Civil Rights Act had been in existence for more than twenty years, but black citizens of the United States could still face domestic racism and discrimination from white people who wanted to humiliate and insult them. The publication of such material in such early years for the formation of a public agenda of tolerance was intended to show how the black community was coping with linguistic racism in their direction. In this context, Naylor intelligently notes that they transformed nigger to signify the varied and complex human beings they knew themselves to be, emphasizing that the people& took a word that whites used to signify worthlessness or degradation and rendered it impotent (2). It is not difficult to postulate that the invasion of the term into the community against which it has historically been used was a method of protection through devaluation. Therefore, the beneficiaries of this story should be all progressive-minded readers, especially black readers: Naylor sought to show that not everything is unambiguous with the use of the word Nigger, and each case must be considered individually.
The significance of this story is borne out by the fact that Naylor recounts the phenomenology of linguistic racism through the lens of her own experience. An additional search reveals that Naylor came from a poor extended family, forced to flee the segregated South to New York City (Tikkanen). Her parents were not wealthy skilled laborers but instead took any work to feed their family. The author describes this life well when she writes of her grandmothers home, where they were all there to let down their hair and put up their feet after a week of labor in the factories, laundries, and shipyards of New York (1). Thus, Naylor had hardly any national lobbying interests in racism or anti-racism but instead sought to tell her story by inspiring readers to be critical of the slurs directed at them, for words alone cannot be offensive.
The Meanings of a Word emphasizes the semantic plurality of reality and the impossibility of reducing its interpretations to a single meaning. As Naylors story suggests, the same word spoken by different people has completely different connotations. This conclusion is not difficult to extrapolate more broadly: language is only a tool one uses to convey a particular meaning. In this, it is possible to find an idea that allows considering a strategy for dealing with such manifestations of an intolerant society. It is as if Naylor reports that instead of prohibitions and sanctions for the use of bad words at the level of society, which can undoubtedly be silenced but will not stop mentally reproducing them, it is much more reasonable to devalue their meaning. When a classmate is hurt by peers calling him offensive words, a working strategy can be self-irony, taking away from the offenders the opportunity to use those words in a negative context. This is what is seen as the critical value of the short story: Naylor veiledly encourages victims of verbal abuse to fight back. Accordingly, the values that are subverted turn out to be the ability to offend a person through words.
At first glance, the work might be viewed skeptically: it is as if Naylor is showing that there is no unambiguous insult in the more mainstream use of the word Nigger. It is unclear how many non-black people, inspired by the story, have come to use the term in a variety of ways. However, that seems to have been the core purpose of the story the more often the word is used verbally, the more likely it is to lose its specific negative connotation. In other words, by assuming the role of the mouthpiece of the black community in the 1980s, the author shows that avoiding the word may not be appropriate and pernicious, but instead, there are alternative mechanisms for combating racism and racial discrimination, including through the power of context.
Works Cited
Naylor, Gloria. The Meanings of a Word . WQED, 1986, Web.
Tikkanen, Amy. Gloria Naylor. Britannica, Web.
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